City-Journal.org

The drug cartels extend their corrupting influence northward.

Beheadings and amputations. Iraqi-style brutality, bribery, extortion, kidnapping, and murder. More than 7,200 dead-almost double last year's tally-in shoot-outs between federales and often better-armed drug cartels. This is modern Mexico, whose president, Felipe Calderón, has been struggling since 2006 to wrest his country from the grip of four powerful cartels and their estimated 100,000 foot soldiers.

But chillingly, there are signs that one of the worst features of Mexico's war on drugs-law enforcement officials on the take from drug lords-is becoming an American problem as well. Most press accounts focus on the drug-related violence that has migrated north into the United States.

Religious authorities utilized the word 'heretic' in the 16^th century to silence or 'slap down' anyone that brought facts, figures and new concepts to the public.  If a new scientific concept contradicted the Catholic Church, they placed the scoundrel under house arrest-such as Galileo for proving the Earth revolved around the sun.

CBP Creates Electronic Reading Room to Increase Public Access to Documents

Washington - U.S. Customs and Border Protection today launched improvements in Web-based technology designed to increase public access to agency records and documents.

The upgraded CBP Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room will feature records and documents formerly only available through FOIA request. Documents and records responding to certain FOIA requests are now available at foia.cbp.gov. (FOIA Reading Room )

"CBP is striving to boost agency transparency and accountability, while promoting efficiency and effectiveness through the use of technology," said Acting Commissioner Jayson P. Ahern.

El Universal (Mexico City) 10/20/09

Violence crosses into the U.S. without a visa

Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana was murdered with eight .45 caliber shots the night of Friday, May 15, in a residence to the northeast of El Paso, Texas. The 37 year old man was the presumed leader of the Juarez cartel and a DEA informant. The killer was identified by police as Michael Jackson Apodaca, 18 years old, a member of the 111th Air Artillery Defense Brigade of the United States Army. Apodaca was asked to kill him. A rival organization, known as La Compania [The Company] contracted him and two other subjects to square away a debt.

Four months later, the night of Thursday, September 3rd, another supposed drug trafficker was taken out of his domicile violently, in a suburb of that same city.