[Guest post by DRJ]
Quin Hillyer at the Washington Times passes along a notice from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that the Washington Post plans to publish a “compendium of government agencies and contractors allegedly conducting Top Secret work,” including the type of work performed and the location of facilities. The publication may be a series of reports beginning Monday.
— DRJ
[Guest post by DRJ]
Yesterday a car bomb in downtown Juarez ambushed and killed 2 federal police officers, 1 local police officer and injured 7 federal police officers and 1 camera newsman. Reports say this is the first time Mexican law enforcement has been successfully targeted by a car bomb.
It’s just a matter of time before the violence moves across the border, although it’s already being felt in the border communities. For instance, Juarez victims may be buried in Texas cemeteries — a fact that brings an increased threat of violence to American communities and citizens. As a result, cemetery officials have started enforcing a rule that only people who lived in town or had a relative there could be buried in the Fort Hancock Cemetery. Of course, as we learned in the Ramos/Compean trial, most Mexican families also have relatives living in Texas, New Mexico or Arizona.
Juarez isn’t the only place seeing increased violence. Near McAllen, Texas, the Mexican city of Reynosa was recently the site of a gun battle. Across the Rio Grande, the poor farming communities in the valley of Mexico have seen more than 75 people killed in the past year — a per capita rate 30 times higher than the death rate in New Orleans, where the 2009 death rate is the highest in America, and the ripple effect is pervasive. Read the whole thing and then tell me why we don’t need a massive fence … or two.
H/T A Friend.
— DRJ
UPDATE: In an El Paso Times‘ article, the Mayor of Juarez provided more details today about yesterday’s car bomb terrorist attack on the police. Commenter ng4779 adds a link to a KVIA report that has video of the attack.
[Posted by Karl]
While searching for something else, I stumbled upon Conor Friedersdorf’s response to my post on Dave Weigel’s departure from the WaPo over his writings on the now-defunct JournoList. Although folks have moved on from the story, Friedersdorf’s piece is worth a reply as an entry point to a broader discussion of ethics in journalism.
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