DebateGate

Jerry Falwell, Political Innovator
Tuesday, May. 15, 2007 By MICHAEL DUFFY 

Jerry Falwell stood apart from other fundamentalist Christian leaders in the last quarter of the 20th century as the man who dragged his strongly conservative faith fully — and many said recklessly — into the public square. American politics and, in many ways, American religion have not been the same since.

Politics from the Pulpit
Unlike famed evangelist Billy Graham, who was far more careful about ever tipping his hand in public, Falwell showed no hesitation to shout his politics from the pulpit — and then shout them again on radio and television.

Secular Americans found Falwell to be horrifying, a dangerous mix of sacred and conservative. But so, at least at first, did many fundamentalists, who believed that politics had no place in houses of prayer. "What you have to remember is that American fundamentalists were separate from the rest of country politically and theologically," said Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "Falwell came along and said, 'Politics is important now. You can't stay apart.' That was no small thing. Whether one agrees with Falwell or not, to mobilize millions of people who had heretofore been apolitical — and apolitical for theological reasons — was quite a shift for a Southern fundamentalist preacher."

Falwell's spiritual breakthrough, however, was accompanied by a political innovation. Instead of being comprised simply of fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants, Falwell opened the Moral Majority up to everyone: Jews, Catholics and Mormons — in short, the very people (and faiths) that fundamentalists had been separating themselves from for generations. That was Falwell's greatest political discovery: he understood that fundamentalists, orthodox Jews, conservative Catholics and Mormons had so much in common politically that they could overlook their theological differences.

The son of a Lynchburgh, Va., family with utility company and entertainment businesses, Falwell started the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg after graduating from a Missouri Bible college. A year later, the church's membership had grown from 35 to nearly 1000. Like many of his denomination, he railed against premarital sex, adultery and drinking — and in 1965, just a few weeks after Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, Falwell delivered a sermon that urged against any formal mixture of politics and faith: " Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else — including the fighting of communism, or participating in the civil rights reform....Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners."

But Falwell's views on that would change. By the mid-1970s, he was big enough to lure the attention of Jimmy Carter, who was openly courting faith- minded voters in his own campaign for president. But Falwell cooled on Carter and within a year or two of his election turned hostile. In 1979, he started the Moral Majority, partly at the urging of two Republican political consultants. In 1980, Falwell moved the organization behind Ronald Reagan, buying anti-Carter ads on tiny radio stations across the South and Midwest.

That November, he recalled later, he sat in his pickup truck listening to the returns on the radio and claimed to be stunned by the breadth and depth of the landslide. The next morning, when he appeared at a rally at Liberty, the band played "Hail to the Chief."

Along the way, he created his own Bible college — and then turned it into an even bigger university, where Republican Presidents and presidential candidates stood in line to speak to graduating classes. By 1985, his operations had budgets of more than $100 million a year, and he was winging round the world in private jets, appearing on the cover of TIME, over the headline, "Thunder on the Right."

It was during the Reagan years that Falwell seemed to most flex his political muscles, pushing the newly minted Republican administration to tighten laws regulating abortion, preaching against homosexuality and pornography and pushing for looser tax treatment of, and more generous federal grants to, parochial and Christian schools. Falwell also dabbled in foreign policy, supporting Israeli sovereignty against the Palestinians and opposing the Reagan administration when it announced plans to sell early warning planes to Saudi Arabia. The Moral Majority lasted only a decade: until l989. But Falwell remained a controversial figure — and a go-to source for politicians and reporters seeking to know how the nation's growing tide of values voters would respond to various issues. Many other leaders did not care for his intensely partisan pulpiteering and kept their distance from him. The Lynchburg preacher was downright hostile to Bill Clinton, boasting to his flock in the first week after Clinton's inauguration in 1993 that he had a sex tape of the new President, but was too appalled by it to share it in public. Falwell came out early for Bush in 2000. Not long after, John McCain called Falwell, along with Rev. Pat Robertson, an "agent of intolerance." McCain more recently traveled to Lynchburg to mend fences.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1621300,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner

It shouldn't cost more than about $5,000 to buy a place for an illegal in one or another developing country

On LAPD and the illegal alien provocations and such like:

http://patterico.com/2007/05/10/when-the-last-hero-leaves-la-will-anybody-notice/ 

"In fact, according to the L.A. Police Protective League, fully 60% of LAPD officers have been with the department less than five years. At that rate, almost the entire department could have been replaced twice since the 1992 riots. Notably, officers who leave the LAPD in their first five years have to repay the City for their academy training.

If you want to understand why the LAPD can't retain officers, don't look to the Los Angeles Times. The story below was first told to five of their top staff writers. Each deemed it interesting, but none reported it. In fact, this very column was presented to their OpEd section, and was rejected because a vaguely similar piece ran last year, addressing a less compelling set of facts. Apparently, only limited space is allotted to critical local issues in Los Angeles's newspaper of record.

So, instead of looking to the Times, look to two other certified heroes: officers Troy Zeeman and Bryan Gregson. Last November, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger presented them with California Medals of Valor, for engaging a suspected killer in a running gunfight through a South L.A. apartment building.

The LAPD, by contrast, ruled them tactically deficient, worthy only of retraining."

While I have reason to know that LAPD isn't perfect -- it's overstretched to begin with -- city policies don't help. But the main problems in the past few years have been the swelling of the ranks of illegal immigrants.

The police are overloaded, as are the hospital emergency rooms and other social services; perhaps not true in other parts of the country, but certainly in California. The city of San Diego is essentially bankrupt due to the costs of illegal immigrants.

My solution to the illegal immigrant problem: close the borders ($20 billion a year? probably less. A billion dollars buys a lot of fences, border patrol agents, local sheriff services, and bounty hunters) and allow the melting pot to work. Stop this multi-culturalism and encourage assimilation as we did for 200 years. We need not actively seek out illegals. If they obey the laws, leave them alone. But if anyone illegally here comes to the attention of the police in any capacity other than as a crime victim, they get deported. If the country of origin will not take them back, then we buy them citizenship in Liberia, Chad, or some other willing place: indeed we can auction that off. Countries will bid for the fee we will pay them.

It shouldn't cost more than about $5,000 to buy a place for an illegal in one or another developing country. Meanwhile, a Congressional act instructs the courts that the Civil War Amendments do not make citizens of those born here to illegal immigrant parents; if need be, removes such cases from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts and from appeal to the SCOTUS.

If the problem continues put a $3,000 bounty on illegal immigrants to be paid to whomever brings them to the authorities. That can include each other if husband and wife turn each other in. Take home a nice bonus.

With 20 million illegal immigrants in the US, and an average cost of $5500 to deal with each, that is $110 billion; not cheap, but given that illegal immigrants cost California alone about $20 billion a year in schools and hospital services (not to mention jails, police, and so forth) it will not be long before that investment shows a profit. And of course we won't have a full 20 million to deport.

Of course none of this will happen, but when Bush says that amnesty is the only possible policy it is evident that he has not properly considered the question, and those who have so advised him are no friends to the president.

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view465.html

Poll: Congress' Approval Same As Bush

Friday May 11, 2007 11:16 AM


By ALAN FRAM

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - People think the Democratic-led Congress is doing just as dreary a job as President Bush, following four months of bitter political standoffs that have seen little progress on Iraq and a host of domestic issues.

An AP-Ipsos poll also found that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a more popular figure than the president and her colleagues on Capitol Hill, though she faces a gender gap in which significantly more women than men support her.

The survey found only 35 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job, down 5 percentage points in a month. That gives lawmakers the same bleak approval rating as Bush, who has been mired at about that level since last fall, including his dip to a record low for the AP-Ipsos poll of 32 percent last January.

``It's mostly Iraq'' plus a lack of progress in other areas, said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who heads the House GOP's campaign committee. ``These are not good numbers for an incumbent, and it doesn't matter if you have an R or a D next to your name.''

Democrats agree the problem is largely Iraq, which has dominated this year's session of Congress while producing little more than this month's Bush veto of a bill requiring the withdrawal of U.S. troops. It has also overshadowed House-passed bills on stem cell research, student loans and other subjects that the White House opposes, they say.

``People are unhappy, there hasn't been a lot of change in direction, for example in Iraq,'' said Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., chairman of House Democrats' campaign effort.

The telephone survey of 1,000 adults was taken Monday through Wednesday and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Hezbollah builds a Western base
From inside South America’s Tri-border area, Iran-linked militia targets U.S.
By Pablo Gato and Robert Windrem
NBC News
Updated: 9:29 a.m. ET May 9, 2007

CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay - The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, fostering a well-financed force of Islamist radicals boiling with hatred for the United States and ready to die to prove it, according to militia members, U.S. officials and police agencies across the continent.

From its Western base in a remote region divided by the borders of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina known as the Tri-border, or the Triple Frontier, Hezbollah has mined the frustrations of many Muslims among about 25,000 Arab residents whose families immigrated mainly from Lebanon in two waves, after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and after the 1985 Lebanese civil war.

An investigation by Telemundo and NBC News has uncovered details of an extensive smuggling network run by Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group founded in Lebanon in 1982 that the United States has labeled an international terrorist organization. The operation funnels large sums of money to militia leaders in the Middle East and finances training camps, propaganda operations and bomb attacks in South America, according to U.S. and South American officials.

U.S. officials fear that poorly patrolled borders and rampant corruption in the Tri-border region could make it easy for Hezbollah terrorists to infiltrate the southern U.S. border. From the largely lawless region, it is easy for potential terrorists, without detection, to book passage to the United States through Brazil and then Mexico simply by posing as tourists.

They are men like Mustafa Khalil Meri, a young Arab Muslim whom Telemundo interviewed in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay’s second-largest city and the center of the Tri-border region. There is nothing particularly distinctive about him, but beneath the everyday T-shirt he wears beats the heart of a devoted Hezbollah militiaman.

“If he attacks Iran, in two minutes Bush is dead,” Meri said. “We are Muslims. I am Hezbollah. We are Muslims, and we will defend our countries at any time they are attacked.”


Straight shot to the U.S.
U.S. and South American officials warn that Meri’s is more than a rhetorical threat.

It is surprisingly easy to move across borders in the Triple Frontier, where motorbikes are permitted to cross without documents. A smuggler can bike from Paraguay into Brazil and return without ever being asked for a passport, and it is not much harder for cars and trucks.


The implications of such lawlessness could be dire, U.S. and Paraguayan officials said. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said Hezbollah militiamen would raise no suspicions because they have Latin American passports, speak Spanish and look like Hispanic tourists.

The CIA singles out the Mexican border as an especially inviting target for Hezbollah operatives. “Many alien smuggling networks that facilitate the movement of non-Mexicans have established links to Muslim communities in Mexico,” its Counter Terrorism Center said in a 2004 threat paper.

“Non-Mexicans often are more difficult to intercept because they typically pay high-end smugglers a large sum of money to efficiently assist them across the border, rather than haphazardly traverse it on their own.”

Deadly legacy of a lawless frontier
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Tri-border has become a top-level, if little-publicized, concern for Washington, particularly as tension mounts with Iran, Hezbollah’s main sponsor. Paraguayan government officials told Telemundo that CIA operatives and agents of Israel’s Mossad security force were known to be in the region seeking to neutralize what they believe could be an imminent threat.

But long before that, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies regarded the region as a “free zone for significant criminal activity, including people who are organized to commit acts of terrorism,” Louis Freeh, then the director of the FBI, said in 1998.

Edward Luttwak, a counterterrorism expert with the Pentagon’s National Security Study Group, described the Tri-border as the most important base for Hezbollah outside Lebanon itself, home to “a community of dangerous fanatics that send their money for financial support to Hezbollah.”

“People kill with that, and they have planned terrorist attacks from there,” said Luttwak, who has been a terrorism consultant to the CIA and the National Security Council. “The northern region of Argentina, the eastern region of Paraguay and even Brazil are large terrains, and they have an organized training and recruitment camp for terrorists.”

“Our experience is that if you see one roach, there are a lot more,” said Frank Urbancic, principal deputy director of the State Department’s counterterrorism office, who has spent most of his career in the Middle East.

A mother lode of money
Operating out of the Tri-border, Hezbollah is accused of killing more than 100 people in attacks in nearby Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the early 1990s in operations personally masterminded by Hezbollah’s military commander, Imad Mugniyah.

Mugniyah is on the most-wanted terrorist lists of both the FBI and the European Union, and he is believed to work frequently out of Ciudad del Este.

For President Bush and the U.S.-led “war on terror,” the flourishing of Hezbollah in the Western Hemisphere demonstrates the worrying worldwide reach of Islamist radicalism. In the Tri-border, Hezbollah and other radical anti-U.S. groups have found a lucrative base from which to finance many of their operations.

Smuggling has long been the lifeblood of the Tri-border, accounting for $2 billion to $3 billion in the region, according to congressional officials. Several U.S. agencies said that Arab merchants were involved in smuggling cigarettes and livestock to avoid taxes, as well as cocaine and marijuana through the border with Brazil on their way to Europe. Some of the proceeds are sent to Hezbollah, they said.

Many Arabs in the Tri-border openly acknowledge that they send money to Hezbollah to help their families, and the man in charge of the local mosque in Ciudad del Este, who asked not to be identified by name, declared that Shiite Muslim mosques had “an obligation to finance it.”

But the U.S. government maintains that the money ends up stained with blood when it goes through Hezbollah, which is blamed for the bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in the 1980s, as well as the kidnappings of Americans, two of whom were tortured and killed.

Patrick M. O’Brien, the assistant secretary of the Treasury in charge of fighting terrorist financing, acknowledged flatly that “we are worried.”

“Hezbollah has penetrated the area, and part of that smuggling money is used to finance terrorist attacks,” he said.


In Paraguay, looking the other way
The biggest obstacle in the U.S. campaign to counter Hezbollah close to home is Paraguay, whose “judicial system remains severely hampered by a lack of strong anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism legislation,” the State Department said in a “Patterns of Global Terrorism” report.

Since 2004, a draft bill to strengthen money laundering laws has been stalled in the Paraguayan legislature, and the government of President Nicanor Duarte has introduced no draft legislation of its own.

Hampering reform efforts is an endemic reluctance in Paraguay to acknowledge the problem.

Interior Minister Rogelio Benitez Vargas, who supervises the national police, claimed that Hezbollah-linked smuggling was a relic of the 1980s. Today, he said, the Triple Frontier is a safe and regulated “commercial paradise.”

But authorities from the U.S. State and Treasury departments to Interpol to the front-line Paraguayan police agencies all paint a different picture. Eduardo Arce, secretary of the Paraguayan Union of Journalists, said the government was widely considered to be under the control of drug traffickers and smugglers.

Without interference, thousands of people cross the River Parana every day from Paraguay to Brazil over the Bridge of Friendship loaded with products on which they pay no taxes. As police look the other way, he said, some smugglers cross the border 10 to 20 times a day. Earlier this year, Telemundo cameras were present as smugglers in Ciudad del Este loaded trucks headed for Brazil. They could have been laden with drugs or weapons, but no authorities ever checked.

Direct link to Iran alleged
José Adasco knows better than most why Hezbollah has the region in a grip of fear.

In 1992 and 1994, terrorists believed to be linked to Hezbollah carried out two attacks against Jewish targets in Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital. In the first, a car bomb exploded at the Israeli Embassy, killing 29 people. Two years later, a suicide bomber attacked the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, a Jewish community center, killing 85 more.

Adasco, who represents the Jewish association, has never been able to forget that day and the friends he lost.

“Really, to see the knocked-down building, [to hear] the screams, the cries, people running — it was total chaos. Chaos, chaos. It is inexpressible,” he said.

An investigation by Interpol and the FBI found not only Hezbollah’s involvement, but Iran’s, as well. The Argentine prosecutor’s office said the Iranian president at the time, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, ordered the attack to retaliate against Argentina for suspending nuclear cooperation with Iran.

A warrant for Rafsanjani’s arrest remains outstanding, and the prosecutor’s office continues its investigation 13 years later.

Hezbollah tells its story
Alberto Nisman, the Argentine district attorney leading the investigation, said the connection between the Hezbollah attack and the Tri-border is unquestionable. Among other things, he said, the suicide bomber passed through the area to receive instructions.

In the intervening years, Hezbollah has spread throughout Latin America.

On their Web page, local Hezbollah militants in Venezuela call their fight against the United States a “holy war” and post photographs of would-be suicide terrorists with masks and bombs. There are also Web sites for Hezbollah in Chile, El Salvador, Argentina and most other Latin American countries.

“The Paraguayan justice [ministry] and the national police have found propaganda materials for Hezbollah” across the hemisphere, said Augusto Anibal Lima of Paraguay’s Tri-border Police.

And it is not only propaganda. In October, homemade bombs were left in front of the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela, which is next to a school. 

Police arrested a student carrying Hezbollah propaganda in Spanish. One of the pamphlets showed a picture of children and said, “Combat is our highest expression of love and the only way to offer a healthy and uncorrupted world.”

Caracas police were able to detonate the bombs safely. Police Commissioner Wilfredo Borras said they appeared to be “explosive devices made to make noise and publicity” — very different from what would be used if the United States attacked Iran.

“In [the] United States, there are many Arabs — in Canada, too,” said Meri, the Hezbollah member who spoke with Telemundo. “If one bomb [strikes] Iran, one bomb, [Bush] will see the world burning.

“... If an order arrives, all the Arabs that are here, in other parts in the world, all will go to take bombs, bombs for everybody if he bombs Iran.”

© 2007 MSNBC InteractivePablo Gato is a correspondent for Telemundo. Robert Windrem is an investigative producer for NBC News.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17874369/

Senate panel sets 35 mpg standard by 2020

Commerce Committee approves bill that would raise fuel economy standards.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- The U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Tuesday approved a bill that would raise the passenger fleet automotive fuel standard to an average 35 miles per gallon by 2020.

The measure passed on a voice vote. Two leading Republicans on the committee, Ted Stevens of Alaska and Trent Lott of Mississippi, expressed reservations about the bill and how it would apply to domestic automakers and the proposed standard for light trucks.

Survey: Half could support higher gas tax

"I am very concerned about the overall fairness," Lott said. "We need to make sure we are fair across the board to all manufacturers. There are some inherent disadvantages, especially on the truck issue."

The bill would also mandate a mileage standard for the first time for medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks.

Major automakers including Toyota Motor Corp., General Motors Corp.and Ford Motor Co.oppose the bill, saying the proposed standard would represent too steep a rise and be too costly to achieve.

A House of Representatives committee is working on its own plan to increase what are known as the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Congress is under pressure to finalize legislation that would give automakers enough time to adopt changes.

The bill should go to the full Senate for debate and a vote in June, lawmakers said.

"After more than two decades of inaction on fuel economy issues, this is a step that is long past due," said Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, a key sponsor of the bill.

The Senate Commerce Committee also approved an amendment that would prohibit price increases for gasoline during national emergencies, such as those declared by the federal government after a devastating hurricane or flood.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/AUTOS/05/08/bc.autos.fuel.reut/index.html 
 

Trial tells story of couple who ripped off mob
Story Highlights• Thomas and Rosemarie Uva died suddenly on Christmas Eve, 1992
• Authorities say they were whacked by the mob
• The couple robbed wiseguys at mob hangouts, federal authorities say
• Their story is now at center of trial of Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia

NEW YORK (AP) -- Thomas and Rosemarie Uva were not exactly criminal geniuses.

The couple liked to rob Mafia-run social clubs in Little Italy and elsewhere around the city, which, as just about everyone knows, is a really good way to get killed.

They even had the audacity to force mobsters to drop their pants as they swiped their cash and jewelry and cleaned out their card games.

The holdups proved predictably hazardous: The Uvas got whacked on Christmas Eve 1992.

Fifteen years later, the story of the bandits who made the stupid mistake of stealing from the mob is playing out at the trial of the man accused of murdering them, a reputed Gambino crime family captain named Dominick "Skinny Dom" Pizzonia.

"There's virtually no greater insult than robbing the Gambino family where they socialized and hung out," federal prosecutor Joey Lipton said last month in opening statements in Brooklyn.

Prosecutors claim that John A. "Junior" Gotti, while acting boss of the Gambino family once led by his father, sanctioned the killings -- a charge he has denied.

Pizzonia's attorney, Joseph R. Corozzo Jr., told the jurors they would hear testimony that members of the Bonanno crime family were the real culprits.

Mafia 'turncoats'
Corozzo noted that the government was relying on an unsavory cast of Mafia turncoats to make their case, including former Gambino capo Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, who got his nickname as a child after a dog bit him in the face.

The case reflects a new willingness among several old-school gangsters -- some admitted killers like DiLeonardo -- to break the mob's vow of omerta, or silence, and help prosecute graying reputed gangsters like Pizzonia, 65, for crimes dating back decades.

In 2005, Bonanno boss Joseph "Big Joey" Massino stunned the underworld by becoming the first boss of one of New York's five Mafia families to flip.

Exactly why the Uvas gambled with their lives by robbing mobsters remains a mystery. But their former boss at a New York collection agency, Michael Schussel, offered some possible clues for resorting to making collections of a criminal kind.

Schussel testified that Thomas was a Mafia aficionado who asked for days off to attend the trial of the elder John Gotti, the Gambino don who died behind bars in 2002. The couple lived in Gotti's neighborhood in Ozone Park, Queens.

"He was obsessed with the mob," the witness said.

Authorities say the Uvas began their robbery spree in 1991, apparently believing that social clubs -- home to high-stakes card games -- would provide an easy mark.

Rosemarie, 31, took the wheel of the getaway car and Thomas, 28, armed with an Uzi submachine gun, stripped patrons of their money and jewelry and made the men drop their pants. The couple became known on the street as Bonnie and Clyde.

Fainting spell
The moonlighting was stressful: The day after one of the holdups made headlines, Rosemarie showed up for work looking pale and fainted to the floor, her ex-employer said.

By the time the Uvas had hit his Cafe Liberty in Queens a second time, Pizzonia had tired of their act, DiLeonardo testified.

Pizzonia "was very angry, as everybody else was, that these guys had the nerve to go around robbing clubs, like committing suicide," DiLeonardo said. A plan was hatched to track down the couple by getting their license plate number, he said.

On the morning of December 24, they were sitting in their Mercury Topaz at an intersection in Queens when they were each shot three times in the back of the head. The car rolled through the intersection and collided with another vehicle before it stopped; police officers found a stash of jewelry with the bloody corpses.

The killers vanished as mob bosses argued behind the scenes over who should get credit, DiLeonardo said. During a sitdown with his Bonanno counterpart Massino, the younger Gotti set the record straight.

The Bonnie-and-Clyde hit, Gotti said, was "our trophy."

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/05/04/mob.case.ap/index.html 

A friend of mine who works with the Red Cross in FL says we need to increase our Coast Guard efforts in this arena so we can get illegals BEFORE they drown, etc. and therefore at least save their lives. What do you think?

Boat flips in shark-infested water; dozens missing
Story Highlights• U.S. Coast Guard: Survivors say 150 Haitian migrants on boat that capsized
• About 20 bodies found, some partially eaten by sharks, Coast Guard says
• Police boat from the Turks and Caicos Islands rescues 63 migrants
• Coast Guard helicopter searching for missing migrants


SOUTH DOCK, Turks and Caicos Islands (AP) -- A boat filled with Haitian migrants capsized Friday, flinging people into shark-infested waters.

Hours after the sailing vessel overturned in moonlit waters a half-mile (less than a kilometer) from shore, rescuers had recovered more than a dozen bodies -- some with savage bite wounds -- and were searching for about 60 missing people.

A Turks and Caicos police boat picked up 63 survivors, and a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter spotted 10 more clinging to the overturned vessel and guided in another boat to get them, said Petty Officer Third Class Barry Bena. The Coast Guard sent a cutter and a C-130 plane to join the search.

"We have 17 confirmed dead," a Turks and Caicos official told The Associated Press as bodies were being delivered to South Dock, the main commercial port of this British territory. "Five or six small boats of ours are out searching. The survivors are being fed."

The Coast Guard said its helicopter reported spotting about 20 dead. An AP reporter saw about a dozen bodies, some with missing feet and limbs.

It could become the worst disaster in years to hit Haitian migrants, who jam into boats to attempt the treacherous journey. Every year, Haitians by the hundreds set off in rickety boats hoping to escape poverty by sneaking into the U.S. The boat that overturned Friday was about 25 feet (7.6 meters) long and carried 150 people.

"When it's done that way it takes almost nothing for a disaster to occur," Bena said in a telephone interview from Miami. "A strong wind or a sea swell or people moving around can capsize a boat in an instant."

The Coast Guard said the migrant vessel capsized while being towed by a Turks and Caicos police boat at 4:30 a.m., but local authorities said the police boat arrived on the scene after the accident.

Survivors were taken to a detention center on Providenciales, the island that is the urban center of the Turks and Caicos and features an 18-hole golf course, resort hotels, bars and restaurants.

There is a sizable community of illegal Haitian immigrants on Providenciales, and it was not immediately clear if those aboard the boat were headed here or to the United States -- the more common destination.

The number of Haitians intercepted by the Coast Guard has increased recently, despite the restoration of democracy to Haiti last year with the election of President Rene Preval. Preval replaced an interim government that took over after a bloody rebellion overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004.

Preval has used the help of U.N. peacekeepers to crack down on gangs that were behind a kidnapping epidemic in the capital and is seeking foreign investment to help boost the economy. But the numbers of Haitians trying to reach the U.S. show that many people don't wish to wait while he tries to transform the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation.

This year, the Coast Guard has intercepted 909 Haitians, compared to 769 intercepted during all of 2006 and 1,828 in 2005. During turbulent 2004, 3,078 were interdicted.

Jean-Robert Lafortune, chairman of the Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition in Florida, said Haiti's economic struggles and its political instability are too much for many people.

He said Friday's tragedy underscored "one of the greatest fears that we always have in the community -- knowing that many of those refugees do not make it in their attempt to make the Florida shore."


Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/americas/05/04/haiti.capsize.ap/index.html