homeland security

Jesselyn Radack at Daily Kos has a nice roundup of yesterday’s Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, called and led by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who opened the morning session with an announcement that the shootings of 13 soldiers on the U.S. Army base was a “terrorist” attack as opposed to a mass-murder. Never mind that [...]

A four-day sweep conducted last November in Arizona by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents looking for immigrant fugitives and criminals resulted primarily in the arrests of immigrants who were neither criminals nor fugitives, the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona has found.
The operation was supposed to be part of an ICE program to deport dangerous [...]

When I wrote my earlier post about the group of illustrious Americans urging the Obama administration to close Guantanamo and bring suspected terrorists to justice in U.S. federal courts, I neglected to mention that Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), joined by Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jim Webb (D-Va.), is today pushing a measure [...]

You thought Phil Mudd was done? Months ago, Mudd, the chief of the FBI’s national security branch and a respected longtime CIA official, was forced to withdraw his name as Janet Napolitano’s nominee for intelligence chief of the Department of Homeland Security. Mudd bowed out in June after some Congressional staffers muttered to the press [...]

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) today blasted the Obama administration, as well as some of her colleagues in the House and Senate, for including a provision in the Homeland Security Appropriations Bill that would amend the Freedom of Information Act to exempt from disclosure photos depicting the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody.
After the jump, Slaughter’s [...]

House and Senate members today approved language for a homeland security appropriations bill that would give the Pentagon the right to continue withholding photos of the abuse of detainees in its custody, the ACLU reported on Wednesday.
The ACLU has been trying to get its hands on those photos, as well as other records, since 2003 [...]

It sounded like a good idea. In this interactive age, the Department of Homeland Security wanted to take advantage of an easy way to get public feedback on its policies by implementing a Web-based system where users can share their opinions and ideas with the agency. The 2009 Quadrennial Homeland Security Review is supposed to [...]

The federal immigration program that allows local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws is becoming a thorn in the side of the Obama administration.
It’s part of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s tough-on-illegal immigrants strategy, and it wins President Obama points from conservatives who fear he’ll go soft on “illegals”. But the abuse [...]

This revelation from former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge’s new book, nabbed by Paul Bedard, might shed some light on why Ridge passed on a 2010 U.S. Senate bid.
[He] was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
That’s a [...]

Since 2003, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been sending teams of agents around the country to arrest and deport immigrants they could find with outstanding deportation orders or criminal records. But in 2006, ICE stopped requiring that two-thirds of those people be criminals. At the same time, it created a quota for the teams, saying [...]