In “Breach of Trust: FBI Wants It Both Ways,” the editorial board of UC Irvine's New University student newspaper takes issue with the indictment of a Muslim resident of Tustin and the use of a controversial government informant. (Background is here and here.) The case is bound to have a chilling effect, according to the editorial.
This incident is alarming to the American Muslim community in Orange
County, who had been working hard to establish and maintain good
relations with the FBI, according to the Muslim Public Affairs Council
(MPAC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and sets
the already tender relationship back to square one. So was sending in
an undercover informant (and possibly more) to spy on community members
and instigate violent rhetoric in mosques while supposedly working
diligently to develop a “partnership” with that same community on the
surface really the best approach? We beg to differ.
The
editorial expresses the board's problems with the informant's criminal past,
the methods for gathering information and what little appears to have been gained by spying on mosques. “The FBI should redouble efforts to maintain
honest communication
with the affected Muslim community,” writes the board, which includes
this quote from MPAC senior advisor Maher Hathout: “People cannot be suspects and partners at the same time.”
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Bobby Shriver, a Santa Monica city councilman and former California State Park and Recreation Commission chairman (until his brother-in-law Arnold Schwarzenegger fired him), and Joel
Reynolds, a Natural Resources Defense
Council senior attorney, penned “O.C.'s Road Test: Rejection of the Foothill South Toll Road is a Chance for a New Path” in today's LA Times.
It
was a bad idea that deserved to die: the six-lane Foothill South toll
road through a popular Orange County/San Diego County state park. It
violated the principle that parkland is permanently protected. The
California State Park and Recreation Commission and the California
Coastal Commission rejected the toll road through San Onofre State
Beach — no surprise there. But when the Bush administration also said
no, the project's fate was all but sealed.
Everyone seems to
have gotten that message except the Orange County Transportation
Corridor Agencies, “which dreamed up Foothill South and hasn't yet
publicly abandoned it.” The problem, the authors write, is the TCA was
chartered in 1986 to do one thing: build toll roads. But that may not always be the right solution, and the TCA has pusued its mission with scant independent oversight or regard for environmental
consequences. And it has not worked. Projected ridership has
never materialized, a $1.1-billion federal loan bailout from taxpayers
is now being sought and traffic congestion has only increased since 1986.
There is a better way, according to Shriver and Reynolds.
What
we need is a serious examination of alternatives beyond toll roads,
especially options other than new roads through open space and
parkland. Possibilities include rapid transit or carpool toll lanes,
added to existing roadways, with congestion-sensitive pricing or
similar strategies that take demand into consideration.
They call on
the Legislature to expand the TCA's mandate to address the best traffic solutions, beyond simply building toll roads, and to have the agency answer to a
comprehensive state transportation agency, in consultation with
affected regional agencies. “We need
mobility, and we need parkland,” they write. “And we can have both if
only we refuse to settle for less.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.