Now that no match was found between the DNA sample taken from John Mark Karr and that of the killer of six year old JonBenet Ramsey, I wish someone in the media would ask why it was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in Thailand who arrested Karr in Bangkok on August 17.
CNN, August 17, 2006:
The 41-year-old American was being held at a Bangkok immigration detention center. He faces charges in the United States of first-degree murder, kidnapping and sexual assault on a child, said Ann Hurst, a Department of Homeland Security attache in Bangkok.
Asia Times, August 19, 2006:
The young girl’s unresolved murder nearly a decade ago set off a wild media frenzy in the US. Homeland Security officials and Thai police seized Karr in his modest Bangkok apartment on Wednesday afternoon, hours after a judge in the US state of Colorado, where the girl died in 1996, issued an arrest warrant for murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault in connection with JonBenet’s death.
“Upon investigation, we were able to identify that subject, and that is John Mark Karr,” Ann Hurst, Homeland Security attache at the US Embassy, said at Bangkok’s Department of Immigration Detention Center on Thursday…
The US Department of Homeland Security, Interpol and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation have since all coordinated closely with Thai tourism and law-enforcement agencies to investigate and arrest suspected sex offenders.
So many questions.
Why is the Department of Homeland Security involved in tracking sex crimes in the first place? Doesn’t this gargantuan bureaucracy have enough to do simply tracking terrorists?
As heinous as these overseas underage sex havens are, investigating them has no relevance either to the “homeland” or the “security” of the United States.
This over-reaching by DHS also puts in its current predicament: By arresting John Mark Karr, a man who apparently suffers from a multitude of mental health problems, the department has added another big public screw-up to its resume of failures.
Compounding all this is the timing of Karr’s arrest. A cynic might wonder if DHS made the arrest to change the media’s focus from another big story that the Bush Administration knew it would be facing at the end of August, the anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
It is impossible to say what story the cable newsers would have focused on 24/7 since August 17 had Karr not been arrested, but a case could certainly have been made that more time would have been devoted to the incompetence and negligence of President Bush — and DHS’s FEMA operatives — in the wake of Katrina.
I think the “black eye” is squarely on the Boulder, CO D.A., who rushed this case before they had their ducks in a row.
About Homeland Security, can anyone explain why they inserted themselves in what was a local law enforcement matter and escorted Karr back to the USA?