Atlanta – In Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County, his critics say, the otherwise innocent tableau of Spanish speakers hanging out in front of a convenience store is probable cause for a police officer to approach and ask for identification.
So, apparently, is cruising down the street, according to a suit filed in federal court in Phoenix. The suit’s Hispanic plaintiffs contend that Sheriff Arpaio is ignoring constitutional probable cause standards by targeting Latinos with traffic stops, during which they are asked about their immigration status.
On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Murray Snow heard arguments in the case, with the options of allowing the suit to go to trial, throwing the suit out, or declaring that Arpaio uses racial profiling in the enforcement of immigration laws. The judge is considering whether the acknowledged shredding of documents by the Sheriff’s Department would enable a judge or jury to infer that deputies targeted Latinos.
Four reasons why illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border has dropped
But the suit is just one of a growing mass of legal challenges confronting the maverick sheriff. Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice cited Arpaio for racially profiling Latinos through the Sheriff Department’s frequent “sweeps” of Hispanic neighborhoods in suburban Phoenix.
The death this week of a Hispanic inmate at a Maricopa County jailhouse following a scuffle with Arpaio's deputies is adding to the sheriff's troubles.
The Maricopa County lawsuit and others were bolstered by the Justice Department allegations of racial profiling. One concrete outcome this week of those allegations: 90 of Arpaio's deputies had to turn in federal badges that allowed them to carry out immigration work, including checking suspects' immigration status.
Both the DOJ report and the lawsuit heard Thursday focus on Arpaio's use of large-scale neighborhood “sweeps” where 1,500 people, mostly Hispanics, have been arrested in the last three years alone, with illegal immigrants accounting for 57 percent of those arrested. The DOJ's report, based on a three-year investigation, accused Arpaio's department of using military-style patrols to confront people based on “racially charged” citizen complaints about Latinos participating in what some call a ubiquitous "storefront culture."
The DOJ investigation identified other problems with Arpaio's definition of probable cause, noting that the Sheriff's Department has allegedly tried to silence critics by arresting them without cause. Moreover, the report said Latinos are up to 9 times more likely to be stopped than whites, with many of them arrested without “good cause.”
But legal experts say the allegations against Arpaio's department are hardly slam dunks. For one, state and federal courts tend to give police officers the benefit of the doubt when they're involved in street arrests. Moreover, Supreme Court precedents require very specific, provable allegations to determine constitutional overreach on the parts of police officers on the beat.
"In essence, you've got three Mexican-American men hanging out on the street, and the question is whether that's probable cause for police to believe something is up?" says Norm Pattis, a criminal defense lawyer in Connecticut. "The police officers are going to say, 'We observed three men in a known narcotics area, we suspected foul play, and we went to talk to them.' "
Moreover, many Americans, including presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, consider Arpaio a “hero” for doing the job critics claim US immigration authorities won't do. Others see the DOJ allegations against Arpaio as a politicized attack from the Justice Department, intended to bolster President Obama's relationship with Hispanic voters.
Arpaio “takes great pains to make sure that he doesn't discriminate against people based on race,” Rep. Steve King (R) of Iowa, vice-chairman of the House Immigration subcommittee, said this week. “It's not a profiling operation going on that I can see.”
Besides Thursday’s court hearing in Phoenix, another federal judge will hear the DOJ's case against Arpaio unless he decides by Jan. 4 to work out a settlement on the racial profiling charges. A federal grand jury has also been investigating whether Arpaio and his deputies abuse their power.
Four reasons why illegal immigration across the US-Mexico border has dropped
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NEW YORK – When New York undercover officers and informants were infiltrating a mosque in Queens in 2006, they failed to notice the increasingly radical sentiments of a young man who prayed there. Police also kept tabs on a Muslim student group at Queens College, but missed a member's growing anti-Americanism.
Those two men, Najibullah Zazi at the mosque and Adis Medunjanin at the school, would go on to be accused of plotting a subway bombing that officials have called the most serious terrorist threat to the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
Ever since The Associated Press began revealing New York Police Department spying programs on mosques, student groups, Muslim businesses and communities, those activities have been stoutly defended by police and supporters as having foiled a list of planned attacks.
Recently, for instance, when three members of Congress suggested an inquiry into those programs, Republican Rep. Peter King of New York rallied to the NYPD's defense.
"Under Commissioner Ray Kelly's leadership, at least 14 attacks by Islamic terrorists have been prevented by the NYPD," King said.
But a closer review of the cases reveals a more complicated story.
The list cited by King includes plans that may never have existed as well as plots the NYPD had little or no hand in disrupting. According to a review of public documents, materials obtained by the AP and interviews with dozens of city and federal officials, the most controversial NYPD spying programs produced mixed results. The officials interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly.
There indeed have been successes, such as the 2004 plot uncovered by the NYPD to bomb the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan.
And there have been failures, like Zazi and Medunjanin, who were exactly the kind of people police intended to spot when they developed the spying programs.
And there were other efforts that compiled data on innocent people but produced no meaningful results at all.
Kelly has spent hundreds of millions of dollars transforming the department into one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. In a city that still hurts from 9/11 and still sees a hole in the ground near where the World Trade Center stood, people have had little interest in questioning whether that effort has been effective. City lawmakers, for instance, learned about many of the department's secretive programs from the AP.
For New Yorkers, the result is that fear of another terrorist attack is used to justify spying on entire neighborhoods. And the absence of another attack is held up as evidence that it works.
___
Some of the NYPD intelligence programs were born out of fear and desperation. After 9/11, police reached for whatever might work.
One idea was to use informants to trawl local mosques and monitor imams to watch for signs of radicalization. Though the NYPD denies the term exists, several former officials said the informants were known as "mosque crawlers." They would listen in mosques and report back to their handlers.
It was the CIA that first developed that idea overseas and came up with the name. The NYPD program was a version of that effort, according to former CIA officials who were familiar with it. Like many interviewed about the NYPD, they insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss intelligence programs.
Former senior CIA officials said the mosque crawlers were ineffective.
In New York, however, the program persisted. With help from the mosque crawlers and secret NYPD squads, documents show, police intelligence analysts scrutinized every mosque in and around the city and infiltrated dozens. The monitoring of imams included even those who worked closely with police and preached against violence.

These days, however, fewer imams are under investigation, an official said.

The NYPD has pledged to do all it can to prevent terrorism. So when a new intelligence program is conceived, several current and former officials said, there is little discussion of its prospects for success.

NYPD intelligence chief David Cohen, a former top CIA official, was asked about that in September 2005 during a deposition in a lawsuit over the department's policy of randomly searching the bags of subway riders. Civil rights lawyers asked how police knew whether a program deterred terrorism.

"If it works against them, then it works for us," Cohen replied. "That is deterrent to one degree or other."

Cohen was asked, How do you know it works? Is there some police methodology?

"I never bothered to look," Cohen said. "It doesn't exist, as far as I could tell."

At times, police officials themselves have raised concerns about intelligence-gathering programs. In about 2008, for instance, police began monitoring everyone in the city who legally changed names. Anyone who might be a Muslim convert or appeared to be Americanizing his or her name was investigated and personal information was put into police databases.

Current and former officials say it produced no results. Police still receive the list of names of people who change their names, court officials said. But one official said the program is on hold while its effectiveness is evaluated.

Kelly has said the NYPD does not trawl neighborhoods and instead only pursues leads. But those leads can be ambiguous, officials say, and can be used to justify widespread surveillance programs.

For example, the NYPD began the "Moroccan Initiative," a secret program that chronicled Moroccan neighborhoods, after suicide bombings killed 45 people in the Moroccan city of Casablanca in 2003, and after Moroccan terrorists were linked to the 2005 train bombing in Madrid. New York police put people, including U.S. citizens, under surveillance and catalogued where they ate, worked and prayed.

"What we were doing is following leads," Kelly told City Council members during an October hearing when asked about that program. "The Moroccan issue that was mentioned had to do with a specific investigation."

But officials involved in the program said there was no specific threat to New York from Moroccans. The Moroccan Initiative thwarted no plots and led to no arrests, officials said.

___

Much of the information in the Moroccan Initiative was gathered by a secretive squad known as the Demographics Unit. Using plainclothes officers known as "rakers," the squad infiltrated local businesses and community organizations looking for trouble or "hot spots." Their daily reports helped create searchable databases of life in New York's Muslim neighborhoods.

One NYPD official said that unit identified a Brooklyn bookstore as a hot spot. That led police to open an investigation and send in an informant and undercover detective, ultimately leading to the arrests of two men in the Herald Square case.

The work of that secret unit, the official said, helped the NYPD arrest a Pakistani immigrant named Shahawar Matin Siraj and foiled an attack.

For years, police have said publicly that the Herald Square case began with a tip but have not elaborated. Siraj's lawyer, Martin Stolar, said prosecutors provided no documents related to the Demographics Unit at trial.

Siraj was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison in 2007. But defense attorneys, and even some inside the NYPD intelligence unit, said police had coaxed the men into making incriminating statements and there was no proof Siraj ever obtained explosives.

The case is arguably the NYPD's greatest counterterrorism success. But there are others.

The NYPD played an important role in the case against Carlos Amonte and Mohammed Alessa, two New Jersey men who pleaded guilty to charges they tried to leave the country in 2010 to join the al-Qaida-linked terrorist group al-Shabaab. The FBI long had been aware of the two men but had been unable to win their trust with an informant or undercover agent, federal officials said. The NYPD, with its deep roster of Muslim officers, provided the undercover officer who ultimately succeeded in winning their confidence.

When the NYPD's effectiveness is questioned, the department's most ardent supporters frequently point to a long list of terrorist plots said to have targeted New York since 9/11. The list often is described as plots thwarted by the NYPD.

"One can't argue with results," said Peter Vallone, the New York city councilman who heads the Public Safety Committee. "The results of this gargantuan effort have been that at least 13 planned attacks on New York City have been prevented."

In reality, however, the NYPD played little or no role in preventing many of those attacks.

Some, like a cyanide plot against the subway system, were discovered among evidence obtained overseas but were never set into motion. Others, like the 2006 plot to blow up U.S.-bound airliners using liquid explosives, were thwarted by U.S. and international authorities, and plans never got off the ground.

And some, like the 2008 subway plot, went unnoticed by the NYPD despite the money and manpower devoted to monitoring Muslim communities, according to the NYPD files obtained by the AP. The files along with interviews show the NYPD was monitoring Zazi's mosque, and also the Muslim student organization Medunjanin attended. Zazi and Medunjanin were friends and had been praying together regularly since 9th grade. As the years passed, Zazi grew increasingly upset about civilians killed by the U.S. military in Afghanistan; Medunjanin was outraged by the way Muslims were treated at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, and he promoted jihad at the mosque and after basketball games with friends, according to court documents. He said his friends didn't have the "balls" to do anything.

The plot was discovered after U.S. intelligence intercepted an email revealing that Zazi was trying to make a bomb.

Those programs, meanwhile, have widened the chasm between the police and the city's Muslims, a community the Obama administration says is a crucial partner in the effort to prevent another terrorist attack. Fed up with a decade of being under scrutiny, some Muslim groups now urge against going directly to police when someone hears radical, anti-American talk.

They reason that the person is probably a police informant.

___

Each morning at the NYPD, Cohen meets his senior officers to discuss the latest intelligence before he briefs Kelly. There is no bigger target for terrorists than New York, the nation's largest city and the heart of the financial and media world. Cohen repeatedly reminds his officers that, on any given day, they might be the only thing standing in the way of disaster. It's a mentality that officials say underscores the seriousness of the threat and the NYPD's commitment to the effort.

Several current and former officials point to that pressure to explain why programs rarely get scrapped, even when there are doubts about their effectiveness. Nobody wants to be the one to abandon a program, only to witness a successful attack that it might have prevented.

At the federal level, intelligence programs are reviewed by Congress, inspectors general and other watchdogs. The NYPD faces no such scrutiny from the City Council or city auditors. Federal officials, too, have been reluctant to question the effectiveness of the NYPD, despite spending more than $1.6 billion in federal money on the department since 9/11.

After House Democrats circulated a letter signed by 34 members of Congress recently asking for a federal review of the NYPD's intelligence programs, King, the New York Republican, accused them of smearing the police department.

The Justice Department under Eric Holder repeatedly has sidestepped questions about what it thinks about the NYPD programs revealed by the AP. Some Democrats in Congress have asked prosecutors to investigate. Since August, the department has said only that it is reviewing those requests.

During the Bush administration, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and senior Justice Department officials received a briefing in New York about the NYPD's capabilities, according to a former federal official who attended.

Gonzales left convinced, the official said, that the federal government could not replicate those programs. The NYPD had more manpower and operated under different rules than the federal government, the Justice Department concluded. And the mayor had accepted the political risk that came with the programs.

It was a policy briefing only, the former official said, meaning the federal government did not review the NYPD programs to determine whether they were lawful.

The NYPD's terrorist cases include ones the federal government has declined to prosecute. Last year, a grand jury declined to indict Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh on the most serious charge initially brought against them, a high-level terror conspiracy count that carried the potential for life in prison without parole. They were indicted on lesser state terrorism and hate crime charges, including one punishable by up to 32 years behind bars.

Last month, NYPD detectives arrested Jose Pimentel on terrorism-related charges. A state grand jury has yet to indict him on those charges. Federal and city law enforcement officials who reviewed the case told the AP there were concerns that Pimentel lacked the mental capacity to act on his own. The NYPD informant's drug use in the case also created serious issues, the officials said.

FBI Director Robert Mueller has tried to mute criticisms of the NYPD. On a visit to the Newark, N.J., FBI office a few years ago, current and former officials recall, agents asked Mueller how the NYPD was allowed to operate undercover in the state, with no FBI coordination. Mueller replied that it was a reality the bureau would have to live with, the officials said.

There will always be some debate over the effectiveness of intelligence-gathering programs, particularly ones that butt up against civil liberties. Nearly a decade after the last terrorist suspect was waterboarded in a secret CIA prison in 2003, for instance, politicians and experts still debate whether the tactic gleaned valuable information and whether it could have been obtained without such harsh methods.

During the Bush administration, officials repeatedly pointed to the years without a successful terrorist attack to justify the most contentious programs from the war on terrorism. Vice President Dick Cheney used the years without an attack to defend the secret National Security Agency wiretapping program. Gonzales credited the USA Patriot Act and military actions abroad. And President George W. Bush said the years without an attack validated his polices.

"While there's room for honest and healthy debate about the decisions I've made — and there's plenty of debate," Bush said in the final days of his presidency, "there can be no debate about the results in keeping America safe."

When questioned about its own programs, the NYPD has made the same arguments.

During the 2005 deposition over the subway searches, lawyers pressed Cohen to explain how the NYPD could be so sure its programs really worked.

"They haven't attacked us," he said.

___

Contact the Washington investigative team at DCInvestigations(at)ap.org

Follow Apuzzo, Goldman and Sullivan at http://twitter.com/mattapuzzo and http://twitter.com/goldmandc and http://twitter.com/esullivanap

Will New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez be the next vice president?

“Don’t know her, but on paper I think she looks very impressive,” veteran GOP strategist Mike Murphy, a one-time aide to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, told The Daily Caller.

A conservative former prosecutor, Martinez is the most popular of the new Republican governors elected last fall, with an approval rating at or above 50 percent in a traditionally liberal state.

“What makes Martinez’s numbers so noteworthy is that she’s doing it as a Republican in a state that voted for Barack Obama by 15 points in 2008 and appears ready to do so again next year,” wrote Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-leaning firm, on Wednesday. “In addition to universal support from Republicans, an unusually high 32 percent of Democrats give her good marks and independents approve of her by a 48/38 margin as well.”

“[Florida Sen.] Marco Rubio (40 percent approval in Florida) and [Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (45 percentВ approval in Virginia) get most of the VP buzz, but Martinez has much more impressive numbers in her home state,” the report continued.

In addition to her popularity, Martinez is also the first Hispanic woman of either party to be elected governor of a state. Come next November, the Latino vote will be heavily contested as the White House seeks to win over enough Hispanics to compensate for President Obama’s low approval ratings among white voters and as the GOP looks to make inroads with America’s fastest growing minority group.

Martinez has said she has no interest in being the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2012, and an aide to the governor told TheDC that her position wouldn’t change. But, as in the case with Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, anything short of a Sherman-esque refusal is unlikely to dampen speculation among her fans.

Adam Brickley, a conservative blogger widely credited with first floating the idea of nominating then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for the vice presidential spot in 2008, told TheDC that putting Martinez on the ticket would be “a good idea.”

“She’s certainly one of the more viable options,” Brickley told TheDC. “A lot of Hispanic people have been bandied about as options, and she would certainly be on the short list considering she’s popular, effective and conservative. She’s got everything she needs, so she’s somebody I’d consider.”

While New Mexico only has five electoral votes, it’s an important swing state. President George W. Bush lost the state by a razor-thin margin in 2000 — the closest election in modern times — but won it in 2004.

Should Martinez join the Republican ticket next year, chances are she won’t be the only New Mexican running for executive office. Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is expected to declare his candidacy for the Libertarian nomination next week, and is currently polling at 23 percent support in the state against Romney and Obama.

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MIAMI – Deborah Labrada was giddy as she stood in line at Miami-Dade International Airport, waiting to fly to the town of Guantanamo, Cuba.
It is the place she visits roughly once a year to see her grandfather, aunts and uncles and cousins. She still considers it a second home, even though she has lived nearly all her 17 years in South Florida.
"The first thing I'm going to do when I get there is cry, and then give everyone hugs," she said Monday, as she leaned against her cart of bags secured in the festive, neon green airport plastic wrap. The duffel bags — cheaper to ship through than heavier, traditional luggage — bulged with food, over the counter medicine, toys and other necessities hard to obtain in Cuba's struggling economy.
Labrada was among thousands of Cuban-Americans flying to the island this week to celebrate the new year. These types of annual pilgrimages would have been sharply curtailed if two South Florida, GOP Cuban-American congressmen had succeeded in returning to the Bush-era limit of once every three years. The measure backed by U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart and David Rivera was tucked into the congressional spending bill, but Republican leaders jettisoned it last week as part of a last minute compromise.
Labrada said Monday she didn't appreciate the effort to restore the old restriction.
"I think it was very disappointing, because the least we can do is help our own families," she said. "We should go and take advantage of the opportunity to bring them things and help any way we can."
President Barack Obama allowed unlimited family visits by Cuban-Americans shortly after taking office and removed the $1,200 annual cap on remittances. Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but the Cuban government said earlier this year it expected about 500,000 U.S. visitors annually, the vast majority of them Cuban-Americans. Cuban officials did not immediately respond to requests for corresponding statistics from past years, but they have previously said there were nearly 300,000 visits from Cubans living outside the island in 2009. It was not immediately clear whether that included repeat travelers.
Many Cuban-Americans, like Labrada have already been traveling to Cuba for years. They just had to go through special church trips or through a third country to get around the three year ban.
Of nearly a dozen families interviewed at the Miami Airport, all but two said they'd last visited the island in the last year or two.
"I don't think it should be any different for us than it is for anyone else going to visit family in any other country," Labrada said.
Except it is different.
Most Cubans who come to the U.S. are able to immigrate here as a result of U.S. policy that views them as victims of political oppression. And as Diaz-Balart is quick to note, not everyone can travel. While average Cubans may be able to visit family off the island, their visa requests can easily be denied. The Cuban government has refused to allow blogger and internationally renowned activist Yoani Sanchez to travel to the U.S. and Europe to accept human rights awards.
But Professor Andy Gomez of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuba and Cuban-American Studies says the flood of travelers isn't likely to stop any time soon, and he says trying to stem the flow makes no sense.
"I was at the Miami airport last week, and there were flights on the hour," he said. "Stopping it? Impossible. It is the people-to-people contact we want and need, and it is already happening."
Most of the flights to Cuba still originate from South Florida, with nearly 300,000 people departing to the island just from Miami International Airport in 2010. Numbers for 2011 were not yet available. But they also now leave from places such as Tampa, Fla.; Oakland, Calif.; Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta and Puerto Rico.
Flights to Cuba from the Tampa International Airport began in early September after a 50-year hiatus, and local officials are banking on it as a new source of revenue. Airport officials said about 45,000 passengers will travel the route in 2012.
Manny Martinez, a 21-year-old Tampa resident, was standing at the back of the long line four hours before Tuesday's flight. He said he's spending two weeks on the island and staying with family. Like Labrada, he said Cuba still feels like home, even though he's lived in the U.S. for 11 years.
When asked to name the first thing he would do once he arrived, he laughed.

"Party," he said. "Just go out with my old friends and have fun."

Not everyone goes just to see family.

Gomez said his maintenance man just returned from a trip to Cuba to visit his dentist because he has no health care insurance in the U.S. and can't afford the visit here. Meanwhile, media reports are on the rise in South Florida about Cuban-Americans involved in Medicare fraud fleeing to the island.

Back at the Miami airport, Isabel Baez, 39, teared up as she talked about visiting her family in Santiago de Cuba. Yet, she said she knows of people who also go as "mules," taking much needed provisions for others on the island who are not relatives, sometimes even for resale.

"But most of those people still go to see their family," she said. "They bring the packages as a way to get a free ticket."

___

Associated Press writer Tamara Lush contributed to this report from Tampa, Fla.

We interrupt this seamy, scandal-plagued, cash-grab-of-a-college-football season for the following public-service message:
Matt Barkley is staying in school.
The announcement Thursday that Barkley will return to Southern California for his senior season isn't really a tale about great sacrifice. He knows NFL-ready quarterback prospects almost always hold their value and he'll likely get his millions soon enough.
It isn't even the most uplifting story in the game this week. That would be Eric LeGrand's appearance on the cover of Sports Illustrated commemorating the best sports moment of 2011, when he led his Rutgers teammates onto the field in a wheelchair for a home game in late October, little more than a year after he was paralyzed playing against Army.
Barkley's decision isn't the newsiest development this week, either, That would be the wrist slap the NCAA gave Ohio State, whose clueless president and shameless athletic director whined that the school had punished itself enough after learning that former coach Jim Tressel lied and cheated his way through the entire 2010 season.
But Barkley's story might be the most surprising, considering how rarely loyalty takes hold across the college football landscape, including the very spot on which he was standing.
Not quite two years ago, Pete Carroll, the coach who recruited Barkley, left for Seattle and the NFL rather than stick around and face the harsh penalties the NCAA was about to levy on Southern California for a host of violations on his watch. The coach Barkley played for the past two seasons, Lane Kiffin, didn't exactly cover himself in glory, either, for the way he departed Tennessee — abruptly — to take Carroll's place.
Barkley and his teammates bore the brunt of the postseason bans and all that upheaval and decided to come back anyway.
"I am staying so I can finish what I started," Barkley said to cheers inside USC's Heritage Hall.
More than a few pro scouts shook their heads at that moment, though, recalling how Matt Leinart made the same call to a similar round of cheers a handful of years earlier.
"It's another year with my pals, no matter how it turns out," Leinart said a few days after his decision. "But I'll tell you what: I didn't want to look back 10 or 20 years down the road and find out I passed on the chance to be a part of something really special."
He was coming off USC's back-to-back national championships and a Heisman Trophy-winning season. He didn't duplicate either achievement in the one that followed and his draft stock tumbled when Texas quarterback Vince Young, who outplayed Leinart in a thrilling Bowl Championship Series finale, declared himself eligible for the same 2006 draft. Leinart, a lock for the top spot a year earlier, tumbled to No. 10 and wound up costing himself millions.
If there's any consolation for Barkley in that example, it's that Leinart, despite proving himself a barely adequate backup in the pros, still made millions. Plus, like Leinart, Barkley will be returning to a Trojans squad with a very realistic chance to win a national championship next season and a strong enough supporting cast — on offense, anyway — to get him a Heisman Trophy.
USC finished 10-2 and climbed all the way to No. 5 before shutting things down for the season. While Barkley loses his best protector on the offensive line — left tackle Matt Kalil already declared for the NFL draft, where he could go as high as No. 2 — the quarterback will reunite with receivers Marqise Lee and Robert Woods, a tandem that might be the nation's best.
We won't know how things turn out, of course, for a while. But it's hardly the bad business decision those NFL scouts panned it as, if only because Stanford's Andrew Luck made the same one at the end of last season and cemented his place at the top of next spring's NFL draft.
And the quartet of quarterbacks who did the same dating back to Peyton Manning in 1997 — Leinart, Tim Tebow (2009) and Jake Locker (2010) — all were gone by the end of the first round the following year.
But minimizing the risk that Barkley is taking shouldn't stop us from marveling at the loyalty he showed to a school and a sport that always rewards coaches and administrators handsomely, but not always the kids who make it all possible.
The lessons the sport has been teaching the past few years — from fleeing coaches to shady conference realignment schemes to university presidents only too willing to look the other way — is that it's every man for himself. By returning to USC for one more year, Barkley signaled he was still about something else.

Bravo.

"That's not an easy decision," said Kiffin, who won't get a better present this Christmas. "Not many people would do what Matt has done."

___

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitke(at)ap.org. Follow him at http://Twitter.com/JimLitke.