http://www.latimes.com/local/california ... story.htmlEnrique Marquez, who allegedly purchased the assault rifles used in the San Bernardino mass shooting, could face a variety of charges, including lying on his application to buy the guns and conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism, legal experts said.
Marquez, 24, legally purchased the rifles from an authorized gun dealer in 2011 and 2012, but there was no record of any transfer of the weapons from him to Syed Rizwan Farook or Farook's wife, Tashfeen Malik, according to federal sources familiar with the ongoing investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity. Farook and Malik killed 14 people and wounded many others during a Dec. 2 attack on a social services office.
Marquez told officials that Farook asked him to purchase the guns because Farook feared he would not pass a background check,
another government source said. That source said Marquez also divulged that Farook was planning a different attack in 2011 or 2012 but later abandoned it.
If Marquez knowingly bought the guns for Farook to use in an earlier attack, he could be charged with conspiracy to commit a terrorist act or conspiracy to commit murder, lawyers said. Either offense carries a potential life sentence.
"I think the guy is definitely facing some serious potential problems," said UC Hastings law professor Rory Little, a former federal prosecutor. "The idea that he is talking to them without a lawyer makes everybody gasp."Ismail Ramsey, another former federal prosecutor, said conspiracy can be charged if a suspect performed an overt act to carry out a crime, even if the crime was never committed. He cited the example of someone buying a ski mask to commit a bank robbery. Purchasing a ski mask is legal but buying it for a bank robbery could support a conspiracy charge, Ramsey said. "You can withdraw from a conspiracy before completion," said Ramsey, now a criminal defense lawyer in Berkeley, "and that could be a defense."
Little said conspiracy could be charged if Marquez knew about a plot that was real and assisted in it, but "not for hot air blown in the back of a barroom. Conspiracy allows you to reach things that didn't actually happen," Little said.
To prove someone withdrew from a conspiracy generally requires evidence that the person went to the authorities or prevented the plot from being carried out, he said. "Withdrawal is an incredibly hard defense to make," he said.
A charge of aiding and abetting is "another way to spread criminal liability to people who are tangentially involved in an offense," Little said. Investigators would have to prove that Marquez knew the guns would be used in the San Bernardino attack, a charge that law enforcement has not made in either public or private comments.
The most straightforward case against Marquez would probably center on violations of state and federal gun laws, experts said. Federal rules make it a crime to lie on any part of the registration paperwork required of gun buyers. As part of that law, gun buyers are prohibited from purchasing a gun with the intent of giving it to another person — a deceit known as a straw purchase or "lying and buying."
The violation, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, can be hard to prove, said William Vizzard, who worked for 27 years as an agent in the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
"The challenge is proving the person's state of mind. If he confesses that he intended to hand the weapons over, that's one thing," said Vizzard, now a criminal justice professor at Cal State Sacramento. "But if he's at all smart, he'll deny any intent to pass on the weapons. It's a pretty impenetrable defense."
Under California law, transferring the ownership of a firearm from one person to another must be conducted by a registered gun dealer. The dealer keeps possession of the weapon while the person wanting it undergoes a background check by state officials.
Giving or selling a firearm to another without going through such a process is a misdemeanor offense.
Gil Eisenberg, a San Francisco criminal defense lawyer, said Marquez made a "big mistake" by waiving his right to a lawyer.Eisenberg said Marquez could attempt to have any admissions thrown out on the grounds he was "mentally incapacitated." Marquez checked himself into a mental health facility after the shooting, "and then shortly after that he was interrogated."
"Was he competent?" asked Eisenberg. "If he was mentally incapacitated, he might not have understood he could leave."
Marquez, who could not be reached for comment, has not surfaced publicly since the Dec. 2 attack on the Inland Regional Center. On the weekend after the killings, the FBI searched the home on Tomlinson Avenue where Marquez lived with his parents. Farook used to live next door until he and his family moved to Redlands this year.
Before then, Farook and Marquez were often seen spending long afternoons tinkering on old cars in the driveway of Farook's home. After Marquez converted to Islam, Farook's religion, he prayed at a local mosque and married a member of Farook's extended family, a Russian emigre.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... stion.htmlWas The San Bernardino Massacre Really ISIS-Inspired?
A public pledge on Facebook and social media posts were supposed to be the smoking guns connecting ISIS to San Bernardino. But now, the director of the FBI has called that theory into question.
For nearly two weeks, the massacre in San Bernardino has been characterized in the press and by government officials as an ISIS—or, at least, ISIS-inspired—attack in which social media figured prominently in the shooters’ radicalization and planning. On Wednesday, FBI Director James Comey raised major doubts about that characterization when he told reporters that that the husband and wife who killed 14 people in San Bernardino hadn’t posted to social media about radical jihad. That significantly altered the public understanding of how the couple plotted their rampage and what might have been done to stop them.
Previously, anonymous federal officials told journalists that Tashfeen Malik, the wife of Syed Farook, had posted allegiance to ISIS via a Facebook page at the time of the attack. And news reports have focused on Malik’s use of social media to express her jihadist views. That Facebook post in particular, which the FBI has never publicly confirmed, became the strongest evidence of a possible link between the attackers and the militant group and it raised questions about whether ISIS had ordered the couple to attack or merely inspired them to carry out what became the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001.
But Comey told reporters during a press conference at the New York Police Department that reports of public social media posts were incorrect, and that the FBI has so far only found that the shooters were communicating via private messages, which law enforcement agencies would have been unable to see without a warrant.
“These communications are private direct messages, not social media messages,” Comey said. The FBI has searched back to late 2013, Comey said, when the couple were in touch electronically but hadn’t yet met in person. Farook was living in California, and Malik was living in Pakistan. The shooters were “showing signs in that communication of their joint commitment to jihad and to martyrdom.”
But, Comey added, “So far in this investigation, we have found no evidence of posting on social media by either of them at that period of time and thereafter reflecting their commitment to jihad or to martyrdom. I’ve seen some reporting on that and that’s a garble. The investigation continues but we have not found that kind of thing.”
An FBI spokesperson later clarified Comey’s remarks to say the director was only speaking about events before the shooting. Comey didn’t specify which reports had misstated the facts of the case.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... story.htmlBurguan was there quickly, and set up a command post in a bus outside the Inland Regional Center. As officers searched for gunmen, he realized he and his men were way too close and decided to pull back to a safer position.
“I was told there was everything from two shooters, two shooters plus a getaway driver, three shooters, three shooters plus a getaway driver,” he said. “My original description was two to three white males.”
He addressed the persistent rumor that there was a third shooter, saying it was not true and that it reflected the chaos of the moment and the shaky nature of witness testimony in an emergency.
Why would Farook shoot up the office party?
“It defies logic,” Burguan said, but added, “In most mass-shooting events, mass shooters go into places that they’re familiar with.”
The FBI is running the investigation now, and Burguan said he doesn’t know whether there was a larger conspiracy. But in general, he said, “there’s always people that know. There’s always people that know who the bad guys are.” Of the possibility that Farook and Malik kept their terrorist inclinations secret, he said, “I find it hard to believe that they could completely lead two separate lives in that regard.”
His people trained for active-shooter events. They handled the case as they would any other mass shooting. The motivation, Burguan suggested, doesn’t really change anything.
“It would be just as tragic and just as horrific had it turned out to be an extreme case of workplace violence,” he said. “We just live in that day and age now.”
http://www.pe.com/articles/news-789502- ... ation.htmlSAN BERNARDINO SHOOTING: News coverage has public asking 'Who said that?'
Inland residents who have followed media coverage of the mass shooting in San Bernardino can be excused for feeling whipsawed by information that has been frightening, confusing, and, sometimes, anonymous.
There have been news reports about Internet loans, alleged plans for previous attacks, bomb-building, and lots of material about the alleged actions of a Riverside man who was a friend and neighbor of one of the two shooters – often attributed to unnamed sources. Use of anonymous sources, which should be a journalist’s last resort, is now overused and a cause for skepticism among the public, said Vince Gonzales, a professor of professional practice at USC-Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
“There is a pressure to get new details, and I have watched it over the years, the willingness to accept anonymous sources – in San Bernardino, in Oklahoma City, in 9-11,” he said by phone. “But you fail in your journalism job if you rely too heavily on unnamed sources.”
People who watch and read the news need to weigh the information they are getting from news leaks, he said. Some unnamed sources are “selfless whistle-blowers,” he said, but most are trying to get journalists to “do their dirty work.”
“If it’s based 100 percent on a faceless, nameless source, it may be true, but you should wait and see,” he said.
In the more than two weeks since 14 people died and 22 were injured when a couple identified as Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik , 29, opened fire on San Bernardino County health workers, people have heard anonymously-attributed reports that:
�• Nothing linked to the case was recovered by FBI and San Bernardino County Sheriff’s divers after days searching the bottom of Lake Seccombe in San Bernardino.
�• That the object of the divers’ search was a thumb drive or computer hard drive.
�• Enrique Marquez, identified by federal authorities as the Riverside man who legally bought the two rifles used by Farook and Malik, also made pipe bombs with Farook.
�• Marquez is cooperating in interviews with the FBI.
�• Marquez faces charges.
�• Farook and Malik also planned to attack either a local school or college.
Use of unnamed sources in a 24-hour news cycle is hardly new, but it has become especially prolific since the Dec. 2 shooting.
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller has declined to comment on news reports about the case. No charges had been filed, and the FBI has not described the status of anyone who might be involved in their investigation. “Reporters need information from somewhere. When you have a big story like this one, every reporter is going to be tapping into his or her sources as much as possible – public safety and government,” said Charlotte Grimes, professor emerita of newspaper and online journalism at Syracuse University.
Grimes’ background includes international reporting and a dozen years in Washington for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“The FBI is communicating back to their bosses in D.C., and that is one way the reporters tap in to find out,” she said. “The hard part is to verify anything” in an investigation where information can change from day to day, she said.
“So little is actually known and that is where you get the speculation.”
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015 ... /77385610/WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson activated the National Terrorism Advisory System for the first time Wednesday, warning the public of "self-radicalized actors who could strike with little or no notice."
The bulletin, which marks the addition of a new level of public warning to the system, will be in effect for the next six months, or until events dictate otherwise, Johnson said.
The Department of Homeland Security is "especially concerned that terrorist-inspired individuals and homegrown violent extremists may be encouraged or inspired to target public events or places," the bulletin stated.
"As we saw in the recent attacks in San Bernardino and Paris, terrorists will consider a diverse and wide selection of targets for attacks,'' the DHS notice said.
There was no specific information, however, about a pending attack, Johnson said.
...
In the bulletin issued Wednesday, the public was urged to report suspicious activity to authorities and offered guidance for how community leaders, co-workers and family members may recognize "signs of potential radicalization to violence.''
With much of the country in the midst of holiday celebrations, the notice also said that "more stringent security should also be anticipated at public places and events.''
"This may include a heavy police presence, additional restrictions and searches on bags and the use of screening technologies,'' the bulletin stated.
Johnson signaled the system change as recently as last week, saying that the recent attacks illustrated "a new phase in the global terrorist threat'' that includes both terrorist-directed assaults and those inspired by organizations that involve singer attackers or small groups who can often evade law enforcement detection.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2 ... ifying-dayI've done my best not to pay too much attention to the San Bernardino shooters. They weren't part of ISIS, or recruited by ISIS, or associated in any way with organized terrorism. They were apparently inspired by ISIS, but mass killers are inspired by lots of things. There's just nothing very unusual here. The plain truth is that although this case is an immense tragedy, it really isn't that interesting.
Still, there's the question of how they stayed under the radar so long. Why were they allowed in the country? Did the Department of Homeland Security or anyone else check out Syed Farook's new wife? I lost interest in this, too, when Tashfeen Malik's famous social-media dedication to jihad turned out to be little more than a few private Facebook messages written in Urdu. It's hardly surprising that was missed. But now it appears there was even less to miss:
I guess we'll have to wait to see how this plays out, but from where I sit it sure looks like there's a lot less here than meets the eye. There was no plot by ISIS. There was no gigantic breakdown in security. There's no special reason to suddenly decide that all our lives are in danger from terrorism. There was just a pair of troubled youngsters who were inspired by the wrong people and went on a killing spree. Add them to the ever-growing list.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... ey/420771/As Comey noted on Monday, the FBI does not—and, he implicitly argued, should not—comb through direct communications that American citizens send unless there’s probable cause to be doing so. It’s not clear whether metadata on this sort of message would have been swept up in the NSA’s collection of information. After widespread backlash to the revelations provided by Edward Snowden about mass surveillance, there’s been a turn toward a demand for greater surveillance since the San Bernardino attacks, both in public polling and by politicians.
The messages were also, Comey said, general in nature—about a commitment to jihad, rather than about specific plots.
Comey’s comments leave some important questions unanswered. The way that officials talk about internet tools is often unusual or somewhat opaque. “These communications are private direct messages, not social-media messages,” he said. Comey offered no indication he was contradicting news reports of Malik’s Facebook pledge of allegiance, though his comments could be read to do so.
by stickdog99 » Wed Dec 16, 2015 6:23 pm 
