Washed It!

For years in her native Myanmar, Aung San Suu Kyi has been known simply as “The Lady,” a pro-democracy stalwart and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has languished for years in an arbitrary solitary confinement imposed by the nation’s ruling military junta.

Although she was snatched from the public limelight, residents of the former Burma have always known this about the charismatic Buddhist activist, now 65: She would not be broken by the military generals she has long defied.

On Saturday, Suu Kyi proved them all right. She was finally released from the mildewing, two-story villa where she has spent much of her house arrest, spanning 15 of the last 21 years.

Whether in prison or not, supporters say, she has remained a quiet but defiant symbol of struggle against political repression for residents of the impoverished Southeast Asian nation.

Always cutting a slight figure, the daughter of a national hero who had generations earlier campaigned for Burma’s independence from Britain endured personal hardship to uphold her political principals, often going years without seeing her husband or sons.

But as popes, presidents and activists called unsuccessfully for her release, she never wavered. Once asked if she thought her story had the makings of a Greek tragedy, she responded: “Don’t be silly. I don’t go in for melodrama.”

She later added: “I look upon myself as a politician. That’s not a dirty word, you know. Some people think that there is something wrong with politicians. Of course, there is something wrong with some politicians.”

Time and again, Suu Kyi showed her mettle since taking up the democracy struggle in 1988.

Spending much of her early life abroad, Suu Kyi had returned home that year just as street protests erupted against a quarter-century of military rule. The daughter of martyred independence leader Gen. Aung San, she quickly assumed a leadership role.

Then 44, she campaigned for the government to stage proper elections and became the first secretary general of the fledging National League for Democracy.

Explaining why she risked prison or worse by taking on the nation’s military, she responded: “I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that was going on.”

Her unsuccessful efforts to stop a brutal military suppression that killed thousands of protestors, repeatedly facing own armed soldiers, gained her worldwide notoriety, including the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, being proclaimed by the Nobel committee as “an outstanding example of the power of the powerless.”

But Suu Kyi’s sons, Alexander and Kim, accepted the award in Oslo on behalf of their mother who, seen as a threat by the country’s new military rulers, was detained in 1989 on national security charges.

She spent the next six years under house arrest at the family home at 54 University Avenue, enduring various periods in detention since then. Over the years, she has waged repeated hunger strikes to call attention to the military’s brutal repression of protesting students.

But Suu Kyi endured. When her husband, British scholar Michael Aris, died in London in March 1999, they had only seen each other a handful of times since her first house arrest a decade earlier.

Press reports have painted her life in captivity as austere. Rising each day at 4 a.m., she meditated, read and listened to one of five radios that were her only link to the outside world. She had no telephone, no television, no Internet. Her mail, if delivered at all, was heavily censored.

Once an accomplished pianist, Myanmar’s muggy equatorial heat long ago warped her instrument. Her only companionship: two long-serving, mother-and-daughter assistants.

Recent months have brought particular frustration. Suu Kyi was just a few weeks away from being released last year when she had an unexpected visit by an American, John Yettaw. She was found guilty of harboring anti-government elements and her sentence was extended.

At the time, one of her assistants told reporters: “It has been a hard life, she has sacrificed a lot. But she is used [to it] now. And she keeps working, waiting for the day she will be released.”

john.glionna@latimes.com
Suu Kyi outlasted her oppressors

Seated in a tan leather couch, Petty Officer Sarax suddenly straightens his back and begins flailing his right arm.

“She doesn’t know what I’ve been through,” Sarax, who just returned from Iraq, says when asked about his marriage. “There are things that I just don’t want to talk about with her. And she keeps pushing.”

He talks and behaves like a soldier overcome by combat trauma, but Sarax isn’t real. He is a software program, a life-size projection on a movie screen that is reacting and responding to questions from a psychologist being trained to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sarax is a virtual patient, one of many computer-simulated humans created by psychologists, engineers and scientists at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. By the end of the year, the virtual patient is expected to be in use in university classrooms, and eventually in clinical hospitals and military bases.

Interactive computer patients are just one of many cutting-edge virtual technologies being developed at the institute. Many of them are used as training tools for U.S. military personnel, from fighting insurgents to calming nerves of combat-weary soldiers.

The institute’s wide-ranging virtual technologies, now found on 65 military sites across the country, have popped in and out of the public spotlight, but last week they were on full display when the institute opened the doors to its new 72,000-square-foot facility in Playa Vista.

“The move is a mark of a new era for us,” said Randall W. Hill Jr., executive director of the institute, which outgrew its facility in Marina del Rey. “But really, it’s a new era for the Army as well.”

The institute’s funding has increased from $5 million in 1999 to about $30 million today — as the Pentagon has stepped up spending on training military personnel through simulations. It has also attracted a diverse staff of more than 180 professionals, from graphic designers to former Disney artists and designers.

“Five years ago, the characters were talking heads with computer-generated voices with no emotion,” said Patrick G. Kenny, who leads the virtual patient program. “Today, it’s getting harder to distinguish what is real from what is not with virtual human characters.”

Walking through the institute’s new Playa Vista offices is like walking through a fraternity house for high-tech geeks. Cubicles have white boards on which workers can quickly jot down ideas whenever they have an “aha” moment. And a corner office is more likely to be occupied by a twentysomething in a T-shirt huddled over computer monitor than a supervisor in a suit.

On a recent visit, the institute engineers were testing one of their latest first-person, multi-player games that allows players to take part in a simulated attack that includes dealing with an improvised explosive device.

The game is designed to prepare soldiers for an insurgent ambush. It is already found on three military bases, including Camp Pendleton, in northern San Diego County.

In the training simulation, soldiers sit in mock Humvees and slowly roll through towns in either Iraq and Afghanistan, which are aesthetically true to life because the institute used satellite photographs to design the town’s landscape.

“We try to make it as real as possible,” said Todd Richmond, the game’s project director.

Richmond said he knew the institute got the game right after a Marine, who had been deployed overseas, was playing the game and pointed to a shop by the side of the road and said, “Hey, I went in that place and bought a Coke.”

In addition to mapping and satellite reconnaissance, the institute uses Hollywood movie writers to come in and make the story lines more compelling. The institute is one of the country’s only organizations that draws on the entertainment industry to do such work.

Maintaining this kind of realism is key to the institute’s success, said Peter W. Singer, author of “Wired for War,” a book that examines robotic warfare. “The stuff that ICT does is really in a class of its own.”

Singer estimates the U.S. military is spending about $6 billion each year on virtual training and expects that number to rise.

“This is a medium the iPhone generation knows,” Singer said. “You can’t simply teach them on a chalkboard anymore.”

william.hennigan@latimes.com
Computer simulation is a growing reality for instruction

After years of dishing tales of celebrity folly and misfortune, The National Enquirer’s publisher has fallen on hard times of its own.

American Media Inc. plans to seek federal bankruptcy protection in the next two weeks or so. The privately held company, based in Boca Raton, Fla., announced its intention Monday without sharing any details about its finances.

Calls to American Media weren’t immediately returned.

American Media, whose other publications include Star, Shape, Men’s Fitness and Fit Pregnancy, is trying to get most of its creditors to back its reorganization plan before it files for Chapter 11 protection. About 80% of its bondholders have expressed their support, the company said.

By cobbling together a prepackaged bankruptcy case, American Media hopes to gain court approval of its plan within 60 days of its filing. That would be much quicker than most corporate bankruptcy cases are resolved.

Like other publishers of newspapers and magazines, American Media has been struggling to recover from the recession while also trying to adapt to technology that has driven more readers and advertisers away from print to less expensive — or even free — alternatives on the Internet.

The challenge has proved too daunting for some. More than a dozen U.S. publishers of newspapers and magazines have filed for bankruptcy since December 2008. Many of the publishers seeking refuge in Bankruptcy Court were saddled with heavy debt loads that they took on during better times.

American Media appears to fall in this category. One of its subsidiaries, American Media Operations, had $1.1 billion in debt as of December 2008, according to a filing made with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company reached an agreement with its major bondholders in July to reduce its debt by $200 million. It didn’t publicly disclose how much debt it had at that time.

If its reorganization plan is approved, American Media indicated that much of its debt would be wiped out in exchange for giving its bondholders ownership of that company. The bondholder group includes hedge fund Avenue Capital and distressed-debt specialist Angelo, Gordon & Co., which has gained stakes in major newspapers — such as the Orange County Register — through bankruptcy proceedings.

Stiffening competition for celebrity gossip and news has hurt American Media’s publications. Besides other print magazines such as Time Warner Inc.’s People and US Weekly, National Enquirer increasingly finds itself chasing websites, such as Time Warner’s TMZ.com, that dig up the latest news about celebrities.

American Media’s website says its magazines have a combined circulation of about 6.8 million. In March 2008, its publications were selling a combined 7.5 million, according to an SEC filing.
National Enquirer’s owner to file for bankruptcy

A terrorist attack apparently aimed at two Jewish centers in Chicago was thwarted when two packages the size of bread boxes containing explosives were intercepted in Europe and the Middle East, President Obama and counterterrorism officials announced Friday.

The packages, which had originated from Yemen, were found on cargo planes after a tip from an official in Saudi Arabia. The targets were a synagogue and another Jewish center on the North Side of Chicago, a U.S. official said.

As they launched a terrorism investigation on three continents, authorities said suspicion fell in particular on Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, which has been linked to the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound U.S. airliner on Christmas Day. The explosive material found in the two packages is the same as that used in the failed airliner attack, according to a U.S. official.

Authorities discovered the packages late Thursday in UPS cargo planes that had flown from Yemen to an airport in East Midlands, England; and Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

An initial examination of the packages found that “they do apparently contain explosive materials,” Obama said in an announcement from the White House on Friday afternoon. Officials said it was still uncertain whether the devices were operational or whether they were to be picked up and activated by someone in Chicago. One official said federal law enforcement authorities believe the latter scenario to be the most likely.

The events “underscore the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism,” the president said. He warned that authorities believe Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemen-based group, “continues to plan attacks against our homeland, our citizens and our friends and allies.”

A federal law enforcement official said the cargo packages resembled the kind of smaller but deadly attacks recently urged by Anwar Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric thought to be living in Yemen. Awlaki sent e-mail to U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan encouraging him to militant activity before the November attacks at Ft. Hood, Texas, in which Hasan is suspected of killing 13 fellow soldiers. The cleric is also suspected of being behind the Christmas Day airliner plot allegedly carried out by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

“He is pushing the less sensational,” the official said, asking not to be identified because the investigation is continuing. “There appears to be a good amount of debate within Al Qaeda, and Al Awlaki is pushing for more hits, but on a smaller scale. He also believes that even when attacks are scrubbed or foiled, they nonetheless are successful if it terrorizes the United States.”

Federal authorities searched cargo planes at airports along the Eastern seaboard on Friday as well as a delivery truck in Brooklyn, N.Y., but found no explosives.

An Emirates Airline passenger jet carrying cargo from Yemen was escorted from the Canadian border to New York City by two military jets, in what U.S. officials described as a precautionary measure. A package aboard the passenger plane appeared similar to those found in England and Dubai, officials said, but was found not be contain explosives.

John Brennan, Obama’s counterterrorism advisor, said the explosives “were in a form that was designed to try to carry out some type of attack.”

A federal law enforcement official said initial reviews of the two suspicious cargo packages showed that the one found in England apparently contained a printer or ink toner cartridge with “some kind of white powder” and syringes and wires. He said the package uncovered in Dubai apparently contained cellphone components and a timer. He cautioned that both were still being evaluated and that no firm conclusions had been made.

Obama said that Brennan had spoken with the president of Yemen, who had pledged full cooperation in the investigation.

According to officials, the White House called a 1 a.m. meeting Friday to evaluate the cargo package intelligence, which included video participation with Homeland Security officials. They said the White House decided it was “good enough intelligence” to alert allies in Europe to start checking cargo packages coming from Yemen and bound for the U.S.

At 3 a.m., they said, the U.S. ordered every package from Yemen headed for the U.S. to be pulled off planes and inspected.

Homeland Security officials took a series of steps to enhance security, including heightened cargo screening and additional safety measures at U.S. airports. “Passengers should continue to expect an unpredictable mix of security layers that include explosives trace detection, advanced imaging technology, canine teams and pat downs, among others,” Homeland Security officials said.

A Jewish Federation of Greater Chicago spokeswoman said the group was “taking appropriate precautions” and was “advising our local synagogues to do likewise.” One of the targets was a Jewish congregation that meets at a Unitarian church, according to a U.S. official.

Oren Segal, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism in Washington, said Rahm Emanuel has been the focus of some attention on extremist blogs since long before he resigned as White House chief of staff to run for Chicago mayor. Segal said that vitriol on message boards peaked when Obama named Emanuel his top aide in early 2009.

The two incidents highlight a known vulnerability in the air cargo industry, one that has been the subject of extensive discussion between the Transportation Security Administration and the industry for several years.

The federal government has mandated in recent years that all cargo on passenger aircraft be screened, a goal that was achieved only this August. But the issue of parcels aboard cargo-only aircraft has been far more difficult to resolve. As far back as March 2009, the industry warned Congress it would not be able to meet the August deadline that 100% of cargo would be screened.

A TSA official acknowledged Friday that not all cargo inbound from abroad is screened and that the cargo that does get screened is handled differently than passenger luggage, which is subject to X-ray. That means that the two suspicious packages may not have been subject to screening when they were originally loaded in Yemen.

paul.richter@latimes.com

richard.serrano@latimes.com

bbennett@tribune.com

Christi Parsons in the Washington bureau and Times staff writer Ralph Vartabedian in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

Explosives found in two U.S.-bound packages, thwarting terrorist attack

Weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, oil company BP and subcontractor Halliburton were aware of test results showing that the cement mixture designed to seal the well was unstable — but they used it anyway, President Obama’s special commission investigating the environmental disaster reported Thursday.

The findings shed new light on troubles with the cement job on BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, which exploded April 20, killing 11 workers and causing the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The cement is supposed to secure the well pipes and keeps oil and gas from flowing up the well.

Legal experts said the information could bolster plaintiffs’ cases in the multitude of spill-related lawsuits by helping to show that BP acted with gross negligence leading up to the spill. This could, among other issues, greatly increase the multibillion-dollar penalties BP might have to pay for violation of the Clean Water Act.

“There’s no question that it’s important evidence,” said Charlie Tebbutt, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, which has filed a lawsuit seeking $19 billion under the Clean Water Act. “It serves to confirm the previous reports of significant problems with the exploration and production of the well.”

The information was included in a letter to Obama’s commission by Fred. H. Bartlit Jr., its chief counsel.

David Uhlmann, a law professor at the University of Michigan who formerly headed the Justice Department’s Environmental Crimes Section, said the findings make it appear more likely that Justice officials will file criminal charges not only against BP and Transocean Ltd., the rig’s owner, but also against Halliburton, the Texas oilfield services giant once headed by former Vice President Dick Cheney.

“There have been questions all along about the integrity of the cement job, and today those questions loom larger and are closer to being answered,” Uhlmann said. “And those answers are not good ones for Halliburton.”

In the letter, Bartlit said that his team recently asked Halliburton to turn over samples of the cement materials like those used at the well. The materials were tested by Chevron employees at a Houston lab. The employees were “unable to generate stable foam cement” from the materials, meaning the cement would not be strong enough to keep the well sealed.

Bartlit then asked Halliburton to turn over all of the tests it had run on the mixture.

Those documents showed that Halliburton had conducted four “stability tests” of the mixture. The first two were run in February 2010 using a slightly different recipe than the one eventually used at the well. Both of these tests indicated that the mix was unstable.

Halliburton sent results from only one of those tests to BP in an e-mail March 8.

“There is no indication that Halliburton highlighted to BP the significance of the foam stability data, or that BP personnel raised any questions about it,” Bartlit wrote.

Two more tests were conducted by Halliburton in April. The first test, conducted about seven days before the blowout, again showed the mix to be unstable, although Bartlit said it may have been improperly conducted. These results were reported internally at Halliburton, Bartlit said, “though it appears that Halliburton never provided the data to BP.”

Bartlit said Halliburton apparently began a fourth test, and after modifying the testing procedure, found the cement to be stable.

“We are not yet certain when Halliburton reported this data internally or whether the test was even complete prior to the time the cement job was poured at the Macondo well,” he wrote. “Halliburton reported this data to BP after the blowout.”

Bartlit said that because BP did not have the test results, “the cement job may have been pumped without any lab results indicating that the foam cement slurry would be stable.”

BP officials did not return a call for comment Thursday. A Halliburton spokeswoman said company officials were reviewing the report.

Late Thursday, Halliburton issued a statement. Its February tests were of a different slurry mixture, the company said, and its first April test was “irrelevant because the laboratory did not use the correct amount of cement blend. Furthermore … BP was made aware of the issues with that test.”

Halliburton said its second April test used the agreed-upon mixture and showed it was stable. But BP changed the mixture that was actually used in the well, Halliburton said, and “a foam stability test was not conducted” on the new formulation.

The cement job was not the only problem that plagued the well on the evening of April 20, and Bartlit did not say that it was the only cause of the blowout.

The blowout preventer — a massive device that was supposed to shut off the well off in case of a dangerous geyser of oil and gas — also failed. Other human errors have been alleged as well. On the day of the blowout, BP canceled a test called a “cement bond log” designed to discover cement defects, saving more than $100,000.

Jesse Gagliano, a Halliburton technical advisor, also told federal investigators that BP risked causing a “severe gas flow problem” when they decided to use fewer devices called “centralizers” rather than the 21 he recommended.

Critics of BP and its partners on the Macondo project jumped on the findings to demand greater oversight of the companies involved in the accident and of the oil industry. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, said the counsel’s findings underscored the need for BP’s new chief executive, Bob Dudley, to appear before Congress, which he has recently declined to do.

“The fact that BP and Halliburton knew this cement job could fail only solidifies their liability and responsibility for this disaster,” Markey said in a statement. “We now know what BP and Halliburton knew, and when they knew it. And now we know they did absolutely nothing about it.

The report’s release sent Halliburton shares plunging 16%, to less than $30 in New York trading, but it recovered somewhat to close at $31.68, down $2.74, or 8%. BP’s American shares, however, closed at $40.60, up 1.25%.

Richard.fausset@latimes.com

Nbanerjee@tribune.com

Fausset reported from Atlanta and Banerjee reported from Washington. Rong-Gong Lin II contributed to this report from Los Angeles.
Tests warned of cement problems before well’s blowout

One night a few years back, a California communications executive named Deborah Bowker was worried about her husband, who was sick and hospitalized. An old friend told her she shouldn’t be alone, that she should come over and stay the night.

The guest bedroom at the friend’s house was used most often by grandchildren, and contained two tiny beds. That night, Bowker was crying herself to sleep in one of them when the door cracked open. Without a word, Carly Fiorina padded across the room and crawled into the other bed.

Bowker and Fiorina have been close friends since they went to MIT together, and little changed for 20 years — until Fiorina decided to run for the U.S. Senate, with Bowker as her chief of staff.

That fretful night doesn’t seem like a big deal now. Bowker’s husband recovered, and Fiorina might not even remember it, Bowker said with a laugh. Bowker said she hadn’t told the story before and wasn’t sure why she was telling it now — except that she hardly recognizes Fiorina in the image that’s been created through the veneer of politics.

Those closest to Fiorina, 56, describe her as loyal and fun-loving, witty and bright. But they are well aware of the other image — of a pompous diva, aligned with the most strident factions of her Republican Party, pampered by a golden parachute after being fired from her high-profile job.

Fiorina the candidate hasn’t always helped matters. Her tone on the stump can be caustic. At one point in her dogged campaign against the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Barbara Boxer, an open microphone caught her belittling Boxer’s hair as “so yesterday.”

In a sneering attempt to connect with a “tea party” crowd near Fresno recently, she referred to San Francisco — the center of the metropolitan area where she spent nearly half of her life, the city just up the road from her 5,400-square-foot Los Altos Hills estate — as “that faraway world.”

And her critics tend to roll their eyes when Fiorina — who was raised on opera and French lessons, was the daughter of a powerful judge and has a sterling academic pedigree — pitches herself as a kind of Horatio Alger. Her journey, she said at one recent campaign event, was “only possible in the United States of America.”

Getting to know the person friends call “the real Carly,” meanwhile, can be a confounding task. Stung by several episodes in her life, including the unraveling of her first marriage and the brouhaha surrounding her firing from Hewlett-Packard, where she was chief executive, president and chairman, she is private and guarded.

Fiorina’s work ethic is legendary, and her discipline is one reason Boxer — a lioness of the left seeking her fourth Senate term — is in arguably the toughest race of her career. But Fiorina can be so on-message that she comes across as a machine.

During a recent heat wave, Fiorina met with business leaders in a sweltering City of Industry warehouse. A visitor joked that the record heat might cause her to rethink her position on global warming. Fiorina was not amused, launching instantly into her talking points about climate change — contending that she reserved the right to “challenge the science.”

On the campaign trail, it can be difficult to envision the Fiorina who could often be found dancing with the interns and the secretaries at the end of corporate parties, long after the other executives were gone. Or the woman who, on a recent boat trip, suddenly disappeared; she had jumped off the stern and hauled herself onto a tiny raft with her step-granddaughters.

Friends say she’s a fair cook and has a nice touch on the piano. She was raised Episcopalian but is not a regular churchgoer. She does Jane Fonda-style aerobics, whether she’s home or on the road.

She reads policy briefs on her iPad but reads books the old-fashioned way. She’s a voracious shopper, said one friend of 20 years, and gave one Hong Kong jeweler enough business that he put her picture in the window. She has at her disposal a household net worth estimated as high as $121 million and yachts on both coasts, and will be one of the wealthiest members of Congress if she wins.

She and her husband, Frank Fiorina, a former AT&T executive with blue-collar roots in Pittsburgh, have been married for 25 years. It is a second marriage for both; she calls him a “hunk” with some frequency.

Last fall, she threw him a sock-hop-themed 60th birthday party, tracking down friends he hadn’t seen in 30 years. Fiorina was stylish as ever, said an old friend, Kathy Fitzgerald, in a black dress and textured stockings — and, since she was being treated for breast cancer, bald.

Cara Carleton Sneed was born in Austin, Texas. Her mother, a talented oil painter, was a refugee from a troubled childhood in Ohio. Her father, Joseph Tyree Sneed III, was a University of Texas law professor whose ambition in academia meant that she was perpetually “the new kid,” she wrote in her autobiography, as the family moved repeatedly.

In 1969, while teenagers across America experimented with a new counterculture, Fiorina was in Ghana, where her father was teaching students about the country’s new constitution.

Fiorina’s father soon joined the Stanford law faculty, and she graduated from Stanford with a degree in philosophy and medieval history — which, she jokes, rendered her unemployable. She bounced from job to job, working as a typist, a temp, a receptionist. In 1980, she signed on as a management trainee with AT&T.

Fiorina presents a sharp contrast in images

For months, the budget crisis in Los Angeles has hamstrung and frustrated the city’s homicide detectives. With no money to pay for the long hours of overtime they typically work, LAPD officials saw no choice but to force detectives to take time off from the job. Cases started taking longer to solve or going cold.

The LAPD’s struggles weren’t lost on Robert Clark, an FBI assistant special agent in charge of the bureau’s anti-gang efforts in Los Angeles. Clark’s concern grew as he watched the number of gang-related killings in the city’s violent southern swatch spike in early summer. With agents, cash and equipment to spare, Clark approached LAPD officials with an unusual offer to help.

The results were striking: More than two dozen homicide cases were solved during a first-of-its-kind collaboration of the two agencies.

“I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said veteran LAPD homicide Det. Sal LaBarbera. “We were able to clear cases at a pace that we never would have been able to hit. Twenty-seven homicides in three months? That’s unheard of.”

Though the FBI and LAPD have collaborated before, officials from both agencies said the speed with which the improvised idea came together, the scope of the assistance and its immediate effect were unprecedented.

Named Operation Save Our Streets, the effort began July 1 and teamed six FBI agents with a few dozen LAPD homicide detectives who work in some of the city’s bloodiest, most gang-saturated neighborhoods. With the agents came half a dozen vehicles, badly needed computers and hard drives, and access to the FBI’s forensic laboratory and surveillance equipment. Most importantly, Clark ponied up money to cover the LAPD detectives’ overtime costs, allowing them to forgo the department-wide policy that sends officers home on forced leave when they accrue too many hours of additional work.

The money “kept us working — allowed us to stay at it unrestricted, in the way we need to. Without it, we would have been stuck keeping regular office hours,” LaBarbera said.

The effect of the LAPD’s overtime policy on homicide cases was first reported in The Times in April.

At the start, detectives and agents focused on 13 recent killings in which the detectives believed they had strong leads and a good chance of quick arrests. Within weeks, however, the scope of the project expanded as the agents began joining detectives when they rolled out to fresh crime scenes, as well as helping with cases going back several years. In all, the teams worked on 78 homicides, LaBarbera said.

Often forced to wait for the LAPD’s overworked crime lab to process DNA evidence and conduct other forensic tests, LaBarbera said, detectives got quicker results from the FBI’s lab. Advanced cellphone tracking technology was available, as were surveillance vans outfitted with equipment not owned by the LAPD.

The case of Shavonna Jones, a 30-year-old woman allegedly shot to death by her estranged husband on May 22, underscored the reach of the FBI. LAPD detectives had spent several weeks chasing dead ends throughout the region, but lost the husband’s trail.

On information they gathered from prison inmates who knew the man, FBI agents were able to trace him to an area outside Minneapolis. Calls to the bureau’s Minneapolis field office resulted in his arrest Aug. 12.

“Would we have solved the case? Probably, but it would have taken three or four times as long,” LaBarbera said.

Arrests were also made in Nevada and Arizona. The oldest case solved went back two decades. In all, agents and detectives interviewed more than 250 witnesses and suspects, served more than two dozen search warrants and made 20 arrests, according to LAPD officials. In a few cases, the suspects whom police concluded were responsible for the killings were found to have died.

If there was a downside to the collaboration, LaBarbera said, it was that it was a stark reminder of what LAPD detectives might be able to do with more resources.

“There shouldn’t be a cap or a limit when it comes to somebody’s life,” he said. “If it were my kid, I’d want 1,000 people out there working around the clock.”

joel.rubin@latimes.com
FBI and LAPD join forces to solve more than two dozen homicide cases

Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad provoked yet another controversy Thursday saying a majority of people in the United States and around the world believe the American government staged the Sept. 11 terror attacks in an attempt to assure Israel’s survival.

The provocative comments prompted the U.S. delegation to walk out of Ahmadinejad’s U.N. speech, where he also blamed the U.S. as the power behind U.N. Security Council sanctions against Iran for its refusal to halt uranium enrichment, a technology that can be used as fuel for electricity generation or to build nuclear weapons.

Ahmadinejad said the U.S. has allocated $80 billion to upgrade its nuclear arsenal and is not a fair judge to sit as a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council to punish Iran for its nuclear activities. Iran denies it is seeking a nuclear weapon.

The Iranian leader — who has in the past cast doubt over the U.S. version of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — also called for setting up an independent fact-finding U.N. team to probe the attacks. That, he said, would keep the terror assault from turning into what he has called a sacred issue like the Holocaust where “expressing opinion about it won’t be banned”.

Ahmadinejad did not explain the logic behind blaming the U.S. for the terror attacks but said there were three theories:

–That “powerful and complex terrorist group” penetrated U.S. intelligence and defenses, which is advocated “by American statesmen.”

–”That some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime. The majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians agree with this view.”

After Ahmadinejad uttered those words, two American diplomats stood and walked out without listening to the third theory: That the attack was the work of “a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.”

Mark Kornblau, spokesman of the U.S. Mission to the world body, issued a statement within moments of the walkout.

“Rather than representing the aspirations and goodwill of the Iranian people,” he said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad has yet again chosen to spout vile conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic slurs that are as abhorrent and delusional as they are predictable.”

Ahmadinejad said the U.S. used the Sept. 11 attacks as a pretext to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people. He argued that the U.S., instead, should have “designed a logical plan” to punish the perpetrators and not occupy two independent states and shed so much blood.

He boasted of the capture in February of Abdulmalik Rigi, the leader of an armed Sunni group whose insurgency in the southeast of Iran has destabilized the border region with Pakistan. He praised Iranian security forces for capturing him in an overseas operation without resorting to violence. Rigi was later hanged.

Ahmadinejad’s attacks on the United States and the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program dominated the opening of the General Assembly’s annual ministerial meeting.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned kings, prime ministers and presidents in his keynote address of the growing political polarization and social inequalities in the world and implored U.N. members to show greater tolerance and mutual respect to bring nations and peoples together.

“We hear the language of hate, false divisions between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ those who insist on ‘their way’ or ‘no way,”‘ he said.

In times of such polarization and uncertainty, Ban said, “let us remember, the world still looks to the United Nations for moral and political leadership.”

President Barack Obama, speaking soon after, echoed the secretary-general, warning that underneath challenges to security and prosperity “lie deeper fears: that ancient hatreds and religious divides are once again ascendant; that a world which has grown more interconnected has somehow slipped beyond our control.”

The U.S. president’s 32-minute speech — more than twice the allotted 15 minutes — covered global hotspots from Iran and Afghanistan to the Mideast and North Korea.

Obama said Iran is the only party to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty “that cannot demonstrate the peaceful intentions of its nuclear program” and as a result the U.N. Security Council has imposed four rounds of increasingly tough sanctions.

“The United States and the international community seek a resolution to our differences with Iran, and the door remains open to diplomacy should Iran choose to walk through it,” he said. “But the Iranian government must demonstrate a clear and credible commitment, and confirm to the world the peaceful intent of its nuclear program.”

Ahmadinejad, speaking in the afternoon session, stressed that Iran will never submit “to illegally imposed pressures” from the U.N. nuclear agency which has been demanding that Tehran halt enrichment, a key Security Council demand as well.

“Iran has always been ready for a dialogue based on respect and justice,” he said.

But the Iranian leader said sanctions imposed by the Security Council were illegal and disrespectful.

The General Assembly hall was packed for Obama’s speech, with leaders and diplomats, including Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee, listening carefully, some snapping photos with cell phone cameras. Obama was interrupted twice by applause and received a prolonged and warm response at the end of his remarks.

Just ahead of Obama’s speech, Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin sharply criticized the United States, saying that the 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrated that the “blind faith in intelligence reports tailored to justify political goals must be rejected.”

“We must ban once and for all the use of force inconsistent with international law,” Amorin told the General Assembly, adding that all international disputes should be peacefully resolved through dialogue.

Qatar’s Emir Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani declared that terrorism “should not be treated by waging wars.”

He blamed wars fought to combat terrorism for spreading destruction, causing the death and displacement of millions of people “as well as economic and financial crises that shook the stability of the world and undermined the efforts made in dialogue among cultures.

“What we fear is for the war on terrorism to turn into commercial transactions, financial contracts and armies of mercenaries who kill outside of any international and human legitimacy,” the emir said. “These are all very dangerous things.”
U.S. walks out on Ahmadinejad U.N. speech

Richard J. Bing of La Ca

Five U.S. troops were killed by roadside bombs and insurgent fire in southern and eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, the latest casualties in a particularly bloody spell that has left 12 service members dead in two days, and 19 since Saturday.

Meanwhile, on the southern outskirts of the capital, Kabul, a gunman opened fire on a busload of Afghan Supreme Court clerks, killing three and wounding 12, the Interior Ministry reported.

Assailants on two motorcycles halted the bus Tuesday morning in the Musayi district, an area where insurgents are active, court spokesman Abdul Malik Kamawi said. One gunman then boarded the bus and opened fire with an automatic weapon, killing two people, Kamawi said. A third died later in a hospital.

“We’re trying to find out who they were. For now, we can only say they are the enemies of the Afghan people,” Kamawi said.

Suspicion immediately fell on Taliban insurgents who have waged a continuous campaign against Afghan government officials and institutions and have stepped up attacks in the run-up to Sept. 18 elections for the lower house of parliament. Candidates and their aides have been threatened, kidnapped and killed, and many voters say they plan to stay away from the polls for fear of violence.

In Tuesday’s attacks, NATO said four troops were killed by a roadside bomb in eastern Afghanistan, while a fifth died in a battle with insurgents in the country’s south. No other details were given and the service members were not identified by name, as is standard procedure.

The deaths came a day after roadside bombs killed eight other members of the international force in Afghanistan, including seven U.S. troops, NATO said Tuesday. A 20-year-old Estonian soldier was also killed.

The deaths bring this month’s total to 55, including a Marine killed in fighting in the volatile southern province of Helmand on Friday whose death was not announced until Monday night. That is still fewer than the 66 killed in July, the deadliest month for U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.

Almost all of the recent coalition deaths have come in southern and eastern Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency is most deeply entrenched and where fighting has been heaviest.

Those areas are also closest to the mountainous border with Pakistan, where insurgents maintain safe havens and training bases to instruct recruits, including foreign fighters, who are later infiltrated into Afghanistan.

NATO commanders have warned casualties will mount as coalition and Afghan forces enter areas under longtime Taliban control, particularly in the hard-line Islamic movement’s spiritual heartland of Kandahar province. The NATO force swelled this month to more than 140,000 — including 100,000 Americans — with the arrival of the last of the reinforcements that President Barack Obama ordered to Afghanistan in a bid to turn the tide of the nearly nine-year war.

Also Tuesday, NATO also said its forces, working with Afghan army and police, had killed 19 insurgents and captured five in a major air assault on the village of Omar in the eastern province of Kunar.

Ground forces taking part in the assault that began Monday uncovered insurgent fighting positions, along with weapons caches and ammunition stockpiles inside the village, it said.

The coalition also said it killed two insurgents and wounded a third in an airstrike Monday on a Taliban commander in charge of logistics in Kandahar, including the coordination of homemade bomb attacks.

A number of Taliban and allied Haqqani Network commanders were also detained in operations Monday, including one recently returned from teaching bomb-making techniques in Pakistan, NATO said.

In Zabul province bordering Kandahar, insurgents on Monday night ambushed a convoy carrying food and other supplies, killing two private security guards and wounding five others, provincial government spokesman Mohammad Jan Rasoolyar said.
12 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan in 2 days