Free Republic

Remarks by Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary Julie Myers, and Federal Trade Commission Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras at a Press Conference on Operation Wagon Train Secretary Chertoff: Good morning, everybody. I'm joined here by Julie Myers, the Assistant Secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement; by Deborah Platt Majoras, the Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission; and by George Gaines, the County Attorney for Cache County, Utah. One thing that I've spoken about and many others in the administration have talked about over the last year is the need to take a comprehensive approach...

The union representing workers at Swift & Co. meat processing plant in Greeley went to Federal District Court in Denver this morning to demand that more than 200 workers be released because they were interrogated and detained illegally. United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 attorney John Bowen says, “We are saying that the were seized unlawfully, they do not know what conditions they are being held under or they have not been advised of their rights.”

US promises immigration crackdown US officials have pledged to continue a crackdown on illegal immigration a day after agents arrested 1,200 people at meat-packing plants in six states. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the arrests had uncovered flagrant violations of immigration and privacy laws. Most of the workers arrested at the Swift & Co meat-packing plants are from Central American and African countries. Swift & Co said it did not knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The arrests followed a 10-month investigation into alleged illegal immigrants suspected of using forged or stolen identity papers. "Violations of our immigration laws and privacy...

GREELEY, Colo. — Federal agents raided six Swift & Co. processing plants in six states on Tuesday in search of illegal immigrants who stole the identities of lawful U.S. residents and used their Social Security numbers to get jobs at the beef and pork company. Agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency executed search warrants at Swift's processing facilities in Greeley, Colo.; Grand Island, Neb.; Cactus, Texas; Hyrum, Utah; Marshalltown, Iowa; and Worthington, Minn. ICE officials did not have an arrest total but said workers were being arrested on administrative immigration violations and in some cases, existing criminal arrest...

WASHINGTON - More than 1,200 people were arrested in meatpacking plants in six states during raids that federal officials said amounted to the largest-ever workplace crackdown on illegal immigration. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Wednesday the investigation uncovered a "disturbing front" in the war against illegal immigration, in which illegal immigrants are using the identities of U.S. citizens to obtain jobs. "Violations of our immigration laws and privacy rights often go hand in hand," he said. "Enforcement actions like this one protect the privacy rights of innocent Americans while striking a blow against illegal immigration." The raids at Swift...

One way to get businesses to STOP HIRING ILLEGAL ALIENS is to BOYCOTT their products to QUIT SUPPORTING THEM!!!

BRUSSELS, Belgium - A report by an EU panel released Thursday said the bank data transfer agency SWIFT broke European privacy laws by handing over personal data to U.S. authorities for use in anti-terror investigations. The Belgian-based company, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, "committed violations of data protection laws" by secretly transferring data to the United States, without properly informing Belgian authorities, the EU's data protection panel said. The panel's report calls on SWIFT, financial institutions and EU authorities to "take the necessary measures" to end the transfer, which it said contradicts Belgian and EU data protection rules....

The NY Times, which has revealed some of the nation’s most crucial secrets (including the surveillance of foreign Al Qaeda communications with domestic accomplices, and the SWIFT program that traces bank transactions of foreign terrorists) now opines that maybe it shouldn’t have revealed the SWIFT program to the world. The Public Editor of the Times (sort of an ombudsman) said yesterday

The Navy lawyer who led a successful Supreme Court challenge of the Bush administration's military tribunals for detainees at Guantanamo Bay has been passed over for promotion and will have to leave the military, The Miami Herald reported Sunday. Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, 44, will retire in March or April under the military's "up or out" promotion system. Swift said last week he was notified he would not be promoted to commander. He said the notification came about two weeks after the Supreme Court sided with him and against the White House in the case involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a...

...Has Times editor gotten away with murder?Posted: September 22, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern If you blinked you would have missed it. I'm speaking of the news coverage about who really leaked Valerie Plame's identity as a non-covert CIA agent. The leaker, former Colin Powell aide Richard Armitage, was a vocal critic of the war in Iraq. Perhaps the media "overlooked" Armitage and his role in this scandal precisely because he shared their disdain for the war in Iraq. Did you happen to notice that Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby didn't receive that same consideration – even though they...

Dear Friend, The topic of this email -- and the subject of a major speech I will deliver in Boston's Faneuil Hall tomorrow -- is national security. If you think I'm planning to alert people to Republican pre-election fear-mongering on this vitally important issue, you're only half right. Of course, we need to reject the Republicans' idea that a "debate" on national security involves them demanding another book of blank checks for policies that don't work. And, needless to say, we can't tolerate them smearing any Democrat who stands up to their miserable record of failure. I will be campaigning...

LONDON (Reuters) - Teams of international scientists have used observations from NASA's Swift satellite and other telescopes to witness the evolution of a cosmic blast into a stellar explosion or supernova. The blast is thought to be a milder type of gamma-ray burst (GRB) -- the most powerful type of explosion known to astronomers -- called an X-ray flash. It is known as GRB060218 after the February 18 date it began in the constellation of Aries about 440 million light years away. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. "This extends the...

By Walter Pincus pincusw@washpost.com Courage in journalism today takes all the obvious, traditional forms -- reporting from a war zone or from a totalitarian country where a reporter's life or safety are issues. In Washington, D.C., where I work, it's a far less dramatic form of courage if a journalist stands up to a government official or a politician who he or she has reason to believe is not telling the truth or living up to his or her responsibilities. But I believe a new kind of courage is needed in journalism in this age of instant news, instant analysis,...

A civil liberties group asked six governments Wednesday to block the release of confidential financial records to U.S. authorities as part of American anti-terrorist probes. London-based watchdog Privacy International said it filed complaints with authorities in Japan, Israel, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Argentina, demanding a halt to the monitoring of millions of transactions as part of a CIA-U.S. Treasury program. The group filed similar complaints in 32 countries, mostly in Europe, last month. The U.S. Treasury has acknowledged that since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks it has tracked millions of financial transactions handled by the Belgium-based Society for...

Highlight - "What we had not spoken about publicly, however, is this particular source. And, unfortunately, this revelation is very damaging. Since being asked to oversee this program by then-Secretary Snow and then-Deputy Secretary Bodman almost two years ago, I have received the written output from this program as part of my daily intelligence briefing. For two years, I have been reviewing that output every morning. I cannot remember a day when that briefing did not include at least one terrorism lead from this program. Despite attempts at secrecy, terrorist facilitators have continued to use the international banking system to...

Why do they hate us? No, I'm not talking about Islamofascist terrorists. We know why they hate us: because we have freedom of speech and freedom of religion, because we refuse to treat women as second-class citizens, because we do not kill homosexuals, because we are a free society. No, the "they" I'm referring to are the editors of The New York Times. And do they hate us? Well, that may be stretching it. But at the least they have gotten into the habit of acting in reckless disregard of our safety. Last December, the Times ran a story revealing...

By a vote of 302 to 219, the European Parliament approved a resolution demanding that European banks and governments disclose what they knew about the U.S. program to monitor terrorists' financial transactions. The New York Times reports one French politician accused the U.S. of "rifling through our private bank accounts," and an Italian lawmaker compared the case to alleged CIA kidnappings of terror suspects, saying it has the same objective, "to extort information." The administration had tried to convince the Times not to unveil the secret program, arguing among other things, that it would hurt cooperation with the Europeans. But...

In an op-ed that appeared in the New York Times on July 1, 2006, Dean Baquet (L.A. Times editor) and Bill Keller (New York Times executive editor) said: "…We, and the people who work for us, are not neutral in the struggle against terrorism. ... "…The New York Times has held articles that, if published, might have jeopardized efforts to protect vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear material, and articles about highly sensitive counterterrorism initiatives that are still in operation." They say they are “not neutral” in the GWOT, after all, they too are in the enemy’s kill zone. They infer they...

According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both papers chose to move forward with their stories. "We didn't give them specifics, just general information about regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on SWIFT,...

One of these days, if you lose a son, a daughter, a cousin or a good friend in a terrorist attack, blame whoever perpetrated the deed first, but secondly blame The New York Times, whose irresponsibility may have enabled the killers to obtain necessary financing. This story on how the government tracks terrorist funding likewise hurts the paper while also hurting America as a whole by telling the enemy how he might be found out. Said Tony Snow, presidential press secretary, the Times and other papers that broke the story "ought to think long and hard about whether a public's...