Some Reallly Stupid Cops in This Police Killing
some reallly stupid cops in this police killing.
stupid, stupid, stupid ----- About 3 a.m., police saw an opportunity to go inside the home. Wohletz had left the gun on his patio, which overlooks the complex's swimming pool. SWAT team members used charges to blast open the door. When Wohletz heard them enter he dashed to where he had left his firearm.
and i guess the cops will paint this guy as a really evil person almost as bad as bin laden. after all the guy was wanted by the feds for the henious crime of looking at dirty pictures
Standoff ends in fatal shooting
Man in Tempe allegedly linked to child-porn ring
Katie Nelson
The ArizonaRepublic
Jun. 10, 2005 12:00 AM
A Tempe man allegedly linked to an international child-pornography ring called 911, then held police at bay for seven hours before being shot and killed early Thursday.
Police say the man fired at least twice from his apartment balcony and some apartments remained evacuated throughout the overnight ordeal.
Russell Wohletz, 43, called police about 8 p.m. Wednesday, threatening to kill himself in his apartment.
When police responded to the Elliot's Crossing complex at 7250 S. Kyrene Road, he continually waved a gun and pointed it at his head, police said.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials had been searching for Wohletz last week with a felony warrant for his arrest, police said.
He was wanted for sexual exploitation of a minor for allegedly buying child pornography from overseas, said Sgt. Dan Masters, Tempe police spokesman.
Officials had yet to serve the warrant, Masters said, but Wohletz apparently knew he was wanted. He listed it among reasons he gave Tempe negotiators for wanting to kill himself. Wohletz also was being evicted from his apartment and believed his job as an America West Airlines reservation-taker was in jeopardy, Masters said.
Masters said the shooting happened like this:
SWAT team negotiators talked to Wohletz late into the night on his cellphone until its battery ran out. To continue talks, police provided him with another phone. During the discussions with negotiators, Wohletz paced his second-story apartment. He carried a handgun and at least twice fired shots into the air from his balcony.
About 3 a.m., police saw an opportunity to go inside the home. Wohletz had left the gun on his patio, which overlooks the complex's swimming pool. SWAT team members used charges to blast open the door. When Wohletz heard them enter he dashed to where he had left his firearm.
Gun in hand, he pointed the weapon at police. Two officers fired. Right after, Wohletz shot himself in the head.
Thursday, crime scene tape was still woven throughout the apartment building sidewalks. Two bullet holes were visible from the outside on the man's apartment walls.
Wanted man shot, dies
in police confrontation
TEMPE - A Tempe man who held off police for seven hours was shot and killed early Thursday.
Russell Wohletz, 43, called police about 8 p.m. Wednesday, threatening suicide. When police arrived at his complex in the 7200 block of South Kyrene Road, he continually waved a gun in the air and pointed it at his head, police said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had been searching for Wohletz since last week with a felony warrant, police said.
He was wanted in the sexual exploitation of a minor by buying child pornography from overseas, said Sgt. Dan Masters, Tempe police spokesman.
About 3 a.m., police used charges to blast open the door. When Wohletz heard them enter, he pointed the weapon at police. Two officers fired. Right after, Wohletz shot himself in the head.
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damn they can veriy your social security number on line. the employeer first has to resister. for that see:
(note that is https, not http. the s is for a secure connection)
Few firms use migrant ID service
Daniel González
The ArizonaRepublic
Jun. 11, 2005 12:00 AM
As political pressure mounts for stricter enforcement of laws against hiring undocumented workers, some employers are turning to a little-known federal program that allows them to weed out workers who seek jobs using fake documents.
The 8-year-old program, which in December was expanded to all 50 states, allows employers to verify workers' employment eligibility by logging onto a government Web site and checking their documents against Social Security and immigration databases.
The program is intended to fix one of the biggest problems the government faces in trying to crack down on illegal immigration: the prolific use of counterfeit documents by undocumented workers.
"I have an answer back within a minute," said Martin Thompson, vice president for human resources at Bar-S Foods Co., a Phoenix-based meat-processing company that has participated in the program since 1998.
So far, however, Thompson's company is in the minority. Few employers are taking advantage of the program, mostly because it is voluntary but also because it has not been well-publicized.
Nationwide, just 4,385 employers are participating, said Chris Bentley, spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which oversees the Basic Pilot Employment Verification Program. That is just a fraction of the 5.7 million companies counted by the U.S. census in 2002, the most recent data available.
In Arizona, 101 employers have enrolled of 96,000 companies counted by the census.
"I'm not sure most employers even know about this program," said Farrell Quinlan, spokesman for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce.
Most employers would be relieved to have a system that allowed them to easily verify a worker's eligibility, Quinlan said.
He pointed out that the current system places employers in a Catch-22 between unwittingly hiring undocumented workers using fake documents and opening themselves to discrimination charges by turning away immigrant workers whom they suspect are using fake documents.
The national debate heating up over immigration reform also may be hurting participation in the program, Quinlan said.
Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., recently introduced a bill calling for a guest-worker program that would include a biometric card to allow employers to verify a worker's employment eligibility.
"Until there is better understanding of what is effective and what is available, participation will remain below what one might want," Quinlan said.
Congress created the program in 1997, rolling it out first in California, Florida, Illinois, Texas and New York, states with the highest numbers of undocumented immigrants, Bentley said.
Not mandatory
In 1999, Congress expanded the program to Nebraska at the request of the state's meatpacking industry, and then to all 50 states, Bentley said.
Participating in the program puts employers at a competitive disadvantage with companies that continue to hire undocumented workers, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., research organization that favors tighter limits on immigration. Unless it's mandatory, participation will remain low, he said.
"If it's applied to everyone, all the businesses would be on an even playing field," Krikorian said.
Congress, however, has avoided making the program mandatory under pressure from business interests, he said.
"That's the real problem with this," said Thompson, of Bar-S. "If a person is illegal and doesn't have the proper documents, then they just go down the road to the next employer."
Although based in Phoenix, Bar-S was eligible to participate early on because some of its 1,500 workers are in California and Texas.
The program is helping Bar-S weed out undocumented workers, Thompson said. Before a new employee is hired, he or she is asked to provide a Social Security number and other documents, just like in the past. But now, that information is plugged into a computer to see if it matches federal databases.
If the documentation is rejected, Bar-S tells the worker, who is then given a chance to correct any mistakes. Undocumented workers usually don't come back, Thompson said.
Thompson said word has gotten out that the company is using the program. As a result, fewer undocumented workers are applying for jobs at Bar-S.
"Less than 8 percent of the time we will find someone where the computer kicks them back," down from 30 percent when the company first began using the program in 1998, he said.
By participating, the company hopes to avoid potential audits by federal immigration inspectors, which can be costly, he said.
A 1986 law passed by Congress makes it illegal for employers to knowingly hire undocumented workers and requires them to check the work-eligibility documents of all new employees.
A 'mockery'
But the law does not require employers to verify whether the documents are real. As long as the documents appear to be legitimate, then the employer has met his or her responsibility under the law, said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in Laguna Niguel, Calif.
Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind., told a House subcommittee in May that the easy availability of fake documents has made a "mockery" of the law.
"Fake documents are produced by the millions and can be obtained cheaply," Hostettler said.
The existing system, he said, benefits unscrupulous employers by allowing them to look the other way and accept documents they know are fake. At the same time, it harms businesses that want to follow the law but end up having to accept documents they know are likely bogus to protect themselves against discrimination complaints.
On 16th Street and Roosevelt Street in Phoenix and on many other Valley street corners, fake Social Security and permanent residency cards can be bought for as little as $70 a pair from men hawking micas, Spanish slang for bogus documents.
There were about 7 million undocumented workers in the United States last year, according to the PewHispanicCenter, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington, D.C.
A 2004 study by the Center for Immigration Studies said about 55 percent of them were hired using bogus documents with fabricated Social Security numbers or stolen numbers.
On a recent morning, Roy Jares illustrated the conundrum employers face by reaching into his desk and pulling out a Social Security card and a Resident Alien card belonging to a newly hired employee.
Jares is president and owner of Steel Masters Inc., a Phoenix company that manufactures stairs and railings for apartment complexes. He employs 22 workers, mostly Latino immigrants.
Jares said it was impossible for him to tell whether the documents were real.
"How do I know whether I am hiring illegal immigrants?" Jares asked, waving the cards in the air. "I can't tell you if these documents are real or not. So if immigration comes to my office, how am I going to know?"
Jares said he had never heard of the program to verify a worker's employment eligibility.
Stricter enforcement
Meanwhile, there is a growing clamor to focus more enforcement efforts on employers, not just undocumented workers.
From 1995 to 2003, the number of businesses fined for immigration violations declined to 124 from 909.
In April, a Democratic state lawmaker called for provisions that would have suspended the business licenses of employers in Arizona who knowingly hired undocumented immigrants.
The provisions, which opponents killed, were in response to several Republican-sponsored bills denying certain state benefits to undocumented immigrants.
"This is a supply-and-demand issue," said state Sen. Bill Brotherton of Phoenix, who introduced the provisions. But most efforts to crack down on illegal immigration focus on undocumented immigrants, not the employers who hire them, he said.
In April, Arizona GOP Sen. Jon Kyl also called for stricter enforcement of laws against hiring undocumented workers saying, "Employers pretend that they're not employing illegal immigrants, but they know they are. . . . And the government pretends to enforce the law. But it knows that the documents in many cases are counterfeit."
Reach the reporter at (602) 444-8312.
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Public's approval of Bush, Congress hitting new lows
Will Lester
Associated Press
Jun. 11, 2005 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - When it comes to public approval, President Bush and Congress are playing "how low can you go."
Bush's approval mark is 43 percent, while Congress checks in at 31 percent, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll says. Both are the lowest levels yet for the survey, started in December 2003.
"There's a bad mood in the country, people are out of sorts," said Charles Jones, a presidential scholar and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Iraq news is daily bad news."
The public also is showing concerns about the direction of the country as the war in Iraq drags on. Only about one-third of adults, 35 percent, said they thought the country was headed in the right direction. Forty-one percent said they supported Bush's handling of the war in Iraq.
Gail Thomas, an independent who leans Democratic from Prattville, Ala., said the war in Iraq was a distraction after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack ordered by Osama bin Laden.
"They're not going after the one who did it," said Thomas. "They were too anxious to go after Saddam Hussein. All they're doing is getting our guys killed."
Car bombings and attacks by insurgents killed 80 U.S. troops and more than 700 Iraqis last month. Pentagon officials acknowledge the level of violence is about the same as a year ago, when they were forced to scrap a plan to substantially reduce the U.S. troop presence in Iraq.
While Bush has gotten generally low scores for his handling of domestic issues for many months, Americans have been more supportive of his foreign policy. Not anymore.
The poll conducted for AP by Ipsos found 45 percent support Bush's foreign policy, down from 52 percent in March.
David Fultz, a Republican from Venice, Fla., is among those who are sticking with the president.
"In terms of where we're going in the future, President Bush is laying out a plan," said Fultz.
Bush's popularity reached its zenith shortly after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when various polls found nearly 90 percent approved of the job he was doing. It was close to 80 percent when Ipsos started tracking attitudes about Bush at the start of 2002, and was just over 50 percent when the AP-Ipsos poll was started in December 2003.
Approval for Congress has dipped from the 40s early this year into the low 30s now. A majority of Republicans and Democrats said they don't approve of Congress.
Support for Bush's handling of domestic issues remained in the high 30s and low 40s in the latest AP-Ipsos poll.
Thirty-seven percent support Bush's handling of Social Security, while 59 percent disapprove. Those numbers haven't budged after more than four months of the president traveling the country to sell his plan to create private accounts in Social Security. Support for his handling of the economy was at 43 percent.
The AP-Ipsos poll of 1,001 adults was taken June 6-8 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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can i say hello iraq goodbye vietnam one more time?
Decisive victory doubtful in Iraq
Military: Diplomacy is only path to peace
Bryan Bender
Boston Globe
Jun. 11, 2005 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - Military operations in Iraq have not succeeded in weakening the insurgency, and Iraq's government, with U.S. support, is now seeking a political reconciliation among the nation's ethnic and tribal factions as the only viable route to stability, according to U.S. military officials and private specialists.
Two years after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, the Iraq conflict has evolved into a classic guerrilla war, they argue. Outbreaks of fighting are followed by periods of relative calm and soon thereafter by a return to rampant violence. Underscoring the strength of the insurgency, militants killed five U.S. Marines in a roadside bombing and authorities found 21 bodies on Friday near the Syrian border, where American and Iraqi troops conducted a major military operation in western Iraq.
Despite significant guerrilla setbacks and optimistic predictions by a host of American commanders earlier this year, the Sunni-backed insurgency remains as strong as ever, forcing U.S. officials and their Iraqi allies to seek a political solution to the bloodshed. Pentagon officials and current members of the military interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity.
''We are not going to win the unconditional surrender from the insurgents and have no choice but to somehow bring them into society," said retired Army Col. Paul Hughes, an Iraq war veteran who is now at the government-funded U.S. Institute for Peace. ''To think there will be one climactic military event to end this is foolish. Those who cling to that don't understand."
Indeed, recent comments to that effect by Vice President Dick Cheney, who said on May 31 that the insurgency was in its ''last throes," took many U.S. officials and analysts by surprise, Pentagon officials and others with extensive knowledge of the war said in a series of interviews. The available data, they said, simply do not support such a claim.