George Zimmerman

WFTV reports:

Zimmerman admitted to killing Martin in February during a confrontation. However, he claims the shooting was in self-defense. He’s facing a second-degree murder charge, which carries a maximum possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. But if Zimmerman is charged and found guilty of a federal hate crime involving murder, he could face the death penalty.

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FBI investigators are actively questioning witnesses in the retreat at the Twin Lakes neighborhood, seeking evidence for a possible federal hate crime charge.

Martin was unarmed when he was shot to death, police said, and some accuse Zimmerman of targeting the teenager solely because of the color of his skin.

WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said federal prosecutors would have to prove the hate crime to charge Zimmerman, though.

“What the government would have to prove is that Mr. Zimmerman acted out of hatred toward African-Americans. That’s why he came into contact with him. That’s why he shot and killed him,” Sheaffer said.

Sheaffer said a federal hate crime murder charge could bring more serious consequences than the second-degree murder charge Zimmerman faces now.

“Mr. Zimmerman could be punished by up to life in prison or even the death penalty,” said Sheaffer.”

As previously reported by Newsone, U.S. Justice Department spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said the department is conducting its own, separate investigation, and thus far has refused to comment on the special prosecutor’s findings. In April, after Trayvon’s family pushed for their involvement, FBI agents began questioning potential witnesses in the case, confirming to NBC News that the agency had begun a “parallel investigation” that focuses on whether the teen’s civil rights were violated.

This story is developing. Check back with Newsone for more details.

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John Kiriakou, 47, of Arlington, is charged with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and the Espionage Act. A federal judge ordered Kiriakou to be released on a $250,000 unsecured bond. Kiriakou declined to comment as he left the courthouse Monday.

According to authorities, Kiriakou divulged to three journalists, including a   reporter, the role of “Officer B,” who worked with Kiriakou on the capture of suspected al-Qaida financier Abu Zubaydah in the months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times, and his case has been made an example by those who believe the interrogation technique should be outlawed. And Kiriakou’s public discussions of Zubaydah’s waterboarding were a key part of the debate.

In a separate accusation, Kiriakou is alleged to have disclosed the identity of a covert operator to an unidentified journalist. Authorities say that journalist then gave the officer’s name to a team of defense lawyers representing a suspect the U.S. held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. When the lawyers included information about the officer in a sealed legal brief in 2009, the CIA became suspicious and the government began to investigate.

The affidavit states that the defense lawyers were found to have done nothing wrong.

According to the affidavit, FBI agents interviewed Kiriakou last week, and he denied leaking the information. When specifically asked whether he had provided the Zubaydah interrogator’s name to a journalist for a 2008 article, he replied “Heavens, no.”

Kiriakou’s attorney, Plato Cacheris, told reporters after the hearing that his client will plead not guilty. He also said a potential defense argument could be that the charges criminalize conduct that has been common between reporters and government sources for decades.

If convicted, Kiriakou could face up to 30 years in prison and a $1 million fine.

The case was secretly investigated by a top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of the Northern District of Illinois. Fitzgerald is best known for his successful prosecutions of Scooter Libby, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, for perjury and of Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich for corruption.

Kiriakou has worked as a consultant to ABC News, although he hasn’t appeared on the network since early 2009. ABC declined to comment on his arrest. In a 2007 interview with the network, Kiriakou said that waterboarding was used – effectively – to break down Zubaydah. But he expressed ambivalence about pouring water into a suspect’s breathing passages to simulate drowning to try to get them to talk.

“(W)e were really trying to do anything that we could to stop another major attack from happening,” Kiriakou said, describing the months after the Sept. 11 attacks. “I don’t think we’re in that mindset right now. … And, as a result, waterboarding, at least right now, is unnecessary.”

The attorney who represents Zubaydah in the prisoner’s civil petition for release said he is not involved in the Kiriakou prosecution and has never met him. However, Brent Mickum said he had wanted to interview Kiriakou for information that might help the case, but the ex-CIA man refused, by email, to speak with him.

“He was basically out there talking to the whole world about our client and his involvement . I would have loved to hear what he had to say, but he refused to talk to me,” Mickum said.

Mickum said he has come to believe Kiriakou has overstated his knowledge and involvement in the case against Zubaydah, who has been held without charges at Guantanamo since 2006.

Mickum said he and other attorneys who work at Guantanamo take security restrictions seriously and know not to reveal classified information such as the names of covert investigators. But he also said the government abuses the classification system, selectively leaking information and keeping secret anything that could embarrass U.S. officials.

The charges also accuse Kiriakou of lying about his actions in an effort to convince the CIA to let him publish a book, “The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror,” in 2010. The book explores “the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence apparatus,” according to its description on Amazon.com, and “chillingly describes what it was like inside the CIA headquarters on the morning of 9/11.”

Since leaving the agency, Kiriakou has also worked as a consultant and on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to his LinkedIn profile. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Middle Eastern studies in 1986 and a master’s degree in legislative affairs in 1988, both from George Washington University in Washington.

The Justice Department’s campaign to prosecute leakers has been particularly aggressive under Obama. This is the sixth criminal leak case opened under the administration and the second involving a former CIA officer and the journalist. Federal prosecutors in Alexandria claim Jeffrey Sterling divulged classified information to Times reporter James Risen about CIA efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Sterling’s trial has been delayed while prosecutors appeal several pre-trial rulings, including the judge’s decision to effectively quash a government subpoena demanding that Risen testify. His attorneys argued that unless his testimony is absolutely critical to a government’s case then prosecutors should not be able to subpoena a reporter and require him to testify about anonymous sources.

The Sterling case is not the only leak prosecution to run into trouble. In a case against former National Security Agency executive Thomas Drake, a judge sentenced him only to probation and scolded prosecutors for how they pursued the case.

Prosecutions under the Espionage Act have been particularly contentious. Opponents say the law can be used to unfairly target those who expose government misdeeds. The law was used, for instance, to charge Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case, and a grand jury has been investigating whether WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be prosecuted for the mass of disclosures by WikiLeaks that were allegedly fostered by leaks from Army Pfc. Bradley Manning.

“Safeguarding classified information, including the identities of CIA officers involved in sensitive operations, is critical to keeping our intelligence officers safe and protecting our national security,” said Attorney General Eric Holder. “Today’s charges reinforce the Justice Department’s commitment to hold accountable anyone who would violate the solemn duty not to disclose such sensitive information.”

In light of the indictment, CIA Director David Petraeus reminded his agency’s employees of the essential need for secrecy in their work.

“When we joined this organization, we swore to safeguard classified information; those oaths stay with us for life,” he said “Unauthorized disclosures of any sort – including information concerning the identities of other agency officers – betray the public trust, our country, and our colleagues.”

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Recently MegaUpload named hip-hop producer Swizz Beats as CEO and rapper, Will I Am created a music video in support of MegaUpload that featured Kanye West, Mary J. Blige and several other musicians and celebrities.

The Wall St. Journal reports:

Seven people have been charged with online piracy crimes in an indictment unsealed in northern Virginia. Four of those suspects are already in custody, authorities said. The MegaUpload.com website, which was available earlier Thursday, appeared to no longer be online later in the day.

The four were arrested in New Zealand. Federal agents and other law enforcement agencies simultaneously moved to search bank records and server farms in multiple locations around the globe, authorities said. The charges include conspiracy to commit racketeering and criminal copyright infringement.

Read More At The Wall St. Journal

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The company’s statement will likely inflame suspicion about the monitoring tool and its usefulness to the U.S. government.

Andrew Coward, vice president of marketing for Carrier IQ of Mountain View, Calif., told The Associated Press that the FBI is the only law enforcement agency that has contacted the company. Coward would not say when, why or how often the FBI has reached out to Carrier IQ, but he said the company is not working with the bureau. “There is no relationship between us and the FBI,” Coward said.

During an oversight hearing Wednesday, Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the FBI “neither sought nor obtained any information from Carrier IQ in any one of our investigations.” Mueller was responding to a question by Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., chairman of the committee’s privacy and technology panel, who has said collecting personal information from people’s cellphones could violate federal law.

FBI spokesman Michael Kortan said in an emailed statement that the bureau’s technical staff “communicates routinely with many technology companies, including Carrier IQ, relative to new and emerging technologies and capabilities.”

The company’s technology is designed as a diagnostic tool that gives mobile telephone companies the ability to gather and analyze information that helps them improve the performance of devices that operate on their networks, Carrier IQ said. The software is typically installed by the phone company or the manufacturer of the handset.

Most cellphone users were unaware the company or its software existed until last month when a security researcher, Trevor Eckhart, posted online a video he made showing how keystrokes and messages from his smartphone were logged by the Carrier IQ software.

Eckhart said the software is hard to detect and difficult to turn off. Other researchers who subsequently studied Carrier IQ’s software said it does not appear to transmit the contents of emails or text messages but captures detailed information about recipients or destinations of messages, the physical location from where messages were sent or received and details such as the phone’s battery level.

Even before Thursday’s disclosure by Carrier IQ about the FBI contacting the company, the FBI had fueled questions about whether it sought to use the monitoring software in federal investigations or even whether it was investigating Carrier IQ. The FBI denied a request the AP made on Dec. 2 for internal documents about its interactions with Carrier IQ, citing a provision in the Freedom of Information Act that excludes from disclosure any documents relevant to a “pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding.” The FBI also told the AP that releasing the records that it sought could “reasonably be expected to interfere with the enforcement proceedings.”

The AP had asked for copies of correspondence from FBI officials requesting access to information stored on Carrier IQ’s servers or asking questions about such information. The AP also requested copies of records indicating visits by FBI officials to Carrier IQ’s offices and the results of any testing performed by the FBI on Carrier IQ’s technology.

Eckhart’s online video sparked concerns among privacy advocates about which information Carrier IQ’s software is recording and who can view it. In late November, Franken wrote to Carrier IQ’s president and asked him to answer a series of questions by Dec. 14 about the kind of data that the software can collect, how long the data is stored and whether any of this information is shared with third parties.

“These actions may violate federal privacy laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” Franken wrote. “This is potentially a very serious matter.”

A few days later, Rep. Edward Markey of Massachusetts, co-chairman of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus, asked the Federal Trade Commission whether it was investigating “the installation of software that secretly tracks and reports back the activities of cellphone users.”

Earlier this week, Carrier IQ sought to contain the damage by organizing meetings with officials at the FTC, the Federal Communications Commission and several Senate offices, including Franken’s, to explain what the software is intended to do. The company said it is not aware of an official investigation into its products or practices.

“Our data is not designed for law enforcement agencies and to our knowledge has never been used by law enforcement agencies,” the company said in a statement. “Carrier IQ have no rights to the data gathered and have not passed data to third parties. Should a law enforcement agency request data from us, we would refer them to the network operators. To date and to our knowledge we have received no such requests.”

The company posted a 19-page statement on its website that explains what its software does. It said the only data collected is to help solve common problems, such as batteries that drain too quickly or calls that fail to connect.

The software, called IQ Agent, typically transmits 200 kilobytes of diagnostic data – the equivalent of 50 typed pages – once each day when the phone is not being used, the company said, but decisions about what information to collect and how it is analyzed is determined by the phone companies and the agreements they have with their customers.

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The video message released on the Levinson family’s website publicly transformed the mysterious disappearance into an international hostage standoff. Despite a lengthy investigation, however, the U.S. government has no evidence of who is holding the 63-year-old father of seven.

“Please tell us your demands so we can work together to bring my father home safely,” says Levinson’s son David, seated beside his mother, Christine.

The video plea represents a sharp change in strategy in a case that, for years, the United States treated as a diplomatic issue rather than a hostage situation. Christine Levinson, who lives in Coral Springs, Fla., has issued many public statements over the years, but she typically directed them to her missing husband or to the government of Iran.

In the hostage video, which the family received in November 2010, Levinson pleaded with the U.S. government to meet the demands of the people holding him, whom he did not identify.

The 54-second hostage video showed Levinson looking haggard but unharmed, sitting in front of what appeared to be a concrete wall. He had lost considerable weight, particularly in his face, and his white shirt hung off him. There were no signs of recent mistreatment. But Levinson, who has a history of diabetes and high blood pressure, implored the U.S. to help him quickly.

“I have been treated well. But I need the help of the United States government to answer the requests of the group that has held me for three and a half years,” Levinson says. “And please help me get home.”

His voice weakens and breaks as he speaks of “my beautiful, my loving, my loyal wife, Christine,” as well as his children and his grandson.

“I am not in very good health,” he says. “I am running very quickly out of diabetes medicine.”

The Associated Press saw the video soon after it arrived last year but did not immediately report it because the U.S. government said doing so would complicate diplomatic efforts to bring Levinson home.

Now, those efforts appear to have stalled, U.S. relations with Iran have worsened and Levinson’s family has stepped out of diplomatic channels to appeal directly to the kidnappers.

“We are not part of any government and we are not experts on the region,” David Levinson says. “No one can help us but you. Please help us.”

In the nearly five years that Levinson has been missing, the U.S. government has never had solid intelligence about what happened to him. Levinson had been retired from the FBI for years and was working as a private investigator when he traveled to the Iran in March 2007. His family has said an investigation into cigarette smuggling brought him to Kish, a resort island where Americans need no visa to visit.

The prevailing U.S. government theory had been that Levinson was arrested by Iranian intelligence officials to be interrogated and used as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Washington. But as every lead fizzled and Iran repeatedly denied any involvement in his disappearance, many in the U.S. government believed Levinson was probably dead.

The surprise arrival of the video, followed by a series of photographs, quickly changed that view. But they did little to settle the question of his whereabouts. The video, in fact, contained tantalizing clues suggesting Levinson was not being held in Iran at all, but rather in Pakistan, hundreds of miles from where he disappeared. The photographs, which arrived a few months after the video, contained hints that Levinson might be in Afghanistan, according to several U.S. officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss the sensitive case.

The video prompted Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to announce publicly in March that Levinson was alive and urged the Iranians to help find him. Though the legacy of the 1979 hostage standoff with Iran looms over all relations between the two countries, Clinton did not refer to Levinson as a hostage in March and she softened the U.S. rhetoric toward Tehran.

The video also helped initiate a series of discreet discussions between U.S. and Iranian officials, conversations that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in September were producing good results.

Not long after Clinton’s remarks, the Levinson family received a series of photos of Levinson dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit like the ones worn by detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In these photos, Levinson’s hair and beard were much longer and he looked thinner.

In each photo, he wore a different sign hung around his neck. One read, “Why you can not help me.”

Investigators determined that the video was routed through an Internet address in Pakistan, suggesting that Levinson might be held there. Also, Pashtun wedding music played faintly in the background, officials said. The Pashtun people live primarily in Pakistan and Afghanistan, just over Iran’s eastern border.

The photos, however, traced back to a different Internet address, this one in Afghanistan.

Authorities don’t know whether those clues mean Levinson was being held in Balochistan – a rugged, arid region that spans parts of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan – or perhaps in the lawless tribal region along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. These areas are home to terrorists, militant groups and criminal organizations.

None of these groups has a clear motive for picking up Levinson. But an American hostage, particularly one who used to work for the U.S. government, would be considered a valuable commodity to any of them.

Over the past year, the hopefulness that initially followed the arrival of the video has faded. The meetings with the Iranians have not provided a breakthrough and U.S. officials said the government was no longer as optimistic about the future of those talks.

“We don’t know what else to do,” David Levinson says in the video released Friday. “Please tell us what you want.”

Some U.S. officials believe the Iranian government routed the video through Pakistan as a way to blame Levinson’s disappearance on someone else – most likely the anti-Iran terrorist group Jundallah. But as with every other possibility, the U.S. has no proof.

The video was accompanied by a demand that the U.S. release prisoners, but officials said the United States is not holding anyone matching the names on the list. It’s possible some of them may have been held by the Pakistani government at one point, but officials say the demand doesn’t offer any indication of who might be holding Levinson and there’s been no more communication about it.

U.S. authorities have repeatedly analyzed the video and the apparently scripted remarks Levinson made, looking for clues.

For instance, Levinson said a “group” had held him for three and a half years, a word choice that could suggest a criminal organization or terrorist group, rather than a government. And he said he had been held “here” for that time, suggesting he had not been moved.

Levinson’s dire warning about his diabetes medication is perplexing. He vanished years ago. Whoever is holding him must have had access to diabetes medicine at one point. Was he running out of medication because he was moved somewhere else? Or was it simply intended to add even more urgency for the U.S.?

Relations with Iran, meanwhile, have worsened. The Justice Department recently accused Iranian intelligence agents of plotting to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington. Then a United Nations watchdog released a report warning of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, prompting the United States and its Western allies to issue new sanctions against Iran’s financial system.

Most recently, a high-tech, stealth CIA drone was captured by Iranian officials while on a surveillance mission over Iran. The embarrassing mishap put sophisticated technology in Iranian hands and provided public evidence of the kind of spying that’s been long suspected.

The one bright spot in Washington’s relationship with Tehran was the release of two American hikers from an Iranian prison in September. The U.S. worked behind the scenes to secure that release but officials said Levinson was not part of those discussions.

“All I want is for our family to be whole again,” Christine Levinson said in the video, in a message directed toward her husband. “We love you. We miss you every day. We will not abandon you.”

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton and Assistant U.S. Attorney Lanny A. Breuer announced the results of the ICE and FBI three-month investigation on “Cyber Monday,” the day that for many shoppers kicks off the online holiday shopping season.

The government seized the domain names for the sites that sold everything from fake replica NBA jerseys to replica Louis Vuitton handbags and imitation Ugg boots.

“This is straight crime,” Morton said. “This is people being duped into buying a counterfeit.”

The federal government has seized the domain names of 350 websites since first targeting online counterfeiters in June 2010. Each investigation, Morton said, has grown.

Visitors to the seized domains are now greeted with a message from federal authorities explaining that the site has been seized by the government and a warning that “willful copyright infringement is a federal crime.”

Morton and Breuer said while the domain names were registered in the United States most of the websites were run from abroad, primarily in China. No one has been charged with a crime in connection with the most recently seized domains. But Breuer said the investigations are ongoing.

Earlier this year five people were indicted in Virginia on conspiracy and copyright infringement charges for their roles in operating a website that the Justice Department said allowed people to illegally download high-quality movies and television shows.

Four people accused of running NinjaVideo.net have pleaded guilty. A fifth person is being sought.

It’s unclear how much money the seized sites have made, or potentially cost legitimate companies. Breuer said since the crackdown on counterfeit sellers started last year, Internet users have gone to the seized domains more than 77 million times.

“Typically we don’t track the volumes of sales of these particular sites,” Morton said, adding that criminal organizations often hide ill-gotten profits. “It is very large figures. Well, well above millions.”

Morton said it may seem like a trivial thing to buy a knock-off football jersey or look-alike sunglasses, but the profits seized by counterfeiters can help fund far more nefarious activities.

“This is increasingly not simply a matter of mom and pop violations at the corner of Fourth and Main,” Morton said. “We are worried about organized crime and (that profits) are going to fuel other criminal activity.”

Morton would not say if organized criminal groups are suspected of running any of the seized sites to help fund other criminal acts.

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Millie McGhee, author of “Secrets Uncovered : J. Edgar Hoover Passing For White,” says that Hoover was related to her.

My grandfather told me that this powerful man, Edgar, was his second cousin, and was passing for white. If we talked about this, he was so powerful he could have us all killed. I grew up terrified about all this.”

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The report, released by the FBI’s civil rights division, found the majority of hate crimes were motivated by anti-Black bias.

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Latinos were the targets of 66 percent of all hate crimes motivated by ethnicity or national origin. Jews were the targets of most crimes against religious groups, and most crimes against a particular sexual orientation or gender were motivated by “anti-homosexual male bias.”

The number of hate crimes remained essentially flat between 2009 and 2010. There were 6,628 hate crimes reported in 2010, up very slightly from 6,604 in 2009. About 47 percent of all the reported hate crimes were racially motivated, with 20 percent motivated by religion, 19.3 percent motivated by sexual orientation, and 12.8 percent motivated by nationality.

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Byron de la Beckwith. Sam Bowers. Bobby Frank Cherry. Edgar Ray Killen. James Ford Seale.

There is no statute of limitations on murder, and age and infirmity offer no refuge for the guilty, these cases have proved. But if justice has an enemy, it is time. And now, officials are conceding that the spectacle of juries passing judgment on such aging killers is just about past.

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The Department of Justice, under its 5-year-old “Cold Case Initiative” and the 2007 Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, has combed through that dark period of American history, seeking any cases that could still be prosecuted. Isolating 111 incidents involving 124 deaths, investigators have sought to determine whether those who died were victims of racially motivated crimes – and then whether there’s anyone left to charge.

In about two-thirds of those cases, FBI agents have hand-delivered letters to next of kin, informing them that the government had taken things as far as they could.

In some cases, all of the suspects are dead; in others, suspect individuals have been acquitted in the past and cannot legally be retried. In a few, the agency can find no evidence that a crime was racially motivated – or even that the death resulted from foul play.

“We regret to inform you that we are unable to proceed further with a federal criminal investigation of this matter …, ” a DOJ official wrote to the daughter of Harry and Harriette Moore, who died following the dynamiting of their Florida home six decades ago. “Please accept our sincere condolences on the loss of your parents.”

Roughly three dozen of the reviewed investigations – including the oldest, the Florida lynching of Claude Neal in 1934 – remain open.

Although DOJ reported to Congress recently that some state prosecutions are “potentially viable,” the passage of time and other “impediments” make the prospect of trials unlikely.

“Few, if any, of these cases will be prosecuted,” the agency acknowledged.

Civil rights activist Alvin Sykes, who did as much as anyone to push for this effort, is disappointed.

“I said, `The American people won’t believe you made a full-faith effort if there wasn’t a manhunt,’” says the head of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, named for the 14-year-old black boy whose lynching in Mississippi helped spark the modern civil rights movement. “They made some efforts, but they didn’t make an outreach, a manhunt.”

But Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center says it was clear from the outset that “most of the cases that were solvable have been solved.” Even without new prosecutions, he says, a page has been turned.

“I think there is some utility in closing cases, if for no better reason than to assure the families that what can be done at this late date has been done,” says Potok, director of the Montgomery, Ala.-based organization’s Intelligence Project. “These are people who have been completely left out of the justice process for many decades. So the government does owe them a debt of attention. So I wouldn’t say that it was a total waste of taxpayer money.”

During the darkest days of the civil rights struggle, when all-white juries acquitted obvious perpetrators or Southern state officials flat refused to prosecute racial killings, families could still turn to the federal government for some modicum of justice. A few years in prison for a federal civil rights violation was better than no punishment at all.

Decades later, when prosecutors in the “new South” began reopening some of those old cases, the Department of Justice again stepped forward. Although the statutes of limitations on most federal crimes had long since run out, the FBI’s files were filled with yellowed statements from witnesses or informants, some long dead, that might help locals build a case.

These collaborations – combined with the work of some dogged reporters, activists and persistent family members – produced some stunning convictions in the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century. The most recent was the June 2007 conviction of Seale, a reputed former Ku Klux Klansman whom many had believed long dead.

A federal jury in Jackson, Miss., convicted Seale, then 72, of kidnapping and conspiracy in the torture and drowning of two black youths in 1964. He was sentenced to three life terms and died Aug. 2 in an Indiana prison.

The bureau also “lent its assistance” in the case of former Alabama state trooper James Fowler, who last year pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the Feb. 18, 1965, shooting death of Jimmie Lee Jackson following a protest march in Marion, Ala. Fowler, 77, was sentenced to six months in jail.

After Killen was convicted of manslaughter in 2005 in the so-called “Mississippi Burning” case, activists pushed for charges against a list of what they said were viable prosecution targets remaining; this case of three civil rights workers’ 1964 murder remains technically open. “I HOPE we’re not done,” says John Gibson, executive director of the Arkansas Delta Truth and Justice Center.

On the still-open list are a couple of cases that fall into a peculiar category: Ones in which someone was acquitted by an all-white jury but has now admitted to the killing. So the possibility of vigilantism is among considerations in deciding when to close such cases, says FBI Special Agent Cynthia Deitle, who until recently was in charge of the cold-case effort.

“How does the Department of Justice write a letter that SAYS that?” she asks. “The person that killed your father is very much alive, still lives in the hometown where you live, and admitted doing it … and there’s nothing that we can do or the state can do.”

In some cases, like the one against Seale, the Department of Justice used non-civil rights statutes – such as kidnapping resulting in death, or involving killings on federal lands – to overcome the statute of limitations challenge.

But many of those closed seemed already hopelessly cold when the initiative began.

The FBI sent an 8,000-page file to Mississippi officials on the August 1955 slaying of Till, the Chicago boy who was tortured and shot for whistling at a white woman. Photos of Till’s mangled corpse lying in an open coffin outraged the nation and galvanized civil rights activists.

The admitted killers were long dead, but some thought a case could have been made against others who might have played a role before or after the killing. A local grand jury failed to return any indictments, and the case was officially closed in December 2007.

Although the Till act does not require it, the FBI has provided detailed reports to the next of kin in cases that were being closed, “in an effort to nonetheless bring some sense of closure to the family members of these victims.” Despite a media campaign, the agency has managed to locate relatives for only 95 of the 124 victims.

The Associated Press obtained redacted copies of several letters through the Freedom of Information Act. Survivors of some victims agreed to share their letters with AP reporters.

Some families are satisfied that the FBI had done all it could do to bring their loved ones’ killers to justice. Others, who had allowed themselves to hope, feel violated all over again.

James Ware never expected much from the reopening of his brother Virgil’s case.

On Sept. 15, 1963, the two were on their way home from a junkyard outside Birmingham, Ala. They’d just started a new paper route and were looking for parts to cobble together a second bicycle, with dreams of earning enough to buy themselves a used car.

That morning, just a few miles away, four black girls had died when a KKK bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. As they flew down the Docena-Sandusky Road, the Ware brothers – 16-year-old James pedaling, Virgil, 13, balanced on the handlebars – had not heard of the bombing and had no idea how dangerous it was to be out that day.

Michael Farley and Larry Joe Sims, two 16-year-old white boys, were riding a motorbike down the same road, a miniature Confederate flag flapping behind them, when they came across two friends who said they’d seen a couple of black kids throwing rocks up the way. Farley reportedly opened his jacket to reveal a recently purchased .22-caliber, pearl-handled pistol, saying, “We’ll take care of them.”

As they approached the two black boys, Farley handed the pistol to Sims. Sims fired twice, and Virgil fell.

At 64, James Ware’s memory of that day is still vivid.

“Ware,” Virgil gasped as his older brother leaned over him. “I’m shot.”

“No, you’re not,” James recalls saying. “Get up.” But his brother, wounded in the cheek and chest, never moved or spoke again.

Farley and Sims were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Sims, an Eagle Scout, claimed that his eyes were closed when he shot, and that he was only trying to scare the other boys. After a jury convicted Sims of second-degree manslaughter, Farley pleaded guilty to the same charge. Each was sentenced to seven months, suspended.

James Ware received his letter in late March.

Despite the light sentences, the two men could not be retried in state court (“jeopardy has attached”), and a five-year statute of limitations precluded federal civil rights charges against anyone in the case, the letter said.

James Ware never accepted that the shooting was an accident. But he had long ago accepted the apologies of Farley and Sims, and had considered the case closed.

If nothing else, the renewed investigation rescued Virgil from obscurity, he says. “I don’t see what else could be done. He got full recognition. That’s what I wanted for him – to be known about.”

But to some families who have waited decades for justice, the FBI’s letters have brought no peace.

When lounge manager Jasper Greenwood went missing in Vicksburg, Miss., on June 21, 1964, his family immediately suspected foul play. The FBI was told that Greenwood was allegedly last seen in the company of two white men.

By the time his body was found eight days later on a road outside Vicksburg, it was badly decomposed. A coroner’s inquest failed to identify a cause of death.

Linda Galvin, Greenwood’s granddaughter, says it was a cover-up. “The black funeral home told me that he was castrated and he had what looked to be a stab wound in his throat area,” Galvin told the AP. “None of that showed up in the FBI report.”

But according to the FBI’s letter to the family, agents had interviewed funeral home director W.H. Jefferson in 1964, and he “denied that he thought the hole had been caused by anything other than `nature’ …” The bureau obtained a copy of the Vicksburg Police Department’s report, which concluded that Greenwood had suffered a fatal heart attack while meeting with a married woman on the local “lover’s lane.”

Family members have suggested that Greenwood might have been targeted for his close association with assassinated NAACP activist Medgar Evers. But the letter noted that Charles Evers, then the NAACP’s Mississippi field director, told the FBI that Greenwood “was not active in voter registration efforts or the civil rights movement.”

None of that satisfies Greenwood’s daughter, Rosemary Domino of Jacksonville, Fla. “If they say it’s closed, then it’s closed,” she says. “But the FBI can be wrong.”

The families of Adlena Hamlett and Birdia Keglar also have lingering doubts.

Hamlett, 78, was a retired schoolteacher and one of the first blacks to register to vote in Tallahatchie County, Miss. Keglar, 57, was an organizer for the NAACP who had sued the local sheriff after she was prevented from paying her poll tax. Each had testified before a congressional commission in support of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The women died on Jan. 11, 1966, as they were returning home from a secret meeting in Jackson with then-U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. For years, relatives and certain researchers have insisted that the car was run off the road by the Klan.

Keglar’s granddaughter, Nina Zachery, 76, wept as she described seeing the body at the funeral home. Keglar appeared to have been decapitated.

Zachery was told that the driver of the car, Grafton Gray, supposedly played dead and could hear the women being tortured. “When my family members would try to talk to him, he would not,” she recently told the AP.

The FBI tracked down the wreck’s lone survivor, backseat passenger Richard Simpson, a white activist from Massachusetts, who confirmed the basic details contained in a Mississippi Highway Patrol report, the bureau’s letter said. The accident report said a car on the wrong side of the road struck the activists’ car head-on.

“The impact caused the hood of (the) car to break loose and move through the windshield, fatally injuring” Hamlett and Keglar, the FBI determined.

On a gloriously sunny spring day this year, two FBI agents appeared at 79-year-old Lila Hamlett’s door in Kansas City, Mo., to deliver their letter.

Dated May 27, it said there was “insufficient evidence to indicate that a racially motivated homicide occurred.”

The agents asked if Hamlett had any questions. She had lots, but she didn’t bother asking. If the letter was intended to provide closure, it failed.

“It’s just an unsolved case,” she says. “Whatever it was, it’ll never be revealed now. And I just have to accept it.”

Some families’ refusal to accept what seems like solid evidence is understandable to Patricia A. Turner, a professor of African-American studies and the vice provost for undergraduate studies at the University of California, Davis.

The black community hasn’t forgotten longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s reluctance to investigate civil rights violence, or his attempts to discredit Martin Luther King Jr., she says. And when you consider episodes such as the Tuskegee experiments, in which scientists allowed black men with syphilis to go untreated so they could study the effects, it’s easy to believe the government is capable of doing – and covering up – just about anything, she says.

“And certainly anything related to something as major as a death, the family members are going to have come up with a narrative, a story that fits their understanding of the world and who has power in it – and who doesn’t have power in it.” says Turner, author of the 1994 book, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture.”

Activists were elated when the initiative was launched, reviewing the old cases. But much of that joy has since faded.

Lawmakers had promised annual funding over a 10-year span: $10 million per year to the FBI, $2 million for state and local law enforcement, and more. But only a fraction has been appropriated.

“It hasn’t lived up to its potential,” says Sykes. “I’m disappointed.”

So is Juanita Evangeline Moore.

Her father, Harry T. Moore, organized the NAACP’s Brevard County, Fla., branch in 1934 and served as the organization’s first statewide executive secretary. He and his wife taught school in the area south of Cape Canaveral until their activism got them fired.

On Christmas Day 1951 – which was also the couple’s 25th wedding anniversary – a bomb went off beneath the floor in their bedroom. The blast collapsed the front end of their modest frame house; their daughter Annie Rosalea, who was in the next room, found them lying at the bottom of a crater, covered in debris.

Harry Moore died on the way to the hospital. His wife died nine days later.

The FBI investigated at the time, but no one was charged. A state investigation launched in 1991 turned up little new evidence. In 2004, Florida authorities reopened the case. A 20-month investigation produced the names of four likely suspects – all by then dead.

The FBI closed its second investigation into the case in mid-July. In a letter to Moore, Paige M. Fitzgerald, deputy chief in charge of the cold case initiative, reported that four dead men already identified were “the only subjects credibly linked to the bombing.”

“Therefore, we have no choice but to close our investigation,” Fitzgerald concluded.

Moore, who believes the FBI knew about some of these people years ago, says, “They have waited too long and they have bungled the investigations.”

She chokes up as she recalls returning home from Washington, D.C., and standing at the foot of her dying mother’s bed.

“I hate all white people,” she spat. Harriette Moore chided her.

“She said, `Evangeline. You can’t do that. It would make you ugly, and you’ve always been my beautiful daughter. I don’t want to ever hear you say that again.’”

Moore, 81, says her faith has allowed her let go of that hatred of the killers who went unpunished.

“God,” she says, “has already judged them.”

According to the ACLU, the FBI would racially profile African Americans, Asians, Latinos, and Muslims.

ACLU Suing FBI For Allegedly Racially Profiling

The Huffington Post reports:

Basing its charges on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the ACLU said FBI analysts across the country linked criminal behaviors with certain racial and ethnic groups and then used U.S. census data and other demographic information to map where those communities are located in order to launch investigations.

In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, the ACLU said it has “grave concerns about the overbroad investigative authorities” claimed by the FBI in its domestic surveillance operations, and cited growing evidence “that the FBI is illegally and unconstitutionally targeting innocent Americans for investigation based upon their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, and political activities protected under the First Amendment.”

Read More At The Huffington Post

The Houston Chronicle reports:

Beneath a headline which included a racial epithet referring to African-Americans, the one-page cartoon showed two L-shaped lynching posts with “Sheila Jackson Lee” written on one cross bar and “Hussein Obama” written on the second cross bar. The president’s full name is Barack Hussein Obama.

The return address on the fax said: “Defecating on Obama.”

Read The Whole Story At The Houston Chronicle

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The FBI finally caught the 81-year-old Bulger Wednesday at a residence in Santa Monica along with his longtime girlfriend Catherine Greig, just days after the government launched a new publicity campaign to locate the fugitive mobster, said Steven Martinez, FBI’s assistant director in charge in Los Angeles. The arrest was based on a tip from the campaign, he said.

Movie “The Departed” was based on the Mob Bosses life:

The FBI had been conducting surveillance in the area where the arrest was made, said police Sgt. Rudy Flores, who gave no details of the arrest.

FBI agents swarmed around Bulger’s building late Wednesday, hours after the arrests in a neighborhood of two and three-story apartment buildings.

Bulger lived on the third floor of The Princess Eugenia, a three-story, 28-unit building of one and two-bedroom apartments three blocks from a bluff that overlooks the Pacific Ocean. Neighbors said the couple did not stand out.

Barbara Gluck, who lives on the same floor as Bulger and Greig, said she didn’t know their names but recognized them from photos on the Internet after she heard about their arrest.

Gluck described Greig as “sweet and lovely” and said they would have “girl talk” when they ran into each other in the building. Bulger became angry whenever he saw the two of them talking, and would say, “Stop talking to her,” Gluck said.

“He was nasty,” she added. “At one point, (Greig) said (Bulger) has a rage issue,” Gluck said.

Bulger and Greig were scheduled to make an appearance in Los Angeles federal court Thursday. He faces a series of federal charges including murder, conspiracy to commit murder, narcotics distribution, extortion and money laundering, while the 60-year-old Greig is charged with harboring a fugitive. He was on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list for his alleged role in 19 murders.

The arrest brings an end to a manhunt that received worldwide attention as the FBI received reported sightings of Bulger and Greig from all over the United States and parts of Europe. In many of those sightings, investigators could not confirm whether it was Bulger who was spotted or a lookalike. He has been the subject of several books and was an inspiration for the 2006 Martin Scorsese film, “The Departed.”

The investigation also touched the highest level of Massachusetts politics. Bulger’s younger brother, William, was one of the most powerful politicians in the state, leading the Massachusetts Senate for 17 years and later serving as president of the University of Massachusetts for seven years. William Bulger told a congressional committee that he spoke to his brother shortly after he went on the run in 1995 but had no idea about his whereabouts.

He declined to comment to the Boston Globe about his brother’s arrest.

Bulger, nicknamed “Whitey” for his shock of bright platinum hair, grew up in a gritty South Boston housing project, and went on to become Boston’s most notorious gangster.

Along with Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi, he led the violent Winter Hill Gang, a largely Irish mob that ran loan-sharking, gambling and drug rackets in the Boston area. U.S. Attorney Donald K. Stern said in 2000 that the two were “responsible for a reign of intimidation and murder that spanned 25 years.”

The government has connected Bulger to a series of ruthless killings. One victim was shot between the eyes in a parking lot at his country club in Oklahoma. Another was gunned down in broad daylight on a South Boston street to prevent him from talking about the killing in Oklahoma. Others were taken out for running afoul of Bulger’s gambling enterprises.

He fled in January 1995 after being tipped by a former Boston FBI agent that he was about to be indicted. Bulger himself was a top-echelon FBI informant.

Prosecutors said he went on the run after being warned by John Connolly Jr., an FBI agent who had made Bulger an FBI informant 20 years earlier. Connolly was convicted of racketeering in May 2002 for protecting Bulger and Flemmi, also an FBI informant.

Bulger provided the Boston FBI with information on his gang’s main rival, the New England Mob, in an era when bringing down the Mafia was one of the FBI’s top national priorities.

But the Boston FBI office was sharply criticized when the extent of Bulger’s alleged crimes and his cozy relationship with the FBI became public in the late 1990s.

After he fled, Bulger became one of the nation’s most-hunted fugitives. With a place next to Osama bin Laden on the “Ten Most Wanted” list, he had a $2 million reward on his head.

In September 2002, the FBI received the most reliable tip in three years when a British businessman who had met Bulger eight years earlier said he spotted Bulger on a London street.

After the sighting, the FBI’s multiagency violent fugitive task force in Boston and inspectors from New Scotland Yard scoured London hotels, Internet cafes and gyms in search of Bulger. The FBI also released an updated sketch, using the businessman’s description of Bulger as tan, white-haired and sporting a gray goatee.

On Monday, the FBI announced a new publicity campaign and accompanying public service ad that asked people, particularly women, to be on the lookout for Greig. The 30-second ad started running Tuesday in 14 television markets to which Bulger may have ties and was to air during programs popular with women roughly Greig’s age.

The new campaign pointed out that Greig had several plastic surgeries before going on the lam and was known to frequent beauty salons.

John Weiskopf, who lives across the street from Bulger’s Santa Monica building, said he recognized Bulger when he saw his photo on the Internet.

“I recognized him. I said `Holy Smokes,’” he said.

“From what I understand, these were really gracious easy-going people,” Weiskopf said. “They don’t come out with fangs, they just blended in.”

For many years, William Bulger was able to avoid any tarnish from his brother’s alleged crimes. But in August 2003, he resigned his post as president of UMass amid pressure from then-Gov. Mitt Romney and Attorney General Thomas Reilly.

His resignation came two months after he testified about his brother before a congressional committee.

The committee, in a draft report issued in 2003, blasted the FBI for its use of Bulger and other criminals as informants, calling it “one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement.”

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Ross Township police say the sharp-dressed black woman has been approaching people in shopping center parking lots in various suburbs since at least Friday. She’s targeted mostly older women asked to see their purses or wallets claiming their money might be counterfeit or otherwise illegally linked to a recent bank heist.
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Officials say the woman has encountered at least five people, but has only gotten money from one of them: an elderly man in Oho Township who drove to his home and turned over a couple hundred dollars.

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WASHINGTON – The number of hate crime incidents and victims declined in 2009 compared with the previous year, the FBI reported Monday.

Of more than 6,000 hate crime offenders, over six in 10 were white while nearly two in 10 were black.

Nearly half of the crime incidents in 2009 were motivated by racial bias, nearly 20 percent by religious bias and over 18 percent by sexual orientation bias.

More than half the reported hate crimes against individual people were assaults, said the FBI. One out of a hundred hate crimes involved murder or rape.

There were 6,604 hate crime incidents reported last year, down from 7,783 in 2008. There were 8,336 reported victims, down from 9,691 in 2008. The victim totals include not only individuals but also businesses, religious buildings and other institutions.

The year-to-year figures in the FBI reports for 2009 and 2008 are not exactly comparable because the number of law enforcement agencies providing data to the bureau on hate crime went up last year to more than 14,000, compared to 13,690 in 2008. Nearly 4,000 police jurisdictions do not participate in the program, said the group Human Rights First.

The Anti-Defamation League welcomed a substantial drop in the number of hate crimes in the latest report but expressed disappointment that more than 60 cities with over 100,000 populations each did not participate in the study.

On balance, “we welcome the fact that the FBI’s report contains both the lowest hate crime totals since 1994 and the largest number of reporting law enforcement agencies ever,” ADL national chair Robert Sugarman and ADL national director Abraham Foxman said.

The report said that out of some 4,000 victims of racial bias, seven in 10 were victims because of prejudice against blacks.

Out of nearly 1,600 victims of anti-religious bias, about the same proportion — seven of 10 — stemmed from anti-Jewish bias.

In a separate study, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that homosexuals are far more likely to be victims of violent hate crime than any other minority group.

Timing the release of its study to coincide with the latest FBI report on hate crimes, the nonprofit center said it based its conclusion on 14 years of FBI hate crime data covering 1995-2008. The center said that homosexuals, or those perceived to be gay, are more than twice as likely to be attacked in a violent hate crime as Jews or blacks; more than four times as likely as Muslims; and 14 times as likely as Latinos.

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2010 American Music Awards Photos [from HelloBeautiful.com]

TRENTON — St. Louis overtook Camden, N.J., as the nation’s most dangerous city in 2009, according to a national study released Sunday.

The study by CQ Press found St. Louis had 2,070.1 violent crimes per 100,000 residents, compared with a national average of 429.4. That helped St. Louis beat out Camden, which topped last year’s list and was the most dangerous city for 2003 and 2004.

Detroit, Flint, Mich., and Oakland, Calif., rounded out the top five. For the second straight year, the safest city with more than 75,000 residents was Colonie, N.Y.

The annual rankings are based on population figures and crime data compiled by the FBI. Some criminologists question the findings, saying the methodology is unfair.

Greg Scarbro, unit chief of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, said the FBI also discourages using the data for these types of rankings.

Kara Bowlin, spokeswoman for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, said the city actually has been getting safer over the last few years. She said crime in St. Louis has gone down each year since 2007, and so far in 2010, St. Louis crime is down 7 percent.

Erica Van Ross, spokeswoman for the St. Louis Police Department, called the rankings irresponsible.

“Crime is based on a variety of factors. It’s based on geography, it’s based on poverty, it’s based on the economy,” Van Ross said.

“That is not to say that urban cities don’t have challenges, because we do,” Van Ross said. “But it’s that it’s irresponsible to use the data in this way.”

Here Are America’s Most Dangerous Cities

1. St. Louis, MO
2. Camden, NJ
3. Detroit, MI
4. Flint, MI
5. Oakland, CA
6. Richmond, CA
7. Cleveland, OH
8. Compton, CA
9. Gary, IN
10. Birmingham, AL
11. Baltimore, MD
12. Memphis, TN
13. New Orleans, LA
14. Jackson, MS
15. Little Rock, AR
16. Baton Rouge, LA
17. Buffalo, NY
18. New Haven, CT
19. Hartford, CT
20. Dayton, OH
21. Kansas City, MO
22. Washington, DC
23. Newark, NJ
24. Cincinnati, OH
25. Atlanta, GA

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Rep. Raul Grijalva says white powder in an envelope delivered to his office is a toxic substance. Manuel Johnson with the FBI confirms to News 4 Tucson the powder needs to be tested in Phoenix before any determination can be made.

Grijalva says his staff opened the envelope and found two pieces of paper with swastikas on them along with a baggy of white powder.

Read The Whole Story

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CHICAGO — A 26-year-old Chicago man who told an FBI informant that he didn’t expect to reach the age of 30 was charged with plotting to go to Somalia to become a suicide bomber for al-Qaida and another linked terror group, federal prosecutors alleged in court documents unsealed Wednesday.

During a brief hearing, prosecutors told a judge that Shaker Masri was taken into custody and charged Tuesday evening with trying to aid al-Qaida and al-Shabaab, a violent extremist group in Somalia, and attempting to provide support through the use of a weapon of mass destruction outside the United States.

Masri, who faces a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison for each charge, was ordered to remain in custody after prosecutors called him a flight risk and a danger to the community. He told the judge he was a U.S. citizen, and court documents said he was born in Alabama and spent years overseas before returning to the United States when he was 18.

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In a news release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said he was living in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood and was arrested without incident in the suburb of Countryside. The office had no further details about his background.

According to court documents, Masri started talking to a confidential FBI informant of his plans a little more than two weeks ago, asking that he help him find a job to earn money for the Middle East, as well as come up with money to buy guns.

In the court documents, prosecutors alleged that Masri told the informant that “he did not expect to reach the age of 30″ and that he “hoped to become a martyr by wearing a suicide vest.”

Masri’s attorney, Matthew McQuaid, said he was not prepared to comment because he had not yet seen any evidence or even had a chance to speak with Masri extensively about the charges.

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In court papers, Masri explained to the informant about the need to keep a low profile until leaving the United States because of a recent arrest in Virginia of a man who also wanted to travel to Somalia to fight for al-Shabaab, which was designated by the U.S. as a terrorist group in 2008. In the documents, prosecutors said Masri claimed to know the Virginia man but the papers do not include his name.

Prosecutors also said in the documents that at one time Masri was employed by a nonprofit group that provided free English language translations of the Quran in the United States. No other details were immediately available about Masri and the charges.

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A new book, The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders: U.S. Intelligence’s Murderous Targeting of Tupac, MLK, Malcolm, The Panthers, Hendrix, Marley, Rappers & Linked Ethnic Leftists, written by John Potash, a Baltimore resident and Columbia University graduate, claims that Death Row Records was a front for the FBI to stop Black activism. He recently spoke to the Baltimore City Paper about the book.

“What I think it was was that he had become the most influential black man in the black community in the country,The CIA and U.S. intelligence, what they have to do is win the hearts and minds of the people. They don’t want to control us by force, they want us to control ourselves by having us believe in a certain way–that we don’t need national health care, for example. And here, Tupac was threatening to win over the hearts and minds of people, he was able to counter so much of the propaganda in the black community.”

“I believe that Death Row Records, which included dozens and dozens of police officers at all levels, according to a high-level police officer that investigated them, was a front company and was trying to continue penal coercion and mess up [Tupac Shakur's] head,”

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From the Washington Post:

Three years after the FBI pledged to investigate more than 100 unsolved civil rights killings, the agency is ready to close all but a handful. Investigators say they have solved most of the mysteries behind the cases, but few will result in indictments, given the passage of decades, the deaths of prime suspects and the challenge of gathering evidence.

“There’s maybe five to seven cases where we don’t know who did it,” said FBI Special Agent Cynthia Deitle, who is heading the bureau’s effort. “Some we know; others we know but can’t prove. For every other case, we got it.”

Text continues after gallery …

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Even without taking cases to court, the project has filled in broad gaps in the stories of the murdered, many of whom were forgotten victims from a brutal chapter of American history.

Officials now believe, for example, that an Alabama state trooper killed an unarmed civil rights protester in 1965, a case that helped inspire the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to march in the state. In the deaths of two North Carolina men in police custody — one found in 1956 with a crushed skull and the other who refused medical treatment in 1960 after a heart attack — the agency concluded that there was no federal law it could use to pursue the cases.

Click here to read more.

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From Detroit Free Press

In their investigation of Kwame Kilpatrick, FBI agents are trying to prove that the ex-Detroit mayor and his associates used his elected office as a criminal enterprise to enrich themselves, according to sworn documents reviewed by the Free Press and interviews with people familiar with the probe.

It’s not clear whether the federal government will ever bring charges against Kilpatrick.

But in trying to build a case of criminal conspiracy, federal authorities have scrutinized a variety of evidence they say they have gathered against Kilpatrick, his father and close associates of the former mayor, according to records and people familiar with the probe.

Authorities describe a variety of alleged bribes and extortion demands during Kilpatrick’s years in office that, when taken together, could amount to racketeering violations under federal law. Allegations cited in government documents and culled from interviews include:

• That Kwame Kilpatrick accepted bribes of up to $100,000 from Kado, a businessman who had exclusive, no-bid janitorial and electrical-services contracts at Cobo Center and a sundry shop at the convention hall.

• That Kilpatrick deposited unspecified sums of cash into bank accounts without declaring the funds as income.

• That Bernard Kilpatrick received large amounts of money from contractors and business owners in return for official acts by the mayor; and that he pressured others to donate to his son’s political or civic fund.

• That Kado paid at least $30,000 in bribes to mayoral aide Derrick Miller, including $10,000 for a trip to Europe.

• That Miller told a local businessman he would be punished for backing a political opponent when Kilpatrick sought re-election. Shortly afterward, the businessman’s commercial vehicles started getting ticketed in Detroit — with the directive to do so allegedly coming from the mayor’s office.

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AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Authorities are investigating a reported plane crash into a seven-story office building in north Austin.
Black smoke was coming from the building Thursday morning. The building is located on a major highway in the city.

Dawn Clopton, a division chief with the Austin Fire Department, said two people from the building are unaccounted for. She said it was a small private plane that crashed. There was no other immediate information.

The FBI said there is nothing at this point that indicates that the crash is anything more than an accident at this time.

Initial reports were that the Austin field office of the San Antonio FBI were in the building, but it was later learned that the FBI offices are in a nearby building.

From NOLA.com

Alleging a plot to tamper with phones in Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office in the Hale Boggs Federal Building in downtown New Orleans, the FBI arrested four people Monday, including James O’Keefe, 25, a conservative filmmaker whose undercover videos at ACORN field offices severely damaged the advocacy group’s credibility.

Also arrested were Joseph Basel, Stan Dai and Robert Flanagan, all 24. Flanagan is the son of William Flanagan, who is the acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, the office confirmed. All four were charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony.

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From Talking Points Memo:

The celebrated historian John Hope Franklin was scrutinized by the FBI in the 1960s for supposed links to communists, particularly his opposition to the House Committee on Un-American Activities and his vocal support for W.E.B. Du Bois.

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“Dr. Franklin is an apologist for the late Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent crusader for civil rights and a sponsor of communist fronts who joined the Communist Party at the age of 93,” wrote an unidentified FBI official in a letter to the White House in July 1965.

Franklin’s file, obtained by TPMmuckraker through the Freedom of Information Act, is mainly a collection of background checks conducted when he was up for presidential appointments (though the FBI withheld 18 pages of the 515-page file). The author of the classic From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans, Franklin died in May at 94.

Click here to read more.

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WASHINGTON — Reports of hate crimes against gays and religious groups increased sharply in 2008, according to FBI data released Monday.

Overall, the number of reported hate crime incidents increased about 2 percent. These same figures show a nearly 11 percent increase in hate crime offenses based on sexual orientation, and a nearly 9 percent increase in hate crime offenses based on religion.

The largest category, racially motivated hate crimes, fell less than 1 percent.

RELATED: Obama Signs Bill Expanding Hate Crime Laws To Cover Gay People

Joe Solmonese, president of Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay civil rights group, called the numbers unacceptable and said they showed the need for the expanded federal hate crimes law signed last month by President Barack Obama.

Among all categories of hate crimes, roughly a third are vandalism or property damage. About 30 percent involve intimidation of some kind, and another 30 percent were physical attacks.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not compare year-to-year trends in hate crimes, saying the number of agencies reporting changes too much. In fact, the bureau cautioned that the increase reported Monday might well be due to more agencies tracking such incidents.

Brian Levin, director for the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University-San Bernardino, warned that the national numbers may be misleading because some states — like California, New Jersey, and Ohio — are good at reporting hate crimes while others — Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi and Pennsylvania — are not.

“The quality of the data is so variable and in some instances so bad that it makes trend analysis extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible,” said Levin. “Generally, states that have effective data collection also have effective training and procedures to address these crimes.”

In 2008, 2,145 different agencies reported hate crimes incidents, while the year before 2,025 agencies did this reporting.

In total, there were 7,783 hate crimes reported to the FBI last year, and seven murders were categorized as hate crimes.

RELATED: Eric Holder Pushes For War Against Hate Crimes

The FBI data is based on information law enforcement agencies voluntarily report to the bureau.

Half of all hate crimes are motivated by race, according to the FBI. One out of every five is driven by religious bias, and one out of every six is based on sexual orientation bias.

The Anti-Defamation League said Monday’s figures — the highest total for hate crimes since 2001 — show a need for a new national initiative to combat bias crimes.

Less than a month ago, Obama signed a bill expanding those covered by the federal law against hate crimes. Previously, the law had protected those attacked on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin.

The law signed by Obama now covers crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability. It also removes the restriction that federal authorities can launch investigations of victims who were engaged in federally protected activities like voting or free speech.

JACKSON, Miss. – Over the last three years, the FBI scoured faded documents, interviewed aging lawmen and tracked down witnesses from killings that occurred decades ago, many of them involving white police officers who shot black men or teenagers.

Now, the agency is at a dead end in the search for relatives in at least 33 civil rights-era cases, and the FBI needs the public’s help. Agents are appealing for relatives of the victims to come forward, the latest challenge in a three-year-old effort to right historical wrongs.

“We have done everything we can to find those families and we’ve run out of leads,” said Cynthia Deitle, unit chief for the FBI’s civil rights division. “Whether it’s a spouse, child or parent. We’ve even gone as far as locating cousins who are the next of kin.”

In some cases, the FBI is looking for family members to provide any evidence or details about the crimes. In others, agents want to give a status update or simply tell the relatives the FBI’s investigation has ended.

Among the cases is Johnny Robinson, a black teen shot by police in 1963 in the aftermath of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. Another case is the killing of John Earl Reese, a 16-year-old who died in 1955 when two men fired shots on a black cafe in Gregg County, Texas.
The Civil Rights-Era Cold Case Initiative began in 2006 with a solemn charge: Reopen long dormant cases from a period in America’s history when blacks and whites were killed in the South’s bloody fight to maintain a segregated society.

The unit had 108 cases under investigation, including the infamous Ku Klux Klan slayings of three civil rights workers found buried in an earthen dam in Mississippi in 1964. A part-time Mississippi preacher was convicted of manslaughter in 2005 in the case, and the investigation continues.

The FBI said those identified as suspects in nearly half of the homicides are now dead. Federal officials also have determined about 20 cases were not racially motivated homicides.

Successful prosecutions cited by the FBI include the 2003 conviction of Ernest Avery Avants, found guilty of federal charges of aiding and abetting in the 1966 Klan killing of Ben Chester White, a black handyman shot to death to possibly lure Martin Luther King Jr. to Natchez, Miss.

Another was the 2007 kidnapping conviction of James Ford Seale, a reputed Klansman. Authorities said Charles Moore and Henry Dee were kidnapped, beaten and thrown, possibly still alive, into a Mississippi River backwater in 1964.

Charles Moore’s brother, Thomas Moore, was instrumental in getting that case reopened. Thomas Moore said he took FBI records he obtained to Mississippi U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, who then looked into the case.

Though the FBI’s effort has been applauded, some believe the pursuit comes too late.

“I think the window has been closing for a couple of years because many of the potential defendants are dying or have died. This was an effort that would have been wonderful about 15 years ago,” said Susan Glisson, director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi.

Southern Poverty Law Center president Richard Cohen said his organization has turned over information to the FBI in hopes someone will be prosecuted in at least a few of the remaining unsolved killings.

“The justice that is achieved in those few is going to have to serve as symbolic justice for the whole,” Cohen said.

Deitle said the investigations are “incredibly labor intensive.” Agents who can’t get in touch with relatives seek sheriffs or deputies and comb neighborhoods where the crimes occurred. If that fails, they turn to grand jury dockets.

“We’ve dug that deep to just find anybody,” she said.

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Luqman Ameen Abdullah was remembered as a caring man who followed the tenets of his Islam faith as an imam, or prayer leader, of a small mosque north of downtown. Fellow imams said he was generous and a good brother, and no one mentioned the FBI’s claim that he had a violent, anti-government ideology.

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The FBI says Abdullah, 53, was fatally shot inside a suburban warehouse Wednesday after firing at agents and resisting arrest. Agents wanted him on charges of weapons violations and conspiracy to sell stolen goods, one of 11 people named in a criminal complaint.

“We ask Allah to reward him with the promised reward of those who are martyred,” Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid of New York told mourners at the Muslim Center in Detroit.

As is custom, men sat on the floor, shoulder to shoulder, during the service, with women watching and listening in the rear of the large room. Prayers were given in Arabic and English during the 30-minute service.

Some speakers demanded an independent investigation of Abdullah’s death, saying the fatal shooting seemed excessive.

Imam Abdullah El-Amin asked people to decline to speak to reporters and avoid news cameras outside.

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No terrorism charges have been filed against Abdullah, formerly known as Christopher Thomas, or the 10 others accused in the complaint. According to the FBI, Abdullah was a leader of a national radical Sunni group that wants to create an Islamic state within the U.S. Most members are black.

That Islamic state, investigators said, would be ruled by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, who is serving a life sentence for killing two Georgia police officers.

Abdullah’s mosque has dismissed as “utterly preposterous” the allegations that he was part of a radical group.

Meanwhile, the last of the 11 defendants were arrested Saturday in Windsor, Ontario, where they live across the border from Detroit. Authorities said Mohammad Philistine, 33, and Yassir Ali Khan, 30, were taken into custody without incident.

Both are charged with conspiring to sell stolen goods. They will not immediately be transported to Detroit and it was not known if they had lawyers.

Abdullah told an informant that Philistine is a “soldier and a warrior” and they would do anything for each other, according to the FBI complaint.

One of Abdullah’s sons, Mujahid Carswell, 30, was arrested Thursday in Windsor. A U.S. magistrate set bond Friday at $100,000, but had problems getting an electronic tether and was still in custody Saturday, said a sister, Bernita Regan. Carswell’s attorney has said the charges against him are allusions based on guilt by association.

DETROIT — Federal authorities on Wednesday arrested several members of a radical Sunni Islam group in the U.S., killing one of its leaders at a shootout in a Michigan warehouse, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

Agents were trying to arrest Luqman Ameen Abdullah, 53, at a Dearborn warehouse on charges that included conspiracy to sell stolen goods and illegal possession and sale of firearms. Authorities also conducted raids elsewhere to try to round up 10 followers named in a federal complaint.

No one was charged with terrorism. But Abdullah was “advocating and encouraging his followers to commit violent acts against the United States,” FBI agent Gary Leone said in an affidavit filed with the 43-page criminal complaint unsealed Wednesday.

FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said Abdullah refused to surrender, fired a weapon and was killed by gunfire from agents.
In the complaint, the FBI said Abdullah, also known as Christopher Thomas, was an imam, or prayer leader, of a radical group named Ummah whose primary mission is to establish an Islamic state within the United States.

He told them it was their “duty to oppose the FBI and the government and it does not matter if they die,” Leone said.

Abdullah regularly preached anti-government rhetoric and was trained, along with his followers, in the use of firearms, martial arts and swords, the agent said.

Leone said members of the national group mostly are black and some converted to Islam while in prisons across the United States.
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“Abdullah preaches that every Muslim should have a weapon, and should not be scared to use their weapon when needed,” Leone wrote.

Seven of the 10 people charged with Abdullah were in custody, including a state prison inmate, the U.S. attorney’s office said.

Three were still at large. Another man not named in the complaint also was arrested.

The group believes that a separate Islamic state in the U.S. would be controlled by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H.
Rap Brown, who is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Colorado for shooting two police officers in Georgia in 2000, Leone said. Al-Amin, a veteran of the black power movement, started the group after he converted to Islam in prison.

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“They’re not taking their cues from overseas,” said Jimmy Jones, a professor of world religions at Manhattanville College and a longtime Muslim prison chaplain. “This group is very much American born and bred.”

The movement at one time was believed to include a couple of dozen mosques around the country. Ummah is now dwarfed in numbers and influence by other African-American Muslim groups, particularly the mainstream Sunnis who were led by Imam W.D. Mohammed, who recently died.

By evening, authorities still were working the scene near the Detroit-Dearborn border and the warehouse was surrounded by police tape.

The U.S. attorney’s office said an FBI dog was also killed during the shootout.

Abdullah’s mosque is in a brick duplex on a quiet, residential street in Detroit. A sign on the door in English and Arabic reads, in part, “There is no God but Allah.”

Several men congregated on the porch Wednesday night and subsequently attacked a photographer from The Detroit News who was taking pictures from across the street. Ricardo Thomas had his camera equipment smashed and had a bloody lip from the attack.

Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Dearborn, said the FBI had briefed him about Wednesday’s raids and told him they were the result of a two-year investigation.

“We know that this is not something to be projected as something against Muslims,” Hamad said.

The complaint shows the FBI built its case with the help of confidential sources close to Abdullah who recorded conversations.

A source said that Abdullah regularly beat children inside the mosque with sticks, including a boy who was “unable to walk for several days,” Leone said.

The source, according to the agent, regularly listened to a recording of a 2004 sermon in which Abdullah said, “Do not carry a pistol if you’re going to give it up to police. You give them a bullet!”

In January 2009, members were evicted from a former mosque for failing to pay property taxes. An FBI search turned up empty shell casings and large holes in the concrete wall of a “shooting range,” Leone said.

Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the federal authorities’ description of Abdullah’s extremist links didn’t match what he knew of Abdullah.

“I knew him to be charitable,” Walid said. “He would open up the mosque to homeless people. He used to run a soup kitchen and feed indigent people. … I knew nothing of him that was related to any nefarious or criminal behavior.”

Abdullah had a wife and children, Walid said. A phone number for the family had been disconnected.

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From The News And Observer

RALEIGH — FBI profilers will look into every detail of the crime scenes to tell the story of who, and maybe why, someone raped and killed five African-American women before leaving their bodies to decompose in rural Edgecombe County.

“They will look at whether an arm has been left up or down, or was a hand placed over the chest, to try and reach a conclusion about what sort of person would do it,” said Frank Perry, former special agent in charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Raleigh.

The profilers have joined a task force formed in late June to investigate the slayings. Rocky Mount Police Chief John Manley said they needed the FBI’s expertise and resources to analyze the evidence. The women’s remains were found badly decomposed. In several instances, little more than bones and leathery tissue remained.

While those law enforcement officials working the case would not speak about details of their investigation, Perry explained in general terms how such an investigation would normally proceed.

The federal profilers will analyze the details of each crime scene for evidence that could link them to a single, serial killer. They also will look for evidence to disprove the serial killer theory, he said.

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The FBI on Monday agreed to investigate the beating of a man by Minneapolis police officers after the city’s police chief reviewed video showing some of the officers kicking and punching the man while he was being held face-down in the snow.

Chief Tim Dolan asked the FBI to investigate the February arrest of Derryl M. Jenkins during a traffic stop, saying some of the responding officers’ actions are cause for concern.

Jenkins, who turns 43 on Tuesday, was charged with assault and refusing to submit to alcohol tests, but the charges have been dropped. Through his attorney, Jenkins said releasing the seven-minute video recorded by cameras attached to the police squad cars was in the public interest.

“He wanted to put this out there to educate and make people aware of what happened,” attorney Paul Edlund said Monday.

Jenkins, of Brooklyn Center, has said he was stopped Feb. 19 after a late-night dinner and three beers. The arresting officer accused Jenkins of driving about 15 miles over the speed limit, though Jenkins denies it.

The video shows the officer stopping Jenkins’ PT Cruiser in north Minneapolis, then opening the car’s driver’s side door to talk to him. A couple minutes later, Jenkins gets out of the car and begins to struggle with the officer. The officer pulls Jenkins’ hooded jacket over his head and throws him face-down into the snow while waiting for backup.

When five other officers arrive, several of them begin punching and kicking Jenkins as they try to apply handcuffs. A Taser is used at one point, but it is ineffective, according to police records.

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Jenkins eventually was taken to North Memorial Medical Center, where he received several stitches above his eye. He was then taken to the Hennepin County Jail.

No disciplinary action has been taken against the officers involved, and Dolan said it appears that the officer who tried to make the initial arrest acted appropriately. That officer suffered a split lip and bloody nose during the incident. Dolan issued a brief written statement Monday but declined interview requests.

Police spokesman Sgt. Jesse Garcia said the video shows how officers often have to deal with people who resist arrest, which he said can create a dangerous situation.

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Force “doesn’t look good, but sometimes it is necessary, unfortunately. And I think people that aren’t used to seeing that, it does raise concerns with them,” Garcia said.

FBI spokesman E.K. Wilson said investigators will look into the case. It’s common for the FBI to examine excessive force complaints against local law enforcement because one of its responsibilities is enforcing federal civil rights laws.

In addition, Dolan has referred the case to the department’s internal affairs and training units for a review of arrest procedures.

Edlund, Jenkins’ attorney, said those actions are a good first step. “It is good news for my client as well as the public that the Minneapolis police chief is taking it seriously,” he said.

Six South Florida men being tried a third time on terrorism charges pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden and wanted to wage war against the United States, including blowing up Chicago’s Sears Tower, a prosecutor said during closing arguments Thursday.

The so-called “Liberty City Six” were again facing four terrorism-related charges each after two previous trials ended in hung juries. Closing arguments will continue Friday, with the jury beginning to deliberate on Monday.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jacqueline Arango spent two hours describing the actions of the six defendants as “wanting to kill all the devils we can.” Arango said they spoke of following the destruction of the Sears Tower with “shooting all the survivors they saw.”

She urged the jury to convict the men on all four counts against them that could put them in prison for the rest of their lives.

The defense said the men were manipulated victims of the FBI and two government informants paid tax free to induce the defendants to pledge allegiance to al-Qaida and plan terrorist acts to kill millions. Ana Jhones, the lawyer for the alleged ringleader, Narseal Baptiste, characterized one informant as the “thug” and the other the “master manipulator.”

She spoke for more than four hours and described the FBI in the case as the “federal bureau of manipulation.”

“This isn’t a terrorism case,” Jhones said. “It’s a manufactured, orchestrated crime by the FBI and its informants.”

Baptiste, 34, and his co-defendants, all “dirt poor,” were pulling a scam trying to extort $50,000 from two people whom they thought were foreign agents, Jhones said.

“They had no more intent to bring down the Sears Tower than the man in the moon,” she said. “The only thing brought down was their dreams, hopes and aspirations.”

Prosecutors said the men took photographs and video of possible targets in Miami, including the FBI building, a courthouse complex and a synagogue.

Other defense attorneys have pointed to the lack of evidence in the case: no blueprints or maps of buildings, no bomb instruction manuals, no stashes of cash.

The men each face 70 years in prison if convicted of all four counts, including conspiracy to support al-Qaida and conspiracy to levy war against the U.S.

The group became known by the name of their neighborhood of Liberty City, an impoverished area of Miami.

Five other defense lawyers will give their closing arguments for about an hour each Friday with a prosecution rebuttal.