Colorado Coalition for Human Rights

Post Katrina New Orleans

2007-08-26T10:33:00.000-06:00

Douglas Brinkley has a great op-ed in the Washington Post about the administration's current policy toward post-Katrina New Orleans. The article is pasted below:

Over the past two years since Hurricane Katrina, I've seen waves of hardworking volunteers from nonprofits, faith-based groups and college campuses descend on New Orleans, full of compassion and hope.

They arrive in the city's Ninth Ward to painstakingly gut houses one by one. Their jaws drop as they wander around afflicted zones, gazing at the towering mounds of debris and uprooted infrastructure.

After weeks of grueling labor, they realize that they are running in place, toiling in a surreal vacuum.

Two full years after the hurricane, the Big Easy is barely limping along, unable to make truly meaningful reconstruction progress. The most important issues concerning the city's long-term survival are still up in the air. Why is no Herculean clean-up effort underway? Why hasn't President Bush named a high-profile czar such as Colin Powell or James Baker to oversee the ongoing disaster? Where is the U.S. government's participation in the rebuilding?

And why are volunteers practically the only ones working to reconstruct homes in communities that may never again have sewage service, garbage collection or electricity?

Eventually, the volunteers' altruism turns to bewilderment and finally to outrage. They've been hoodwinked. The stalled recovery can't be blamed on bureaucratic inertia or red tape alone. Many volunteers come to understand what I've concluded is the heartless reality: The Bush administration actually wants these neighborhoods below sea level to die on the vine.

These days a stiff Caribbean breeze causes residents to jerk into a high-alert state of anxiety. Still unfinished is the overhaul of what some call the "Lego levees," the notoriously flawed 350-mile "flood protection system" that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers starting building in 1965.

The Corps has been busy fixing the three principal holes that opened in August 2005. Its hard work has, in fact, paid a partial dividend. A decent defensive floodwall is now on the east side of the Industrial Canal, attempting to protect the Lower Ninth Ward.

Unfortunately, that is where the upbeat news nosedives. The federal government has refused to shut the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet canal that helped cause the Katrina "funnel effect" flooding two years ago. In addition, entire neglected neighborhoods still have no adequate flood control.

The answer to New Orleans's levee woes is painfully obvious: money and willpower. Common sense dictates that the endangered areas -- if repopulated (and that is a big if) -- demand levees that can sustain Category 5 storms. It's a national obligation. Entire blocks are moldering away while the federal government lifts only a cursory hand to reverse the desultory trend.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest misperceptions the American public harbors is that Katrina was a week-long catastrophe. In truth, it's better to view it as an era. Remember, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s lasted eight or nine years. We're still in the middle of the Katrina saga.

Bold action has been needed for two years now, yet all that the White House has offered is an inadequate trickle of billion-dollar Band-aids and placebo directives. Too often in the United States we forget that "inaction" can be a policy initiative. Every day the White House must decide what not to do.

The stubborn inaction appears to fall under the paternalistic guise of helping the storm victims. Bush's general attitude -- a Catch-22 recipe if ever there was one -- appears to be that only rank fools would return when the first line of hurricane defense are the levees that this administration so far refuses to fix.

New Orleans appears to be largely abandoned by the Department of Homeland Security, except for its safeguarding of the Port Authority (port traffic is at 90 percent of pre-Katrina numbers) and tourist districts above sea level, such as the French Quarter and Uptown. These areas are kept alive largely by the wild success of Harrah's casino and a steady flow of undaunted conventioneers.

The brutal Galveston Hurricane of 1900 may be a historical guide to the administration's thinking. Most survivors of that deadly Texas storm moved to higher land. Administration policies seem to tacitly encourage those who live below sea level in New Orleans to relocate permanently, to leave the dangerous water's edge for more prosperous inland cities such as Shreveport or Baton Rouge.

After the 1900 hurricane, in fact, Galveston, which had been a large, thriving port, was essentially abandoned for Houston, transforming that then-sleepy backwater into the financial center for the entire Gulf South. Galveston devolved into a smallish port-tourist center, one easy to evacuate when hurricanes rear their ugly heads.

To be fair, Bush's apparent post-Katrina inaction policy makes some cold, pragmatic sense. If the U.S. government is not going to rebuild the levees to survive a Category 5 storm -- to be finished at the earliest in 2015 and at an estimated cost of $40 billion, far eclipsing the extravagant bill for the entire Interstate Highway System -- then options are limited.

But what makes the current inaction plan so infuriating is that it's deceptive, offering up this open-armed spin to storm victims: "Come back to New Orleans." Why can't Bush look his fellow citizens in the eye and tell them what seems to be the ugly truth? That as long as he's commander in chief, there won't be an entirely reconstructed levee system.

Shortly after Katrina hit, former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert declared that a lot of New Orleans could be "bulldozed." He was shot down by an outraged public and media, which deemed such remarks insensitive and callous. Two years have shown that Hastert may have articulated what appears to have become the White House's de facto policy. He may have retreated, but the inaction remains.

The White House keeps spinning Bush's abysmal poll numbers by claiming that his legacy will rise decades from now the way Harry S. Truman's did. But Truman had a reputation for straight talk and bold vision. If Bush wants history to perceive him as Trumanesque, then he must act Trumanesque.

Bush's predecessors moved mountains. Theodore Roosevelt set aside 230 million acres for wildlife conservation (plus built the Panama Canal). Franklin D. Roosevelt began a kaleidoscope of New Deal programs to calm the Great Depression and Truman oversaw the Marshall Plan rebuilding of Western Europe after World War II. Bush could seize the initiative and announce a real plan to rebuild, a partnership between the government, Fortune 500 companies and faith-based groups.

Unfortunately, right now New Orleans is having a hard time lobbying on its own behalf. Minnesota's Twin Cities have about 20 Fortune 500 companies to draw in private-sector money to help rebuild the bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis. New Orleans has one, Entergy, which is verging on bankruptcy. So besides U.S. taxpayers and port fees, New Orleans must count on spiked-up tourist dollars to jumpstart the post-Katrina rebuild.

But this is where the bizarre paradox of living in a city of ruins comes into play. Out of one side of its mouth the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce says, "Come on down, folks! We're not underwater!" Yet these same civic boosters -- viscerally aware that the Bush administration is treating the desperate plight of New Orleans in an out-of-sight, out-of-mind fashion -- don't want to bite the hand that feeds them large chunks of reconstruction cash. New Orleans is both bragging about normalcy and poor-mouthing itself, confusing Americans about what the real state of the city is.

Recently Mayor C. Ray Nagin, born with the proverbial foot in his mouth, tried to explain why the homicide rate in New Orleans is so appallingly high. When a TV reporter asked, Nagin merely shrugged: "It's not good for us, but it also keeps the New Orleans brand out there." This absurd comment -- and dozens like it -- hurts New Orleans's recovery almost as much as Bush's policy of inaction.

Everywhere I travel in the United States, people ask, "Why did you guys reelect such a doofus?" There is a feeling that any community that reelected a "first responder" who stayed in a Hyatt Regency suite during Hurricane Katrina, never delivered a speech to the homeless at the Superdome or Convention Center in New Orleans, and played the "chocolate city" race card at a historic moment when black-white healing was needed probably deserves to get stiffed by the federal government.

And Nagin isn't the only bad ambassador New Orleans has. It also has City Council member Oliver Thomas, Sen. David Vitter and Rep. William J. Jefferson -- all currently in deep trouble for potentially breaking the law. Dismayed by such political buffoonery, Americans have simply turned a blind eye to New Orleans's reconstruction plight. There is a scolding sentiment around the country that Louisiana needs to get its own house in order before looking for fresh levee handouts.

Then there are egregious contractor crimes such as over-billing and price-gouging. The medical infrastructure has largely collapsed. Mercy and Charity hospitals remain closed. A severe crisis in mental health care has erupted and gang violence is on the rise. The Environmental Protection Agency refuses to clearly state that it's safe to live in the metro area. Young professionals, recognizing that there are greener pastures all over the nation, are fleeing in droves.

Even with our trillion-dollar debt and excessive military expenses in Iraq, the American people, if presented with a bold plan, might be ready to save the beleaguered city. Perhaps the people haven't lost their good Samaritan grit.

Let's, for once, put New Orleans on the front burner. After all, Katrina exposed all the ills of urban America -- endemic poverty, institutionalized racism, failing public schools and much more. New Orleans is just a microcosm of Newark and Detroit and hundreds of other troubled urban locales.

How we deal with New Orleans's future will tell us a lot about our nation's future. In 2008 it should really be an up or down vote. Category 5 levees or not? An independent FEMA or a FEMA still ensconced in Homeland Security? Do we pour $40 billion into grandiose Louisiana engineering projects or do we instead put up "no trespassing" signs in the areas below sea level? All are hard choices with various merits and pains.

The important thing, however, is for America to decide whether the current policy of inaction is really the way we want to deal with the worst natural disaster in our history.

Douglas Brinkley is a history professor at Rice University and

the author of "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina,

New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast."

New Rules May Limit Health Care Program Aiding Children

2007-08-21T02:15:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

The Bush administration, continuing its fight to stop states from expanding the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, has adopted new standards that would make it much more difficult for New York, California and others to extend coverage to children in middle-income families.

Administration officials outlined the new standards in a letter sent to state health officials on Friday evening, in the middle of a monthlong Congressional recess. In interviews, they said the changes were intended to return the Children’s Health Insurance Program to its original focus on low-income children and to make sure the program did not become a substitute for private health coverage.

After learning of the new policy, some state officials said yesterday that it could cripple their efforts to cover more children and would impose standards that could not be met.

“We are horrified at the new federal policy,” said Ann Clemency Kohler, deputy commissioner of human services in New Jersey. “It will cause havoc with our program and could jeopardize coverage for thousands of children.”

Stan Rosenstein, the Medicaid director in California, said the new policy was “highly restrictive, much more restrictive than what we want to do.”

The poverty level for a family of four is set by the federal government at $20,650 in annual income. Many states have received federal permission to cover children with family incomes exceeding twice the poverty level — $41,300 for a family of four. In New York, which covers children up to 250 percent of the poverty level, the Legislature has passed a bill that would raise the limit to 400 percent— $82,600 for a family of four — but the change is subject to federal approval.

California wants to increase its income limit to 300 percent of the poverty level, from 250 percent. Pennsylvania recently raised its limit to 300 percent, from 200 percent. New Jersey has had a limit of 350 percent for more than five years.

As with issues like immigration, the White House is taking action on its own to advance policies that have not been embraced by Congress.

In his budget in February, President Bush proposed strict limits on family income for the child health program. Both houses of Congress voted this month to renew the program for five years, but neither chamber accepted that proposal. Legal authority for the program expires on Sept. 30.

The administration’s new policy is explained in a letter that was sent about 7:30 p.m. on Friday to state health officials from Dennis G. Smith, the director of the federal Center for Medicaid and State Operations. The policy would continue indefinitely, though Democrats in Congress could try to override it.

The Children’s Health Insurance Program has strong support from governors of both parties, including Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Sonny Perdue of Georgia. When the Senate passed a bill to expand the program this month, 18 Republican senators voted for it, in defiance of a veto threat from Mr. Bush. The House passed a more expansive bill and will try to work out differences with the Senate when Congress reconvenes next month.

Click here to read the full article.

White House Torture Policy

2007-07-26T00:09:00.000-06:00

A great op-ed from the Washington Post:

War Crimes and the White House
The Dishonor in a Tortured New 'Interpretation' of the Geneva Conventions

By P.X. Kelley and Robert F. Turner
Thursday, July 26, 2007; A21

One of us was appointed commandant of the Marine Corps by President Ronald Reagan; the other served as a lawyer in the Reagan White House and has vigorously defended the constitutionality of warrantless National Security Agency wiretaps, presidential signing statements and many other controversial aspects of the war on terrorism. But we cannot in good conscience defend a decision that we believe has compromised our national honor and that may well promote the commission of war crimes by Americans and place at risk the welfare of captured American military forces for generations to come.

The Supreme Court held in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld last summer that all detainees captured in the war on terrorism are protected by Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which prescribes minimum standards of treatment for all persons who are no longer taking an active part in an armed conflict not of an international character. It provides that "in all circumstances" detainees are to be "treated humanely."

This is not just about avoiding "torture." The article expressly prohibits "at any time and in any place whatsoever" any acts of "violence to life and person" or "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment."

Last Friday, the White House issued an executive order attempting to "interpret" Common Article 3 with respect to a controversial CIA interrogation program. The order declares that the CIA program "fully complies with the obligations of the United States under Common Article 3," provided that its interrogation techniques do not violate existing federal statutes (prohibiting such things as torture, mutilation or maiming) and do not constitute "willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual in a manner so serious that any reasonable person, considering the circumstances, would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency."

In other words, as long as the intent of the abuse is to gather intelligence or to prevent future attacks, and the abuse is not "done for the purpose of humiliating or degrading the individual" -- even if that is an inevitable consequence -- the president has given the CIA carte blanche to engage in "willful and outrageous acts of personal abuse."

It is firmly established in international law that treaties are to be interpreted in "good faith" in accordance with the ordinary meaning of their words and in light of their purpose. It is clear to us that the language in the executive order cannot even arguably be reconciled with America's clear duty under Common Article 3 to treat all detainees humanely and to avoid any acts of violence against their person.

In April of 1793, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson wrote to President George Washington that nations were to interpret treaty obligations for themselves but that "the tribunal of our consciences remains, and that also of the opinion of the world." He added that "as we respect these, we must see that in judging ourselves we have honestly done the part of impartial and rigorous judges."

To date in the war on terrorism, including the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and all U.S. military personnel killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq, America's losses total about 2 percent of the forces we lost in World War II and less than 7 percent of those killed in Vietnam. Yet we did not find it necessary to compromise our honor or abandon our commitment to the rule of law to defeat Nazi Germany or imperial Japan, or to resist communist aggression in Indochina. On the contrary, in Vietnam -- where we both proudly served twice -- America voluntarily extended the protections of the full Geneva Convention on prisoners of war to Viet Cong guerrillas who, like al-Qaeda, did not even arguably qualify for such protections.

The Geneva Conventions provide important protections to our own military forces when we send them into harm's way. Our troops deserve those protections, and we betray their interests when we gratuitously "interpret" key provisions of the conventions in a manner likely to undermine their effectiveness. Policymakers should also keep in mind that violations of Common Article 3 are "war crimes" for which everyone involved -- potentially up to and including the president of the United States -- may be tried in any of the other 193 countries that are parties to the conventions.

In a letter to President James Madison in March 1809, Jefferson observed: "It has a great effect on the opinion of our people and the world to have the moral right on our side." Our leaders must never lose sight of that wisdom.

Retired Gen. P.X. Kelley served as commandant of the Marine Corps from 1983 to 1987. Robert F. Turner is co-founder of the University of Virginia's Center for National Security Law and a former chair of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.

Click here to access the full article.

Ethiopia Is Said to Block Food to Rebel Region

2007-07-22T12:28:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

The Ethiopian government is blockading emergency food aid and choking off trade to large swaths of a remote region in the eastern part of the country that is home to a rebel force, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation, Western diplomats and humanitarian officials say.

The Ethiopian military and its proxy militias have also been siphoning off millions of dollars in international food aid and using a United Nations polio eradication program to funnel money to their fighters, according to relief officials, former Ethiopian government administrators and a member of the Ethiopian Parliament who defected to Germany last month to protest the government’s actions.

The blockade takes aim at the heart of the Ogaden region, a vast desert on the Somali border where the government is struggling against a growing rebellion and where government soldiers have been accused by human rights groups of widespread brutality.

Humanitarian officials say the ban on aid convoys and commercial traffic, intended to squeeze the rebels and dry up their bases of support, has sent food prices skyrocketing and disrupted trade routes, preventing the nomads who live there from selling their livestock. Hundreds of thousands of people are now sealed off in a desiccated, unforgiving landscape that is difficult to survive in even in the best of times.

Click here to read the entire article.

Torture survivors find help, healing

2007-07-01T20:47:00.000-06:00

I received this link from a volunteer at a nonprofit based in San Diego that helps victims of torture. This article is definitely worth reading and I also recommend their website at notorture.org

Click here to read the article.

Protest Journalism

2007-06-29T14:57:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure if people have seen this, but I saw a clip on the BBC about MSNBC journalist Mika Brzezinski who refused to lead with a story on Paris Hilton. She not only refused to lead with the story, but shredded it on air. While this is a small event, it does raise an interesting point about the current state of the news media and to what extent journalists should decide which types of news to report or which are more important. I provided a couple of links below:

Click here to watch the video.

Another link can be found by clicking here.

Senate subpoenas White House over wiretapping

2007-06-27T16:52:00.000-06:00

From the LA Times:

The Senate committee investigating the Bush administration's controversial domestic wiretapping program subpoenaed the White House, Vice President Dick Cheney's office and the Justice Department today for information regarding their legal justification for the warrantless secret surveillance.

The subpoenas by the Judiciary Committee set the stage for another legal and political battle between Senate Democrats and the administration over its counter-terrorism and law enforcement policies. Earlier subpoenas issued by Democratic lawmakers to current and former White House officials have essentially been ignored.

Legal experts suggested today that the administration would fight or ignore these subpoenas too, throwing the issue into federal court, perhaps even the Supreme Court. The outcome, they said, could be a kind of out-of-court compromise that gives lawmakers at least some insight into the legal machinations surrounding the top-secret National Security Agency program.

Click here to read the full article.

The General’s Report

2007-06-21T23:02:00.000-06:00

Seymour M. Hersh has an excellent article about torture at Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker which can be accessed here. I will only paste a portion of the article, which is a quote of now retired Army Major General Antonio M. Taguba:

“There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff”—the explicit images—“was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this.” He said that Rumsfeld, his senior aides, and the high-ranking generals and admirals who stood with him as he misrepresented what he knew about Abu Ghraib had failed the nation.

Lawmakers to Investigate Bush on Laws and Intent

2007-06-21T22:48:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

Lawmakers say they plan to dig deeper into the Bush administration’s use of bill-signing statements as ways to circumvent Congressional intent.

In a limited examination of the administration’s practice of reserving the authority to interpret legislation, the Government Accountability Office determined that in 6 out of 19 cases it studied, the administration did not follow the law as written after President Bush expressed reservations about some legislative directives. By using signing statements, the president has reserved the right not to enforce any laws he thinks violate the Constitution or national security, or that impair foreign relations.

The accountability office, a watchdog agency, in a report issued Monday, did not pass judgment on whether the agencies were responding to the signing statements or whether the president had the constitutional authority not to comply. But Congressional officials said Tuesday that the findings were alarming since the administration had apparently not complied with the law in 30 percent of the cases scrutinized.

“Federal law is not some buffet line where the president can pick parts of some laws to follow and others to reject,” said Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Appropriations Committee, one of two senior lawmakers who sought the review.

Mr. Byrd and aides to Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee and joined in seeking the study, said their next step would be to explore the signing statements to determine the broad extent of their impact. Mr. Byrd noted that another agency, the Congressional Research Service, had identified 700 provisions in law questioned by the administration.

“Moving forward, I plan to ask auditors to take a look at these provisions and determine what legal violations they find,” Mr. Byrd said. “Once we have the facts, we will be able to determine the next steps.”

The Bush administration’s frequent use of signing statements has been one front in the battle between the White House and some in Congress over the power of the executive branch.

Administration officials said that it was fully within the president’s power to interpret how laws should be carried out by the executive branch and that the White House had acted appropriately to keep Congress from overreaching and meddling too much in the independent executive branch of government.

Click here to read the full article.

Senate Committee Approves Bill for Detainee Hearings

2007-06-08T21:12:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

The Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday approved a bill that would give detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, part of a renewed effort by the Democratic-controlled Congress to challenge the Bush administration on its wartime policies.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) joined all 10 Democrats on the committee in approving the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act, which aims to counteract a law passed hastily in October that stripped detainees of their ability to bring their cases to court under the centuries-old legal principle of habeas corpus.

Click here to read the article.

Deal on Immigration Reached

2007-05-18T11:24:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

The Bush administration and a bipartisan group of senators reached agreement yesterday on a sprawling overhaul of the nation's immigration laws that would bring an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants out of society's shadows while stiffening border protections and cracking down on employers of undocumented workers.

The delicate compromise, 380 pages long and three months in the making, represents perhaps the last opportunity for President Bush to win a major legislative accomplishment for his second term, and it could become the most significant revision of the nation's immigration system in 41 years. Bush hailed the agreement as "one that will help enforce our borders, but equally importantly, it will treat people with respect."

But though immigration proponents and opponents lauded the work done to reach a deal, both sides -- including Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate -- said they could torpedo the legislation in the end, after the Senate begins debate on the bill next week and after the House considers its version in July.

The Senate deal would grant temporary legal status to virtually all illegal immigrants in the country, while allowing them to apply for residence visas and eventual citizenship. A temporary-worker program would allow as many as 400,000 migrants into the country each year, but they would have to leave after two years. And the current visa system, which stresses family ties, would be augmented by a complex point system that would favor skilled, educated workers. Most of those changes would take effect only after the implementation of tough new border controls and a crackdown on the employment of undocumented workers.

Click here to read the full article.

D.C. Representation Soon?

2007-05-06T14:49:00.000-06:00

The Washington Post has an interesting article about how D.C. may be getting representation soon, although there will be a huge political fight if the Senate passes the bill. Click here to read the full article.

Survey of Troops Draws Dismay from Human Righst Activists

2007-05-05T00:13:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

More than one-third of U.S. soldiers in Iraq surveyed by the Army said they believe torture should be allowed if it helps gather important information about insurgents, the Pentagon disclosed yesterday. Four in 10 said they approve of such illegal abuse if it would save the life of a fellow soldier.

In addition, about two-thirds of Marines and half the Army troops surveyed said they would not report a team member for mistreating a civilian or for destroying civilian property unnecessarily. "Less than half of Soldiers and Marines believed that non-combatants should be treated with dignity and respect," the Army report stated.

About 10 percent of the 1,767 troops in the official survey -- conducted in Iraq last fall -- reported that they had mistreated civilians in Iraq, such as kicking them or needlessly damaging their possessions.

Click here to read the article.

U.S. Asks Court to Limit Lawyers at Guantánamo

2007-04-25T22:14:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

The Justice Department has asked a federal appeals court to impose tighter restrictions on the hundreds of lawyers who represent detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the request has become a central issue in a new legal battle over the administration’s detention policies.

Saying that visits by civilian lawyers and attorney-client mail have caused “intractable problems and threats to security at Guantánamo,” a Justice Department filing proposes new limits on the lawyers’ contact with their clients and access to evidence in their cases that would replace more expansive rules that have governed them since they began visiting Guantánamo detainees in large numbers in 2004.

The filing says the lawyers have caused unrest among the detainees and have improperly served as a conduit to the news media, assertions that have drawn angry responses from some of the lawyers.

The dispute is the latest and perhaps the most significant clash over the role of lawyers for the detainees. “There is no right on the part of counsel to access to detained aliens on a secure military base in a foreign country,” the Justice Department filing argued.

Under the proposal, filed this month in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the government would limit lawyers to three visits with an existing client at Guantánamo; there is now no limit. It would permit only a single visit with a detainee to have him authorize a lawyer to handle his case. And it would permit a team of intelligence officers and military lawyers not involved in a detainee’s case to read mail sent to him by his lawyer.

The proposal would also reverse existing rules to permit government officials, on their own, to deny the lawyers access to secret evidence used by military panels to determine that their clients were enemy combatants.

Many of the lawyers say the restrictions would make it impossible to represent their clients, or even to convince wary detainees — in a single visit — that they were really lawyers, rather than interrogators.

Click here to read the full article.

Climate Panel Confident Warming Is Underway

2007-04-04T22:37:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

The newest international assessment of the consequences of Earth's warming climate has concluded with "high confidence" that human-generated greenhouse gases are already triggering changes in ecosystems on land and sea across the globe.

The second working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was charged with tracking the impact of global warming on specific regions and species, plans to release its final report tomorrow in Brussels. The Washington Post obtained a near-final draft of the report yesterday.

That document -- which follows an IPCC study in February that concluded with at least 90 percent certainty that humans are responsible for Earth's recent warming -- provides a more detailed look at how emissions from automobiles, industry and other sources are affecting life around the world.

The draft says "much more evidence has accumulated over the past five years" to indicate that changes such as longer growing seasons and earlier leaf-unfolding and earlier egg-laying by birds are traceable to human activities.

Click here to read the full article.

New Effort to Pass Equal Rights Amendment

2007-03-27T22:53:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

Federal and state lawmakers have launched a new drive to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, reviving a feminist goal that faltered a quarter-century ago when the measure did not gain the approval of three-quarters of the state legislatures.

The amendment, which came three states short of enactment in 1982, has been introduced in five state legislatures since January. Yesterday, House and Senate Democrats reintroduced the measure under a new name -- the Women's Equality Amendment -- and vowed to bring it to a vote in both chambers by the end of the session.

Click here to read the entire article.

N.Ireland's Parties Seal Power-Sharing Deal

2007-03-26T16:35:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

Northern Ireland's Catholics and Protestants agreed to a power-sharing local government Monday, following a deal struck by two political leaders who had bitterly denounced each other for decades but never held a conversation.

The new provincial government will begin on May 8 under terms agreed to by the Rev. Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, the province's largest Protestant party, and Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein, the largest Catholic party. Sitting side by side in an ornate dining room in Stormont, Northern Ireland's palatial parliament building, the two fierce rivals pledged cooperation in governance of a province where their followers engaged in a three-decade war that claimed more than 3,600 lives.

Click here to read the full article.

Negotiations On N. Ireland Government In Jeopardy

2007-03-25T23:41:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

Northern Ireland's rival Catholic and Protestant political parties engaged in a flurry of behind-the-scenes negotiations Sunday, racing against a deadline to agree to terms for a new power-sharing government or have London retain full control of the province's affairs.

The British government has given the parties until Monday to form a local government, which is seen as a critical step toward cementing peace following the more than three decades of sectarian war that ended with a cease-fire in 1997. But as of late Sunday, any chance of meeting the deadline appeared in serious jeopardy because the province's largest Protestant party, the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), insisted that the deadline be extended until May.

Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, London's top official for the province, said Sunday that Britain would dissolve the 108-member local assembly and scrap plans for local management of day-to-day governance if no agreement were reached by Monday. He said Northern Ireland had achieved "fantastic success" in efforts toward creating a peaceful and prosperous society and warned, "It would be a great tragedy if the politicians managed to blow that success out of the water."

But in an interview with the BBC, Hain also left open the possibility that London would consider extending the deadline if the DUP and Sinn Fein, the province's largest Catholic party, reached an alternative agreement on a power-sharing deal. Hain said any such plan would have to include a specific date for when the parties could agree to begin working together.

"If there's another way forward that has certainty about it, of course I'm not going to turn my back on it," he said.

Hain also said it was "a sign of tremendous progress" that the DUP's leadership said Saturday that it would participate in a power-sharing government if the deadline were delayed six weeks, until May. In a statement made public Sunday, the party said a joint Catholic-Protestant government could make a "meaningful improvement in the lives of all of the people of Northern Ireland." The party also said it would "support and participate fully in a Northern Ireland executive if powers were devolved to it on an agreed date in May."

At a European Union meeting in Berlin, Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern discussed the matter with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and said the DUP's wish for a six-week delay was "not something we can live with, it is not satisfactory to us."

Creating a local assembly in which Catholics and Protestants govern together was a cornerstone of the 1998 Good Friday accord, which set out a blueprint for creating a lasting peace. The first assembly collapsed in October 2002 in a storm of mutual distrust between the rival parties. Although the body officially reconvened in May 2006, officials have been unable to come up with a plan for power-sharing between the "nationalist" Catholics, who favor reunification with the Republic of Ireland, and the "unionist" Protestants, who favor continued British rule.

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Terror Database Has Quadrupled In Four Years

2007-03-25T12:40:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

Each day, thousands of pieces of intelligence information from around the world -- field reports, captured documents, news from foreign allies and sometimes idle gossip -- arrive in a computer-filled office in McLean, where analysts feed them into the nation's central list of terrorists and terrorism suspects.

Called TIDE, for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, the list is a storehouse for data about individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States. It is the wellspring for watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border posts and U.S. consulates, created to close one of the key intelligence gaps revealed after Sept. 11, 2001: the failure of federal agencies to share what they knew about al-Qaeda operatives.

But in addressing one problem, TIDE has spawned others. Ballooning from fewer than 100,000 files in 2003 to about 435,000, the growing database threatens to overwhelm the people who manage it. "The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control," said Russ Travers, in charge of TIDE at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean. "Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?"

TIDE has also created concerns about secrecy, errors and privacy. The list marks the first time foreigners and U.S. citizens are combined in an intelligence database. The bar for inclusion is low, and once someone is on the list, it is virtually impossible to get off it. At any stage, the process can lead to "horror stories" of mixed-up names and unconfirmed information, Travers acknowledged.

The watch lists fed by TIDE, used to monitor everyone entering the country or having even a casual encounter with federal, state and local law enforcement, have a higher bar. But they have become a source of irritation -- and potentially more serious consequences -- for many U.S. citizens and visitors.

In 2004 and 2005, misidentifications accounted for about half of the tens of thousands of times a traveler's name triggered a watch-list hit, the Government Accountability Office reported in September. Congressional committees have criticized the process, some charging that it collects too much information about Americans, others saying it is ineffective against terrorists. Civil rights and privacy groups have called for increased transparency.

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Arab minority demands say in governing Israel

2007-02-22T01:44:00.000-07:00

From the LA Times:

A broadly representative elite of Israel's Arab minority has rejected the idea of Israel as a Jewish state and demanded a partnership in governing the country to ensure that Arab citizens get equal treatment and more control over their communities.

In a manifesto that is stirring anger and soul-searching among Jews, Arab leaders have declared that Israel's 1.4 million Arab citizens are an indigenous group with collective rights, not just individual rights. The document argues that Arabs are entitled to share power in a binational state and block policies that discriminate against them.

Arab citizens, who make up about one-fifth of Israel's population, have always felt alienated by the Star of David on Israel's flag and a national anthem that expresses the Jewish yearning for a return to Zion. They have long protested the disproportionate Jewish share of budget resources, public services and land.

Until now, though, only small groups of Arab intellectuals had dared to advocate collective equality or the abolition of Jewish national symbols.

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U.S. Officials Agree to Release Domestic Spying Documents

2007-01-31T14:03:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and other officials said they have agreed to turn over classified documents about the government's domestic spying program to the congressional judiciary and intelligence committees as early as today, ending a standoff that had included threats of subpoenas from Capitol Hill.

The agreement follows Gonzales's announcement two weeks ago that the Bush administration was abandoning a controversial program that allowed the National Security Agency to spy on Americans without warrants because it now has approval for the monitoring from a secret intelligence court.

But the administration has refused to release the court's Jan. 10 orders publicly, and leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary committees had been rebuffed in their demands for copies of the documents.

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World Court Takes First Case

2007-01-29T23:26:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

The International Criminal Court ruled Monday that Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, charged with recruiting child soldiers as young as 10 and sending them into battle, will be the first defendant to face trial at the newly established court.

At a public hearing in The Hague, presiding Judge Claude Jorda announced that evidence presented by prosecutors was sufficient to "establish strong grounds to believe" that Lubanga was responsible "for war crimes consisting of enlisting and conscripting children under the age of 15."

Lubanga, 46, led a faction in the civil war that broke out in Congo in 1998, drawing in forces from numerous neighboring countries. He was arrested in Kinshasa in March 2005 and moved to a high-security detention facility near the Dutch North Sea coast the following year. A father of seven, he holds a degree in psychology.

Jorda said that children were "led to kill" in clashes between ethnic Hema and Lendu people in the Ituri region, and that some fighters under age 15 lost their lives. Many of the underage soldiers were systematically drugged to numb them against the fear of warfare, he said.

Three boys and three girls, one only 10 years old when Congo's civil war broke out, were among those interviewed in preparing the case.

Backed by 104 countries, the International Criminal Court is meant to replace the current system of ad hoc courts prosecuting war crimes suspects in specific conflicts, such as the ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia. The United States has declined to join, saying the court's proceedings are likely to be politicized and result in unjust prosecution of Americans.

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Scientists Gather to Finalize Climate Report

2007-01-29T12:11:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

Scientists from across the world gathered here today to hammer out the final details of an authoritative report on climate change that is expected to project centuries of rising temperatures and sea levels unless curbs are placed on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

According to scientists involved with writing or reviewing the report, the fourth since 1990 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body overseen by the United Nations, it is nearly certain to conclude that there is at least a 90 percent probability that human-caused emissions are the main driver of warming since 1950.

The report, according to several authors, who spoke only on condition of anonymity saying that details could still change, will describe a growing body of evidence showing that warming is likely to profoundly transform the planet.

Three large sections of the report will be forthcoming during the year, with the summary for policymakers and sections on basic climate science coming on Friday.

Among findings in recent drafts are that the Arctic Ocean could largely be devoid of sea ice in summers later in the century; the Alps could shift from snowy winter destinations to summer havens from the heat; growing seasons in temperate regions will expand, while droughts will likely further ravage semi-arid regions of Africa and southern Asia.

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Contractors Are Cited in Abuses at Guantanamo

2007-01-04T01:16:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

New allegations of detainee abuse at Guantanamo Bay released by the FBI on Tuesday put private contractors at the center of interrogation operations, raising questions once again about where they fit in the military's chain of command.

The FBI's disclosures, which are based on eyewitness reports, refer several times to contractors directing the Army's interrogation efforts at the military detention center in Cuba. In at least one case, FBI agents were told that detainees may have been mistreated on orders from a contractor.

Taken together, the documents suggest a greater role for contractors than was previously known, and contracting experts said they indicate a further blurring of the limits on how much responsibility the private sector can carry in doing the public's work.

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American Farm Subsidies

2006-12-22T00:15:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has an interesting article about an effort to restructure farm subsidies. Below is a portion of the article:

Bread for the World, an anti-hunger organization, has brought religious leaders to Washington to lobby for cuts in subsidies, which they argue can lead to a glut on world markets that hurts poor farmers abroad. The Republican-leaning Club for Growth says subsidies stand in the way of a global trade deal that would help U.S. business. A politically potent coalition of unsubsidized fruit and vegetable growers from California and Florida want their share of the pie. Even the National Corn Growers Association, with 33,000 members, advocates an overhaul.

But these groups will be going up against one of Washington's most effective lobbies as Congress takes up a new farm bill next year.

The farm bloc is an efficient, tightknit club of farmers, rural banks, insurance companies, real estate operators and tractor dealers. Many of its Washington lobbyists are former lawmakers or congressional aides. Harnessed to dozens of grass-roots groups, such as the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Cotton Council and the USA Rice Federation, farm-state lawmakers -- the "aggies," as they call themselves -- fight with the fervor of the embattled.

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Bush Signs India Nuclear Law

2006-12-19T18:46:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

President Bush signed legislation yesterday permitting civilian nuclear cooperation with India, reversing three decades of nonproliferation policy in the interest of redefining U.S. relations with the world's largest democracy and reshaping the geopolitical balance as China asserts itself in Asia.

Bush, who has made the fight against the spread of nuclear weapons a centerpiece of his foreign policy, persuaded Congress to make an exception for India despite its not having signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Although critics warn that the deal could spark a regional arms race, Bush called it a landmark moment that finally relegates Cold War-era tensions to the past.

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Lethal Injection Is On Hold in 2 States

2006-12-15T21:43:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

Executions by lethal injection were suspended in Florida and ordered revamped in California on Friday, as the chemical method once billed as a more humane way of killing the condemned came under mounting scrutiny over the pain it may cause.

Gov. Jeb Bush (R) ordered the suspension in Florida after a botched execution in which it took 34 minutes and a second injection to kill convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz. A state medical examiner said that needles used to carry the poison had passed through the prisoner's veins and delivered the three-chemical mix into the tissues of his arm.

In California, a federal judge ruled that the state must overhaul its lethal-injection procedures, calling its current protocol unconstitutional because it may inflict unacceptable levels of pain.

Judge Jeremy D. Fogel of the U.S. District Court for Northern California ordered the state to revise its procedures and consider eliminating the use of two drugs: pancuronium bromide, which causes paralysis, and potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest.

The judge did not order executions halted, though they have been effectively on hold since February while he conducted a review.

The "pervasive lack of professionalism" in the executions, Fogel wrote, "at the least is very disturbing."

More than 30 states, including Virginia and Maryland, use the same three-drug sequence for lethal injections. Groups opposed to the death penalty have had increasing success arguing that the pain the cocktail inflicts is unconstitutional "cruel and unusual punishment."

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Homeless in state: 11,890

2006-12-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

From the Rocky Mountain News:

The first statewide summertime survey of homelessness in 17 years found 11,890 people living everywhere from emergency shelters in Denver to potato cellars in rural Colorado.

The survey, conducted on Aug. 28 by more than 400 volunteers, provided a one-day snapshot of homelessness, not just in urban areas but in places not traditionally thought of as havens for the homeless.

"We're going to have homeless numbers in communities that didn't think they had homeless," said Kathi Williams, director of the Colorado Division of Housing, which helped coordinate the count along with several other agencies.

The findings released Wednesday are preliminary and contained no data yet on exactly where the homeless were counted. Those figures are expected to be contained in a full report in January.

The preliminary results also found that 75 percent of those surveyed indicated they had been homeless more than once. The survey also found that 60 percent of the homeless were families with children.

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The Persistently Poor

2006-12-07T22:56:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

Despite an intensified campaign against poverty, World Bank programs have failed to lift incomes in many poor countries over the past decade, leaving tens of millions of people suffering stagnating or declining living standards, according to a report released Thursday by the bank's autonomous assessment arm.

Among 25 poor countries probed in detail by the bank's Independent Evaluation Group, only 11 experienced reductions in poverty from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, while 14 had the same or worsening rates over that term. The group said the sample was representative of the global picture.

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Peacekeeping Force For Somalia Approved

2006-12-06T23:19:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

The U.N. Security Council unanimously approved a resolution authorizing an East African peacekeeping force to prevent an alliance of Islamic militias from overthrowing Somalia's fragile interim government.

The decision marked the first time the 15-nation council has backed a foreign intervention in Somalia since U.S. and U.N. troops withdrew from the country in the 1990s. It reflected fears that Islamic militias, known as the Islamic Courts Union, may be poised to topple the country's internationally recognized government.

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Congress Addresses Voting; Advocates Hold Breath

2006-12-01T16:23:00.000-07:00

From NPR:

The debate over electronic voting machines is heating up. A draft government report concludes that paperless touchscreen voting is not secure. And questions continue over 18,000 ballots cast in Sarasota County, Fla. This has boosted efforts in Congress to require paper backups on electronic voting equipment, but some experts think that will only further complicate elections.

Sarasota election workers spent hours today at a warehouse testing five of the county's touch screen voting machines. They're trying to figure out why thousands of ballots showed no votes for a congressional race in the midterm elections.

Observers outside the room listened through speakers as the workers were instructed on how to re-enact the November vote, in an effort to see if the machines might be at fault. An answer isn't expected before next week. But Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) thinks no one will ever know.

"The problem cannot be resolved now without a paper trail," he says. He claims there's no way to verify the electronic results without some kind of paper backup to compare results. His argument has been bolstered by a draft report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The agency is helping to develop federal guidelines for voting equipment, although it's not clear the NIST findings will be adopted. Holt says something has to be done soon, even if, on the surface, appears that the midterm elections went relatively well.

"For all we know, there are other examples maybe dozens it could be...where maybe 18,000 votes are not missing, but maybe 400 votes or 1,000 votes are missing," says Holt.

The congressman already has more than half of his House colleagues as cosponsors for his bill to require paper backups on electronic voting machines. He expects quick action next year.

In the Senate, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein plans to introduce a similar bill in January. And aides say she'll hold aggressive hearings on the issue as the new chairman of the Senate Rules Committee.

"The most important thing for Congress is to take a deep breath," says Dan Tokaji, an election-law expert at Ohio State University. He worries that momentum is building for something that could prove to be a mistake.

"Passing paper trails at this stage, based on what we know right now is really fool's gold. It may provide an initial sense of confidence. But that confidence won't be long-lasting unless we resolve some deeper issues."

Issues such as adequate poll worker training and better voter access. Tokaji notes that there's strong evidence that the problem in Sarasota wasn't due to the machines. Researchers from Dartmouth and UCLA concluded last week that many of the county's voters probably overlooked the race because of poor ballot design.

In addition, lots of election officials complain that paper audit trails cause more problems than they solve. Georgia Secretary of State Kathy Cox spoke at a forum this week in Washington.

"If the paper jams and the voter doesn't know what to look for, the election poll worker may not understand there's a jam," Cox said. "When you go to count your paper component, it's not going to match your electronic component because there was a jam. So the paper is not a panacea."

In fact, a study in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, found that 10 percent of paper ballots attached to its touchscreen machines were blank, ripped or otherwise uncountable. That's causing local jurisdictions to take matters into their own hands as the debate over how to make electronic voting more reliable continues.

Cuyahoga County commissioners this week said they want to ditch their new touchscreen voting equipment before the next election. Voters in Sarasota County agreed in November to do the same thing.

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Experts Concerned as Ballot Problems Persist

2006-11-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

After six years of technological research, more than $4 billion spent by Washington on new machinery and a widespread overhaul of the nation’s voting system, this month’s midterm election revealed that the country is still far from able to ensure that every vote counts.

Tens of thousands of voters, scattered across more than 25 states, encountered serious problems at the polls, including failures in sophisticated new voting machines and confusion over new identification rules, according to interviews with election experts and officials.

In many places, the difficulties led to shortages of substitute paper ballots and long lines that caused many voters to leave without casting ballots. Still, an association of top state election officials concluded that for the most part, voting went as smoothly as expected.

Over the last three weeks, attention has been focused on a few close races affected by voting problems, including those in Florida and Ohio where counting dragged on for days. But because most of this year’s races were not close, election experts say voting problems may actually have been wider than initially estimated, with many malfunctions simply overlooked.

That oversight may not be possible in the presidential election of 2008, when turnout will be higher and every vote will matter in what experts say will probably be a close race.

Voting experts say it is impossible to say how many votes were not counted that should have been. But in Florida alone, the discrepancies reported across Sarasota County and three others amount to more than 60,000 votes. In Colorado, as many as 20,000 people gave up trying to vote, election officials say, as new online systems for verifying voter registrations crashed repeatedly. And in Arkansas, election officials tallied votes three times in one county, and each time the number of ballots cast changed by more than 30,000.

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World Court Official Reports Evidence on Darfur Criminals

2006-11-25T20:49:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

The International Criminal Court has found sufficient evidence to identify the perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities in Sudan's Darfur region, and the probe offers "reasonable grounds to believe" that crimes against humanity were committed, chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo told the annual meeting of the court's member states in The Hague.

"We selected incidents during the period in which the gravest crimes occurred," he said Thursday in a report on his activities over the past year. "Based on the evidence collected, we identified those most responsible for the crimes." Moreno-Ocampo did not name the targets of the investigation, which he said is nearly complete.

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U.S. Finds Iraq Insurgency Has Funds to Sustain Itself

2006-11-25T20:47:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

The insurgency in Iraq is now self-sustaining financially, raising tens of millions of dollars a year from oil smuggling, kidnapping, counterfeiting, connivance by corrupt Islamic charities and other crimes that the Iraqi government and its American patrons have been largely unable to prevent, a classified United States government report has concluded.

The report, obtained by The New York Times, estimates that groups responsible for many insurgent and terrorist attacks are raising $70 million to $200 million a year from illegal activities. It says $25 million to $100 million of that comes from oil smuggling and other criminal activity involving the state-owned oil industry, aided by “corrupt and complicit” Iraqi officials.

As much as $36 million a year comes from ransoms paid for hundreds of kidnap victims, the report says. It estimates that unnamed foreign governments — previously identified by American officials as including France and Italy — paid $30 million in ransom last year.

A copy of the seven-page report was made available to The Times by American officials who said the findings could improve understanding of the challenges the United States faces in Iraq.

The report offers little hope that much can be done, at least soon, to choke off insurgent revenues. For one thing, it acknowledges how little the American authorities in Iraq know — three and a half years after the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein — about crucial aspects of insurgent operations. For another, it paints an almost despairing picture of the Iraqi government’s ability, or willingness, to take steps to tamp down the insurgency’s financing.

“If accurate,” the report says, its estimates indicate that these “sources of terrorist and insurgent finance within Iraq — independent of foreign sources — are currently sufficient to sustain the groups’ existence and operation.” To this, it adds what may be its most surprising conclusion: “In fact, if recent revenue and expense estimates are correct, terrorist and insurgent groups in Iraq may have surplus funds with which to support other terrorist organizations outside of Iraq.”

Some terrorism experts outside the government who were given an outline of the report by The Times criticized it as imprecise and speculative. Completed in June, the report was compiled by an interagency working group investigating the financing of militant groups in Iraq.

A Bush administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed the group’s existence. He said it was led by Juan Zarate, deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, and was made up of about a dozen people, drawn from the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department, the Treasury Department and the United States Central Command.

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Activists Cite Flaws In Nepal's Peace Deal

2006-11-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

Human rights activists on Wednesday welcomed an agreement designed to end a 10-year war between the government of Nepal and Maoist rebels but said it failed to ensure that perpetrators of abuses underlying the conflict would pay for their crimes.

Mandira Sharma, a leading human rights advocate from Nepal, said the country was "moving in the right direction" by consolidating a cease-fire agreement with the new accord and committing to dialogue. But from a human rights perspective, she said, the agreement "is weak."

"It mentions a truth commission but does not give a time frame," said Sharma, who is currently touring the United States. "The approach and mind-set is to move forward. The government thinks if we start delving into all the extrajudicial killings and disappearances, that will hamper the peace process."

Nepal's civil war has resulted in more than 13,000 deaths. Peace negotiations began seven months ago after an uprising by civil society groups, which ended King Gyanendra's autocratic rule.

The king's Royal Nepalese Army is accused of killing noncombatants, torturing prisoners and illegally detaining more than 1,200 people, according to Human Rights Watch. The Maoists, in turn, have publicly executed people they deemed enemies, tortured individuals suspected of treason and forcibly recruited thousands of child soldiers.

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Iraqi civilian deaths hit new high

2006-11-22T11:32:00.000-07:00

From the LA Times:

In its bleakest assessment since the U.S.-led invasion, the United Nations today reported the highest monthly death toll among Iraqi civilians so far: At least 3,709 killed during October, up nearly 400 from September and 700 more than in August.

The vast majority of the killings took place in Baghdad.

The continued slaughter of civilians as well as increasing poverty has forced more than 2 million people from their homes, according to the report. Every month, nearly 100,000 Iraqis flee to neighboring Jordan and Syria, the U.N. found.

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Report: Jewish Settlements Built on Palestinian Property

2006-11-21T12:03:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

An Israeli advocacy group has found that 39 percent of the land used by Jewish settlements in the West Bank is private Palestinian property, and contends that construction there violates international and Israeli law guaranteeing the protection of property rights in the occupied territories.

In a critical report released here Tuesday, the Settlement Watch project of Peace Now also disclosed that much of the land that Israeli officials have said would remain part of the Jewish state under any final peace agreement is private Palestinian property.

That includes some of the large settlement blocs inside the barrier that Israel is building to separate Israelis from the Palestinian population in the West Bank. The report states that 86 percent of Maale Adumim on Jerusalem's eastern edge sits on private Palestinian land. A little more than 35 percent of the settlement of Ariel, which cuts deep into the northern West Bank, is also on private property.

Israel's government has long maintained that the settlements, developed in large part with public money, sit on untitled property known as "state land" or on property of unclear legal status. Israeli courts have also ruled that unauthorized outposts erected on private Palestinian property must be razed, although those orders are rarely carried out.

The 38-page report offers what appears to be a comprehensive argument against the Israeli government's contention that it avoids building on private land, drawing on the state's own data to make the case. Israeli officials said Tuesday they are studying the findings.

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For West Bank, It’s a Highway to Frustration

2006-11-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

For West Bank, It’s a Highway to Frustration

By GREG MYRE

November 18, 2006

ROAD 60, West Bank, Nov. 14 — For four years, the separation barrier Israel has been building just inside the West Bank boundary has drawn protests from Palestinians and international censure for the hardship it imposes on their movement and access to jobs and land.

But getting much less notice have been parallel and perhaps even more restrictive measures imposed by the Israeli military much deeper inside the West Bank. The internal checkpoints and barriers on roads have increasingly limited movement, something Palestinians say they find especially grating, because they are not trying to enter Israel, only to go from one Palestinian area to another.

On a two-day, 75-mile trip along Road 60, the main north-south highway that runs along the hilly spine of the West Bank, a reporter and a photographer for The New York Times examined the daily friction between Palestinian civilians and Israeli soldiers.

In one of the more sweeping restrictions, men under 35 from the northern West Bank are generally not allowed to leave the area. The rules often change, but this one has been enforced most days for the last four months, Palestinians say.

“My main job now is waiting in line,” Hakim Abu Shamli, 40, said during a two-hour delay at a teeming checkpoint. Mr. Abu Shamli, an electrical engineer, lives in Tubas near the city of Nablus, and for years his commute to work was a 20-minute taxi ride. Now he leaves home at 5:30 a.m. to reach his job by 8, and he is often late. There are always two checkpoints, and one recent day there were seven, he said.

The Israeli military says that the web of travel restrictions was imposed in response to the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000 and that the measures have greatly reduced the number of deadly attacks by Palestinians.

“We’re seeing an increasing fragmentation of the West Bank,” said David Shearer, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which monitors the West Bank. “The whole fabric of life for the Palestinians has been disrupted.”

His office says Palestinians traveling within the West Bank now face 542 obstacles, 83 of which are guarded by soldiers, compared with fewer than 400 a year ago. The obstacles have effectively divided the West Bank into three sectors — northern, central and southern — and limited movement among them.

“We know these measures harm the quality of life of the Palestinians, but they save the lives of Israelis,” said Shlomo Dror, a spokesman for the government department that deals with the Palestinians.

As Palestinians make their way through dozens of military checkpoints, they are delayed for hours, rerouted to dirt roads and sometimes turned back altogether on their way to jobs, schools and family visits. They also face hundreds of unattended obstacles that include earth mounds, concrete blocks and trenches that have cut many roads, forcing lengthy detours.

“I used to work as a laborer in Israel,” said Mutie Milhem, 33, a taxi driver near Jenin who had just endured a lengthy wait at a checkpoint. “When that became difficult, I thought it would be easier to be a driver in the West Bank. But every day here becomes harder. We never know what we are going to face.”

Jenin has the reputation as the most radical West Bank town, a center for militancy, and Israel has increasingly isolated it. Israel’s separation barrier, which consists of fences and walls, blocks travel in three directions, and the only way out of Jenin to another city is Road 60 to the south.

The town’s economy has been hit hard, and the main taxi stand overflows with frustrated drivers working their way through packs of cheap cigarettes. The drivers write their names on a blackboard and wait, sometimes for a day or more, before they are called to take passengers outside Jenin. Then they begin hitting obstacles well before reaching the closest Palestinian city, Nablus, less than 20 miles away.

Road 60 is closed to Palestinians for a short stretch that passes by Shavei Shomron, one of many Jewish settlements built on hilltops overlooking the road. To circumvent the blockade there, Palestinian taxi and truck drivers created a rutted path that travels across open fields for several miles.

By the western entrance to Nablus, at the Beit Iba checkpoint where Mr. Abu Shamli, the engineer, was stuck, the Israeli soldiers grew angry as the Palestinian crowd began bunching around them. The soldiers began confiscating identity documents as a punishment, though they later returned them.

Israel says the multiple layers of security not only keep Palestinian attackers out of Israel but also protect the 250,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Before the Palestinian uprising began in 2000, obstacles in the West Bank were relatively few.

“Route 60, used both by the Israeli and Palestinian populations, is a designated location for terrorist attacks against Israelis,” the Israeli military said in a statement. “If it were not for Palestinian terrorism, the crossings would not have been established.”

The Israeli military listed 13 actual or attempted Palestinian attacks on Road 60 in the last year, with four Israelis killed. In addition, Palestinians threw stones or fired on cars dozens of times.

In the northern West Bank, jobs are extremely scarce and the movement restriction on men under 35 has made it virtually impossible for them to look elsewhere in the West Bank for work. University students, most of them commuters, also face a tough time with changing rules.

“Sometimes I can’t make it to the university,” said Ala Suboh, 21, an engineering student at Al Najah University in Nablus. “Other times I make it but I’m not allowed to leave the city and have to spend the night on the floor of a friend’s house.”

The Hawara checkpoint, on the southeastern edge of Nablus, is about 15 miles from the closest West Bank boundary, and a few years back it consisted of several soldiers on the side of the road checking identity documents. Now it resembles an international border.

Israel says internal checkpoints like the one at Hawara are crucial. Numerous would-be suicide bombers have been stopped there.

In 2002, West Bank Palestinians carried out more than 50 suicide bombings; this year there have been two that killed Israelis.

Many Palestinians going through the checkpoint are commuting to Nablus from their homes in surrounding villages. Yet Palestinians must go through turnstiles and metal detectors, while soldiers work on computers in glass booths.

It routinely takes an hour or more to pass during the morning and evening rush hours. Cars cannot pass unless they have permits from Israel. Some taxis and trucks have them, but private Palestinian cars on Road 60 are rare, because the permits are so hard to obtain.

The next major city along the road is Ramallah, the de facto political capital. Traditionally Palestinians have regarded the contiguous cities of Ramallah, Jerusalem and Bethlehem as one metropolitan area.

But now Israel does not allow the vast majority of West Bank Palestinians to enter Jerusalem. So they can no longer take Road 60 to Bethlehem and the south, but instead must take a lengthy detour on a narrow, winding road through the barren hills east of the city, which also includes a checkpoint.

Gabriel Jacoman, 50, was raised in a house on Road 60 as it enters Bethlehem. In 1994 he opened a chicken restaurant that thrived by serving the tourists who came from Jerusalem to visit the tomb of Rachel, the biblical matriarch.

Today his home and neighboring restaurant, now shuttered, are sandwiched between 25-foot concrete walls built across Road 60. One wall is several hundred yards north of his home and serves as the border between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. The second wall is a few paces south of his front door, part of the wall built around Rachel’s Tomb.

“This was the road everyone took from Jerusalem to the southern West Bank,” Mr. Jacoman said. “Now you can’t take it in either direction.”

In the 1990s, Israel rerouted parts of Road 60 so that it looped around some Palestinian towns. Those bypasses allowed Jewish settlers to travel the West Bank without having to go through Palestinian towns, where they often faced stones or worse.

The center of Hebron, the southernmost West Bank town on Road 60, is ghostly quiet. Aside from occasional pedestrians, the only activity consists of Israeli security forces patrolling near the Tomb of the Patriarchs.

Several hundred Jewish settlers live in the city. Israel has imposed some of its most severe restrictions on roughly 30,000 Palestinians who used to live in the center; many have moved out, at least temporarily.

“The whole area is completely dead,” said Talib Karaki, 50, who lives with more than 100 members of his extended family in a two-house compound near the tomb.

Last month Mr. Karaki’s 3-year-old grandson, Walid, picked up gravel and started tossing it toward a soldier at the checkpoint, Mr. Karaki said. The soldier came to complain, and a big argument ensued.

“The whole thing was ridiculous,” the grandfather said. “But it shows how crazy our life has become.”

Some Americans Lack Food, but USDA Won't Call Them Hungry

2006-11-16T11:40:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."

Every year, the Agriculture Department issues a report that measures Americans' access to food, and it has consistently used the word "hunger" to describe those who can least afford to put food on the table. But not this year.

Mark Nord, the lead author of the report, said "hungry" is "not a scientifically accurate term for the specific phenomenon being measured in the food security survey." Nord, a USDA sociologist, said, "We don't have a measure of that condition."

The USDA said that 12 percent of Americans -- 35 million people -- could not put food on the table at least part of last year. Eleven million of them reported going hungry at times. Beginning this year, the USDA has determined "very low food security" to be a more scientifically palatable description for that group.

The United States has set a goal of reducing the proportion of food-insecure households to 6 percent or less by 2010, or half the 1995 level, but it is proving difficult. The number of hungriest Americans has risen over the past five years. Last year, the total share of food-insecure households stood at 11 percent.

Click here to read the article.

Congo Pins Protest on Homeless

2006-11-13T22:49:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

Scores of homeless children and others living on the streets of Congo's capital have been rounded up and accused of starting a protest that led to violence, officials said Monday. The move came as this increasingly tense nation awaited results of a presidential election.

Advocates for street children said those arrested were scapegoats, but Interior Minister Denis Kalume was quoted on state radio as saying the 337 homeless people, including 87 children and 15 mothers, had provoked violence "by disturbing the peace." Kalume said they were being taken outside the capital for "social training."

Violence erupted Saturday between supporters of President Joseph Kabila and Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba, the contenders in a presidential runoff late last month. The governor of the Congolese capital said gun and mortar fire killed three civilians and a soldier in front of Bemba's home -- the scene of the weekend fighting.

Click here to access the entire article.

Citizenship Requirements Put Infants' Access to Medicaid in Danger

2006-11-12T17:50:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

November 3, 2006
Medicaid Wants Citizenship Proof For Infant Care
By ROBERT PEAR
Under a new federal policy, children born in the United States to illegal immigrants with low incomes will no longer be automatically entitled to health insurance through Medicaid, Bush administration officials said Thursday.
Doctors and hospitals said the policy change would make it more difficult for such infants, who are United States citizens, to obtain health care needed in the first year of life.
Illegal immigrants are generally barred from Medicaid but can get coverage for treatment of emergency medical conditions, including labor and delivery.
In the past, once a woman received emergency care under Medicaid for the birth of a baby, the child was deemed eligible for coverage as well, and states had to cover the children for one year from the date of birth.
Under the new policy, an application must be filed for the child, and the parents must provide documents to prove the child's citizenship.
The documentation requirements took effect in July, but some states have been slow to enforce them, and many doctors are only now becoming aware of the effects on newborns.
Obtaining a birth certificate can take weeks in some states, doctors said. Moreover, they said, illegal immigrant parents may be reluctant to go to a state welfare office to file applications because they fear contact with government agencies that could report their presence to immigration authorities.
Administration officials said the change was necessary under their reading of a new law, the Deficit Reduction Act, signed by President Bush in February. The law did not mention newborns, but generally tightened documentation requirements because some lawmakers were concerned that immigrants were fraudulently claiming United States citizenship to get Medicaid.
Marilyn E. Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Medicaid program, said: ''The federal government told us we have no latitude. All states must change their policies and practices. We will not be able to cover any services for the newborn until a Medicaid application is filed. That could be days, weeks or months after the child is born.''
About four million babies are born in the United States each year, and Medicaid pays for more than one-third of all births. The number involving illegal immigrant parents is unknown but is likely to be in the tens of thousands, health experts said.
Doctors and hospitals denounced the policy change and denied that it was required by the new law. Dr. Jay E. Berkelhamer, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the policy ''punishes babies who, according to the Constitution, are citizens because they were born here.''
Dr. Martin C. Michaels, a pediatrician in Dalton, Ga., said that continuous coverage in the first year of life was important because ''newborns need care right from the start.''
''Some Americans may want to grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants, and others may want to send them home,'' Dr. Michaels said. ''But the children who are born here had no say in that debate.''
Under a 1984 law, infants born to pregnant women on Medicaid are in most cases deemed eligible for Medicaid for one year.
In an interview on Thursday, Leslie V. Norwalk, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the new policy ''reflects what the new law says in terms of eligibility.''
''When emergency Medicaid pays for a birth,'' Ms. Norwalk said, ''the child is not automatically deemed eligible. But the child could apply and could qualify for Medicaid because of the family's poverty status. If anyone knows about a child being denied care, we want to know about it. Please step up and tell us.''
Under federal law, hospitals generally have to examine and treat patients who need emergency care, regardless of their ability to pay. So the new policy is most likely to affect access to other types of care, including preventive services and treatment for infections and chronic conditions, doctors said.
Representative Charlie Norwood, Republican of Georgia, was a principal architect of the new law.
''Charlie's intent was that every person receiving Medicaid needs to provide documentation,'' said John E. Stone, a spokesman for Mr. Norwood, who is a dentist and has been active on health care issues. ''With newborns, there should be no problem. All you have to do is provide a birth certificate or hospital records verifying birth.''
But Dr. Berkelhamer disagreed. Even when the children are eligible for Medicaid, he said, illegal immigrants may be afraid to apply because of ''the threat of deportation.''
The new policy ''will cost the health care system more in the long run,'' Dr. Berkelhamer added, because children of illegal immigrants may go without immunizations, preventive care and treatments needed in the first year of life.
Doctors, children's hospitals and advocacy groups have been urging states to preserve the old policy on Medicaid eligibility for children born to illegal immigrants.
Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law at George Washington University, said: ''The new policy reflects a tortured reading of the new law and is contrary to the language of the 1984 statute, which Congress did not change. The whole purpose of the earlier law, passed with bipartisan support, was to make sure that a baby would not have a single day's break in coverage from the date of birth through the first year of life.''
California has objected to the new policy. S. Kimberly Belshé, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, said: ''By virtue of being born in the United States, a child is a U.S. citizen. What more proof does the federal government need?''

--JB

Kidnappings Return to Sri Lanka

2006-11-12T17:47:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

November 7, 2006
Kidnappings Haunt Long War in Sri Lanka
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Like a returning ghost, a rash of mysterious abductions has come to haunt this country once more.
Men and women are being grabbed from their homes, sometimes after dark, sometimes in broad daylight. Ransom is demanded in some cases; in others, political intimidation seems to be the point. A few have been freed, but corpses have also turned up. With rare exceptions, the crimes remain unsolved.
The abductions are a terrifying sideshow in Sri Lanka’s newly revived ethnic conflict, and they contain eerie echoes of the horrors of a generation ago, when this island nation achieved notoriety for tens of thousands of disappearances.
For nearly a quarter of a century, the ethnic Sinhalese-dominated government has been locked in battle with Tamil separatist guerrillas. A new menace has come in the form of a breakaway Tamil rebel faction, widely accused of being allied with the government and — say kidnapping victims lucky enough to tell their tales — of having a hand in the abductions.
The government denies having any link to the group, called the Karuna faction, and describes the latest abductions as a law-and-order problem that it can tackle.
It is difficult to know who is responsible, or exactly how many people have been seized.
The International Committee of the Red Cross says it received more than 350 reports of disappeared persons through late October. The National Human Rights Commission logged 419 such complaints between last December and September.
A private human rights advocacy group, called Home for Human Rights, has documented 203 cases of missing persons in the first nine months of this year, using newspaper clippings and other reports. It lists 965 more extrajudicial killings, some of whose victims might also have been abducted.
The victims come from all walks of life: a radio reporter, a university dean, a fish trader. For the most part, they are Tamil, the country’s main ethnic minority. Many of the abductions have been carried out in government-controlled territory — sometimes in the heart of this highly fortified capital, at other times in the north and east, close to military installations. Some of those kidnapped have won release only after their families appealed to the highest echelons of the state.
A white van appears repeatedly in their recollections: it is the iconic symbol of the late 1980’s, when white vans were used in a wave of abductions as the government fought a violent leftist insurrection.
Despite the official denials, the abductions have spread a cloud over the administration of President Mahinda Rajapakse, including a recommendation by the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, to dispatch foreign monitors to investigate rights abuses here.
[Instead, on Nov. 6, Mr. Rajapakse’s government announced formation of a government commission of inquiry, to be aided by foreign observers. Ms. Arbour’s office cautiously welcomed the plan but warned of the need to “establish not only individual responsibility for crimes, but the broader patterns and context in which they occur.”]
The spike in rights abuses corresponds to the swift deterioration of a 2002 cease-fire between the Sri Lankan military and the ethnic rebels, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
The rights record of the Tamil Tigers has hardly been exemplary. They have been repeatedly accused of abductions, including of children whom they draft into military service. The rebels are also implicated in a rash of assassinations, in particular attacks on ethnic Tamils who work with the state.
The terror of this war has grown ever sharper with the emergence of the Karuna faction, which broke away from the Tamil Tigers.
Sathasivam Kumararatnam, the fish trader, was packed into a white van on a Thursday morning in late September from a street corner near his house. His captors, he said, pistol-whipped him, blindfolded and gagged him, bound his wrists and took his cash.
He was beaten and interrogated about his links to the Tamil Tigers. His family was then pressed for nearly $10,000 for his release. The Kumararatnams bargained his captors down to half that amount, and when a courier came to pick up the ransom, Mr. Kumararatnam’s first-born son, Ravindran, beat him to a pulp. He also forced a confession out of him. “I’m with the Karuna faction,” Ravindran said he heard him say.
The police confirmed that a man arrested in connection with Mr. Kumararatnam’s kidnapping had confessed to links to the rebel faction. They gave no further details.
His captors have since released Mr. Kumararatnam. But he is not yet free. He still receives threatening phone calls, he says. “This time, we will kill you,” the callers tell him.
The political nature of many of the abductions, even in cases where the kidnappers’ identities are hard to pin down, seems clear.
Nadaraja Kuruparan, a Tamil radio reporter, said he was not asked for a single rupee after he was yanked from his car one early morning in August. He was held overnight at what appeared to be a private house, he said, and told he would have to “clarify” some of his reports. He was released on the outskirts of Colombo the following day, and given taxi money to return home.
The government had previously warned the station about Mr. Kuruparan’s popular talk show, on which he had interviewed a Tamil Tiger leader this year. Since his kidnapping, he has decided to take the talk show off the air.
In another case, Balasingam Sugumar, the dean of arts at the main public university in Batticaloa, in the east, was plucked from his house and detained for 10 days, despite his family’s quiet efforts to buy off his captors, the family said.
In exchange for his release, his abductors demanded the resignation of a senior university administrator, whom they accused of having links to the Tamil Tiger rebels. It remains a mystery how the white van that came to get him on a Saturday night in late September managed to pass through the military checkpoints that sit on both ends of his road.
His family says they do not know what ultimately led to Mr. Sugumar’s release, only that they reached out to representatives of each of the warring parties, including President Rajapakse, who promised to investigate.
Mr. Sugumar refused to be interviewed. [He has since fled the country, his family said.]
For now, there seems to be little consensus within the government on who is behind the abductions, let alone what to do about them.
A senior negotiator for the government, Palitha T. B. Kohona, said the kidnappings represented a law-and-order challenge for the state. “We would like to get to the bottom of this,” he said. “We will intensify investigations if necessary.”
Gotabaya Rajapakse, the president’s brother, who also serves as defense secretary, said in late October that “lots of people” had been apprehended in connection with the abductions. But he did not have details on how many and in what period.
His claim was contradicted by a retired judge whom the president appointed to look into the abductions. The judge, Mahanama Tilakaratne, said the police had made virtually no arrests. He also said he believed many of the recent abductions were a result of personal grudges and had little to do with the ethnic conflict.
By way of example, he took out the file of one victim and pointed out that he was suspected of an extramarital affair. The judge said he could not share details of any other cases.
Many of those who disappeared a generation ago are still unaccounted for. Their faces stare out from a simple memorial erected on the outskirts of Colombo. Once a year, their families come to lay flowers.
In late October came a weeping father, W. A. W. Weerasinghe, to remember his son, Krishantha, who was stuffed into a white van one afternoon more than 16 years ago and has not been heard from since.
Along with dozens of other parents, Mr. Weerasinghe, 68, laid flowers and wept. “Disappearance is a crime against humanity,” reads a tablet at the base of the memorial. “Let us not allow it to happen again.”
At the time of those disappearances, President Rajapakse was an opposition lawmaker and a human rights activist whose colleagues were among the thousands abducted and killed. Nine months after Mr. Weerasinghe’s son disappeared, Mr. Rajapakse headed to Geneva to draw the attention of the United Nations to human rights abuses in his country, carrying with him reams of files on missing persons.
According to human rights groups and news reports from that time, the Sri Lankan police seized the documents at the airport.
Shimali Senanayake contributed reporting.

--JB

Despite Billions Spent, Rebuilding in Iraq Incomplete

2006-11-11T21:14:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

For a little more than $38 billion, the United States and its contractors in Iraq have provided 4.6 million people with access to water. They have distributed seeds to Iraqi farmers, improving wheat harvests. With electricity-generating capacity now above prewar levels, they have given many Iraqis more daily hours of power. They have repaired more than 5,000 schools and vaccinated 4.6 million children against polio.

The list goes on. But as the U.S.-led, U.S.-funded portion of Iraq's reconstruction nears its end, American officials and contractors alike are grappling with a cold reality: Thousands of successes in Iraq may add up to a single failure.

"We accomplished a significant amount of work. But it was just overwhelmed by the overlay of violence," said Clifford G. Mumm, who has spent much of the past three years in Iraq managing projects for Bechtel Corp. "It's hard to be very optimistic."

U.S.-funded projects have long been a target for sabotage. Many of those that were spared remain unused by a population paralyzed by violence.

Yet those inside the reconstruction effort say security concerns were hardly the only problem. Poor planning and coordination by U.S. officials meant that even successful individual projects failed to do the job; for example, health-care centers were built at great cost but had no water and sewer service. Poor work-site management by contractors meant that some projects went awry. And now that the United States is handing over reconstruction efforts to Iraq, many involved with the process worry that the Iraqis don't have the training or the money to keep U.S.-built facilities running.

This was not how the rebuilding of Iraq was supposed to go. In the fall of 2003, six months after the U.S. invasion, President Bush promised Iraq "the greatest financial commitment of its kind since the Marshall Plan." Top administration aides said they considered that plan, which helped rebuild Europe after World War II, to be a model for Iraq. Congress soon passed a spending bill that, while offering less money than the Marshall Plan, was expected to be enough to get Iraq back on its feet...

The United States has committed more than $38 billion to reconstructing Iraq, far more than any other nation, according to the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction. Most of that money is now gone. Three-quarters of the primary fund for rebuilding has been spent and the rest has been set aside for finishing key projects.

Overall, 88 percent of planned projects -- about 12,000 -- have been completed, with just 4 percent yet to begin.

Click here to access the full article.

U.S. Vetoes Security Council Resolution Assailing Israel for Attacks

2006-11-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times:

The United States vetoed a Security Council resolution on Saturday that condemned Israel for its military actions in Gaza and called for an immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from the area.The United States ambassador, John R. Bolton, told the Council that the resolution "does not display an even-handed characterization of the recent events in Gaza, nor does it advance the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace."The resolution, introduced by Qatar, the Arab representative on the Council, had been amended during two days of negotiations to meet objections that it was not balanced. But Mr. Bolton said it remained "in many places biased against Israel and politically motivated."In the vote, 4 countries abstained - Britain, Denmark, Japan and Slovakia - and 10 were in favor - Argentina, China, Congo, France, Ghana, Greece, Peru, Russia, Qatar and Tanzania.An original draft had made no mention of Palestinian rocket strikes into Israel and accused Israel of conducting a "massacre" of civilians in its attack at Beit Hanun on Wednesday that killed 18 civilians. New language was inserted condemning the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel and calling upon the Palestinian Authority to take "immediate and sustained action'' to end the rocket fire. But while the resolution named Israel as liable for the attacks on Gaza, it was silent on who or what group was responsible for the attacks on Israel.In other changes, a reference to "indiscriminate" violence became "disproportionate" violence, and the words "military assault," "aggression" and "massacre" were dropped in favor of the general phrase "military operations."Another provision had proposed that a new United Nations observer force be sent into the area to monitor a cease-fire, but it was substituted with language suggested by France that called for the creation of "an international mechanism for the protection of civilians."

Click here to read the full article.

Dirty Water Kills 5,000 Children a Day

2006-11-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

From the Guardian:

The United Nations Development Programme, in its annual Human Development report, argues that 1.1 billion people do not have safe water and 2.6 billion suffer from inadequate sewerage. This is not because of water scarcity but poverty, inequality and government failure.

The report urges governments to guarantee that each person has at least 20 litres of clean water a day, regardless of wealth, location, gender or ethnicity. If water was free to the poor, it adds, it could trigger the next leap forward in human development.

Many sub-Saharan Africans get less than 20 litres of water a day and two-thirds have no proper toilets. By contrast, the average Briton uses 150 litres a day while Americans are the world's most profligate, using 600 litres a day. Phoenix, Arizona, uses 1,000 litres per person on average - 100 times as much as Mozambique.

Click here to read the full aricle.

Saddam Hussein to Hang for Crimes Against Iraqis

2006-11-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was found guilty by a special tribunal Sunday of crimes against humanity for the torture and execution of more than 100 people from a small town north of Baghdad 24 years ago. He was sentenced to death by hanging.

Hussein, 69, was led into the courtroom by seven guards and immediately sat in his chair, refusing to rise for his verdict until Chief Judge Raouf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman ordered guards to force him to his feet...

The verdict and sentence will automatically be sent to a nine-judge appellate panel for appeal. That panel has wide latitude to review the case and call for additional testimony, and it has an unlimited time to rule. But once it does, any sentence must be carried out within 30 days.

Click here to read the full article.

U.S. Seeks Silence on CIA Prisons

2006-11-04T00:20:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods" that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national security secrets and that their release -- even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, a 26-year-old former Catonsville resident who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the "black" sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo, is seeking emergency access to him.

The government, in trying to block lawyers' access to the 14 detainees, effectively asserts that the detainees' experiences are a secret that should never be shared with the public.

Click here to read the full article.

Seafood Population Depleted by 2048, Study Finds

2006-11-02T16:12:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

The world will run out of seafood by 2048 if steep declines in marine species continue at current rates, according to a study released today by an international group of ecologists and economists.

The paper, published in the journal Science, concludes that overfishing, pollution, and other environmental factors are wiping out important species across the globe, hampering the ocean's ability to produce seafood, filter nutrients and resist the spread of disease.

Click here to read the article.

Warming Called Threat To Global Economy

2006-10-30T23:33:00.000-07:00

From the Washington Post:

Failing to curb the impact of climate change could damage the global economy on the scale of the Great Depression or the world wars by spawning environmental devastation that could cost 5 to 20 percent of the world's annual gross domestic product, according to a report issued yesterday by the British government.

The report by Nicholas Stern, who heads Britain's Government Economic Service and formerly served as the World Bank's chief economist, calls for a new round of international collaboration to cut greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming.

Click here to read the full article.

Also check out a related article from the NY Times entitled, " Budgets Falling in Race to Fight Global Warming."

In Baghdad, a Force Under the Militias' Sway

2006-10-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has an interesting article about how militias are infiltrating Iraqi police forces. The article can be accessed by clicking here.

Also check out, "U.S. Is Said to Fail in Tracking Arms Shipped to Iraqis." From the NY Times.

UN Passes Arms Trade Treaty Over US Opposition

2006-10-28T23:23:00.000-06:00

Click here to read the article.

Israeli Bomblets Continue to Trouble Civilians in Lebanon

2006-10-24T19:37:00.000-06:00

In case anyone missed this important article from the New York Times, which appeared on October 6th:

New York Times
October 6, 2006
ISRAELI BOMBLETS PLAGUE LEBANON
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN; NADA BAKRI CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FROM LEBANON.
Since the war between Israel and Hezbollah ended in August, nearly three people have been wounded or killed each day by cluster bombs Israel dropped in the waning days of the war, and officials now say it will take more than a year to clear the region of them.
United Nations officials estimate that southern Lebanon is littered with one million unexploded bomblets, far outnumbering the 650,000 people living in the region. They are stuck in the branches of olive trees and the broad leaves of banana trees. They are on rooftops, mixed in with rubble and littered across fields, farms, driveways, roads and outside schools.
As of Sept. 28, officials here said cluster bombs had severely wounded 109 people -- and killed 18 others.
Muhammad Hassan Sultan, a slender brown-haired 12-year-old, became a postwar casualty when the shrapnel from a cluster bomb cut into his head and neck. He was from Sawane, a hillside village with a panoramic view of terraced olive farms and rolling hills. Muhammad was sitting on a hip-high wall, watching a bulldozer clear rubble, when the machine bumped into a tree.
A flash of a second later he was fatally injured when a cluster bomblet dropped from the branches. ''I took Muhammad to the hospital in my car, but he was already dead,'' said Yousef Ftouni, a resident of the village.
The entire village was littered with the bomblets, and as Mr. Ftouni recounted Muhammad's death, the Lebanese Army worked its way through an olive grove, blowing up unexploded munitions in a painfully slow process of clearance.
Cluster bombs are legal if aimed at military targets and are very effective, military experts say. Nonetheless, Israel has been heavily criticized by United Nations officials, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for using cluster bombs, because they are difficult to focus exclusively on military targets. Israel was also criticized because it fired most of its cluster bombs in the last days of the war, when the United Nations Security Council was negotiating a resolution to end the conflict.
Officials calculate that if they are lucky, and money from international donors does not run out, it will take 15 months to clear the area. There are now about 300 Lebanese Army soldiers and 30 other clearance teams, each of up to 30 experts, working on the problem of unexploded bomblets.
The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center in southern Lebanon recorded 745 locations across the south where unexploded bombs had been found. Of the million estimated to be scattered around, so far 4,500 have been disposed of, according to the center.
''Our priority at the moment is to clean houses, main roads and gardens so that the displaced people can return to their villages,'' said Col. Mohammad Fahmy, head of the national mine clearing office. ''The next stage will be cleaning agricultural lands.''
In Lebanon there are two explanations of why Israel unleashed cluster bombs at the end of the war: to inflict as much damage as possible on Hezbollah before withdrawing, or to litter the south with unexploded cluster bombs as a strategy to keep people from returning right away.
The United States has sold cluster bombs to Israel in the past and says it is investigating whether Israel's use of cluster bombs in its war with Hezbollah violated a secret agreement that restricted when they could be used.
The final days of the war -- a conflict that began when Hezbollah launched rockets from Lebanon into northern Israel and sent militiamen across the border to capture Israeli soldiers -- were marked by a huge Israeli offensive. Israel hoped its final push would, in part, help force the Security Council to adopt a tougher resolution on Hezbollah than appeared to be taking shape.
Israel has said it leafleted areas before bombing and provided Lebanon with maps of potential cluster bomb locations to help with the clearing process. United Nations officials in Lebanon say the maps are useless.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article on Sept. 12 anonymously quoting the head of a rocket unit in Lebanon who was critical of the decision to use cluster bombs. ''What we did was insane and monstrous; we covered entire towns in cluster bombs,'' Haaretz quoted the commander as saying.
Repeated efforts to get Israeli officials to explain the rationale behind the use of the bombs have proved fruitless, with spokesmen referring all queries to short official statements arguing that everything done conformed with international law.
In Lebanon the problem of the unexploded munitions is magnified by the desire to return to villages and lives in a region that is effectively booby-trapped. People want to begin rebuilding and harvest their crops. In some cases they have tried to clear the bomblets themselves, and some people have begun charging a small fee to clear away bombs -- a practice that officials have discouraged as dangerous.
But the people are desperate.
''If I lost the season for olives and the wheat, I have no money for the winter,''' said Rida Noureddine, 54, who farms a small patch of land on the main road in the village of Kherbet Salem. There was a small black object at the entrance to his farm, and he thought it was a cluster bomb.
''I feel as if someone has tied my arms, or is holding me by my neck, suffocating me because this land is my soul,'' he said.
The bomblets, about the size of a D battery, can be packed into bombs, missiles or artillery shells. When the delivery system detonates, the bomblets spread like buckshot across a large area, making them difficult to aim with precision. A fact sheet issued by the Mine Action Coordination Center says cluster bombs have an official failure rate of 15 percent.
That means that 15 percent of the bomblets remain as hazards. According to the fact sheet, the failure rate in this war is estimated to be around 40 percent. ''We estimate there are one million,'' said Dalya Farran, the community liaison officer of the mine action center.
Ms. Farran has worked at the center for nearly three years. It was set up in 2000 to help deal with the mines and unexploded ordnance left behind after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon and from other wars.
After this war, Ms. Farran said, there are two types of cluster bomb fragments across the south. The most commonly found type is known as M42, a deceptively small device resembling a light socket.
She said a large percentage of the unexploded bomblets were made in America, while some were produced in Israel. Each one has a white tail dangling off the back, like the tail of a kite. As they fall to the ground, the tail spins and unscrews the firing pin.
When the device hits, the front end fires a huge slug while the casing blasts apart into a spray of deadly metal fragments. When they fail to detonate they cling to the ground, and with their white tails look deceptively like toys, so children are often those who are injured.
''This is what they are living with every day,'' said Simon Lovell, a supervisor with one of the clearance teams as he looked at five unexploded bomblets poking out of the soft, rocky soil of the Hussein family farm.
Across the street, Hussein Muhammad, 48, at home with his wife and four children, waited for the clearance team. His olive trees were heavy with fruit, but he could not tend to the harvest.
''I feel that the land has become my enemy,'' he said. ''It represents a danger to my life and my kids' lives.''
Copyright 2006 The New York Times

--JB

Sudan Expels U.N. Envoy Over Report of Losses in Darfur

2006-10-23T10:21:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

The Sudanese government on Sunday ordered the chief U.N. envoy out of the country after he wrote that Sudan's army had suffered major losses in recent fighting in Darfur.

The order against the envoy, Jan Pronk, is likely to complicate international efforts to halt the killings, rapes and other atrocities in the strife-torn region of western Sudan.

Click here to read the full article.

Stricter Policy Splits West Bank Families

2006-10-23T10:17:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post.

For decades, Palestinian foreign nationals have entered the West Bank and Gaza Strip on three-month tourist visas, renewing them regularly, because residency cards were difficult to obtain. But in recent months Israel's Interior Ministry has refused in many cases to grant new visas, separating thousands of family members from their relatives inside lands the Jewish state occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

The tightening has coincided with the rise this year of Hamas, a radical Islamic movement, to head the Palestinian government, which most foreign donors have cut off from economic aid. Palestinian officials and Israeli human rights groups contend the shift will undermine private investment in the territories -- investment the Bush administration is seeking to encourage -- while potentially driving out the professional class most likely to have relatives abroad.

Click here to read the full article.

Russia Suspends Scores of Foreign Groups

2006-10-19T17:01:00.000-06:00

From the NY Times:

Scores of foreign private organizations were forced to cease their operations in Russia on Thursday while the government considered whether to register them under a new law that has received sharp international criticism.

Among the suspended organizations were some of those most critical of the Kremlin, including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, and others, like the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, that have been accused by Russian officials of instigating or assisting revolutions against other former Soviet republics.

The Justice Ministry, which is responsible for registering foreign private organizations, insisted that the suspensions were neither retaliatory nor permanent.

It issued a statement saying the suspended organizations had not properly filed new registration materials or had submitted the required materials on the last day before the registration deadline, which was midnight on Wednesday. It said it was rushing to review the applications it had received.

Click here to read the article.

Bush Signs Detainee Legislation

2006-10-17T23:40:00.000-06:00

From the LA Times:

President Bush signed new legislation Tuesday providing for the detention and prosecution of terrorism suspects, and the Justice Department moved immediately to request the dismissal of dozens of lawsuits filed by detainees challenging their incarceration.

Bush signed the legislation in an elaborate East Room ceremony, calling it a "vital tool" in the administration's war on terrorism, while Republican Party officials immediately unleashed campaign broadsides, charging that the measure's Democratic critics advocate freeing terrorists.

The new law thus became both part of the administration's final campaign push to preserve its congressional majority in the midterm election and the beginning of a new chapter in fashioning a judicial process for those captured around the world in U.S. military and counterterrorism operations.

The law is bound to generate new and contentious legal challenges that likely will leave U.S. policies on detainees in an uncertain state. Beside the request that federal courts throw out detainees' lawsuits, judges also will be asked to decide new legal questions that again may end up before the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, human rights groups said it is far from clear how the new law will be implemented, and the CIA has asked Justice Department lawyers to review interrogation guidelines.

Click here to access the full article.

Micro-Credit Pioneer Wins Peace Prize

2006-10-15T22:20:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank he created won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for leveraging small loans into major social change for impoverished families...

Yunus said he believes the Nobel committee endorsed his view that bridging the gap between rich and poor countries in an age of increasing globalization is critical to reducing conflict around the world.

"You cannot go on having absurd amounts of wealth when other people have problems of survival," he said. "If you can bring an end to poverty, at least from an economic point of view, you can have a more livable situation between very rich people and very poor people, very rich countries and very poor countries. That's our basic ingredient for peace."

Click here to read the full article.

Canadians Agree On Plan to Create Vast National Park

2006-10-14T00:52:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

The government and native groups agreed Friday to move forward to preserve an area almost four times the size of Yellowstone Park in far northern Canada, and said they would study making other areas off-limits to burgeoning diamond and uranium mining interests there.

The agreement begins the work to make a huge national park on the eastern edge of the Great Slave Lake, a frigid, pristine area of the Northwest Territories prowled by grizzlies and grazed by caribou...

Work on creating a park started nearly four decades ago but was delayed in part because of the unsettled land claims by native groups. The area being mapped for a park encompasses 8.3 million acres. Yellowstone Park, in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, is about 2.2 million acres.

Click here to read the article.

Documents Reveal Scope of U.S. Database on Antiwar Protests

2006-10-13T12:35:00.000-06:00

The New York Times has an article about the Defense Department's database of antiwar protesters. Click here to read the full article.

In China, Children of Inmates Face Hard Time Themselves

2006-10-13T12:31:00.000-06:00

The Washington Post has an interesting story about what happens to the children of inmates in China. You can access the article by clicking here.

Study Claims Iraq's 'Excess' Death Toll Has Reached 655,000

2006-10-11T11:59:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

The estimate, produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country, is far higher than ones produced by other groups, including Iraq's government.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

The surveyors said they found a steady increase in mortality since the invasion, with a steeper rise in the last year that appears to reflect a worsening of violence as reported by the U.S. military, the news media and civilian groups. In the year ending in June, the team calculated Iraq's mortality rate to be roughly four times what it was the year before the war.

Of the total 655,000 estimated "excess deaths," 601,000 resulted from violence and the rest from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 unexpected violent deaths per day throughout the country.

The survey was done by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health. The findings are being published online today by the British medical journal the Lancet.

The same group in 2004 published an estimate of roughly 100,000 deaths in the first 18 months after the invasion. That figure was much higher than expected, and was controversial. The new study estimates that about 500,000 more Iraqis, both civilian and military, have died since then -- a finding likely to be equally controversial.

Both this and the earlier study are the only ones to estimate mortality in Iraq using scientific methods. The technique, called "cluster sampling," is used to estimate mortality in famines and after natural disasters.

While acknowledging that the estimate is large, the researchers believe it is sound for numerous reasons. The recent survey got the same estimate for immediate post-invasion deaths as the early survey, which gives the researchers confidence in the methods. The great majority of deaths were also substantiated by death certificates.

Click here to read the full article.

Human Rights Reporter Killed in Russia

2006-10-08T13:56:00.000-06:00

From the LA Times:

A prominent Russian journalist known for reporting of human rights abuses in war-torn Chechnya was shot and killed Saturday in her apartment building in what colleagues and authorities described as an apparent assassination.

Anna Politkovskaya, 48, was shot in the chest as she was getting out of an elevator, then shot in the head, the Russian news agency RIA Novosti reported, citing investigative sources. The image of the suspected killer was captured on a surveillance videotape, the agency said.

"We have a feeling, almost an assurance, that it is political murder," said Vitaly Yaroshevsky, deputy editor of Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where she worked. "It was certainly related to her professional activities."

Politkovskaya, known to her friends as Anya, was one in a series of prominent officials and journalists to die violently in post-Soviet Russia, and her slaying sent a chill through Russia's community of pro-democracy and human rights activists.

Last month, gunmen shot and killed a senior central banker, Andrei Kozlov, who had been involved in shutting down banks suspected of money laundering. American journalist Paul Klebnikov, editor of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was gunned down near his office in 2004.

Politkovskaya, a mother of two, was considered one of the toughest critics of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and of pro-Moscow Chechen Prime Minister Ramzan Kadyrov. One of her areas of expertise was documenting mistreatment of ordinary Chechens by Russian troops or forces loyal to Kadyrov.

Click here to read the full article.

Iraqi Police Brigade Accused of Mass Kidnappings

2006-10-04T18:29:00.000-06:00

From the London Times:

AN ENTIRE police brigade in Baghdad has been suspended and its commander placed under arrest on charges of aiding sectarian death squads that have carried out mass kidnappings.

The Eighth Brigade of the 2nd National Police Battalion, which has more than 800 uniformed officers in western Baghdad, was stepped down a day after armed men in official uniforms herded off 14 shopkeepers from central Baghdad, and two days after 24 workers were abducted from a meat processing plant in the capital.

Click here to read the full article.

Terror Laws Cause Number of Refugees Admitted to United States to Fall 23 Percent This Year

2006-10-02T09:36:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

New York Times
September 28, 2006
Terror Laws Cut Resettlement of Refugees
By RACHEL L. SWARNS
WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 — The number of refugees admitted to the United States fell 23 percent this year because of provisions in two antiterrorism laws that have sharply reduced the number of resettled refugees, State Department officials said Wednesday.
The laws, the USA Patriot Act and the Real ID Act, deny entry to anyone who belongs to or has provided material support to armed rebel groups, even if that support was coerced and even if the armed groups fought alongside American troops or opposed authoritarian governments criticized by the Bush administration.
The provisions have derailed the resettlement of thousands of refugees fleeing the authoritarian government of Myanmar, formerly known as Burma; hundreds of refugees from Vietnam and Laos who fought alongside American troops in the Vietnam War; and dozens of Cubans who supported armed groups opposed to Fidel Castro in the 60’s, according to the State Department and the United Nations refugee agency.
Many of the refugees were barred from the United States because, under the new laws, they are deemed supporters of terrorist groups, even though the organizations that they support do not appear on the State Department list of designated terrorist groups.
The statutes have broadened the definition of terrorist groups to include any group of two or more people who take up arms against a state, even if the group supports the aims of American foreign policy.
A result, State Department officials say, is that administration officials will resettle 41,200 of the 54,000 refugees whom they had expected to admit by the end of the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30. That figure is the lowest since refugee admissions plunged for nearly two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The State Department can grant waivers for specific populations that have supported armed groups, if they pose no threat to the United States. In May and August, the department issued waivers for Burmese refugees who have supported the Karen National Union, a group that opposes the government in Myanmar.
But the laws do not allow waivers for refugees who were combatants, received military training from groups deemed to be terrorist organizations or were members of such groups. State Department officials say a change in the law is required to address those populations. In recent weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has met with lawmakers in the House and Senate to discuss such changes.
Ellen R. Sauerbrey, an assistant secretary of state, told senators on Wednesday that the antiterrorism provisions had prevented the United States from resettling 9,500 Burmese this fiscal year. Of that group, 1,500 are expected to enter by Sept. 30 under issued waivers.
“We had anticipated bringing the majority, if not all of those, to the United States,” Ms. Sauerbrey said at a hearing of the Immigration Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
She said the limited waivers meant that the resettlement of many refugees had been indefinitely delayed. In addition to the Burmese, Ms. Sauerbrey pointed to the Cubans and Vietnamese Montagnards.
“We are eagerly looking forward to expanding resettlement,” she said, “to the degree that we can resolve some of these difficulties.”
Refugee advocacy groups, including Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch, and conservative groups like Concerned Women for America, the National Association of Evangelicals and American Values, say officials are not moving swiftly enough.
Representative Joe Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania, has proposed legislation that would bar only members and supporters of groups designated as terrorist organizations by the State Department.
But State Department officials say they do not expect any movement on such legislation before Nov. 7.
Many refugee advocates fear that administration officials and members of Congress are delaying action because they do not want to be viewed as easing up on terrorism during an election year.
Michael J. Horowitz, a neoconservative who worked in the White House of President Ronald Reagan and testified at the hearing on Wednesday, said in a statement that it was “inexcusable that for more than two years the administration has dragged its feet” in finding a solution for the refugees who fought alongside Americans in Vietnam.
The antiterrorism provisions have also affected 500 asylum seekers in the United States, whose cases have been delayed and has prevented 700 people, who have already been deemed refugees or granted asylum, from becoming permanent residents here for the time being.
Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, urged the administration to redouble its efforts on behalf of the Burmese refugees and others who desperately need to resettle. “I know we have a lot security concerns to watch for,” Mr. Brownback said at the hearing. “But there are huge populations that are absolutely persecuted and have no other option.”

--JB

Poll Says Most Iraqis Want U.S. Out

2006-09-29T12:24:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

September 29, 2006
Poll Says Most Iraqis Want U.S. Out

By REUTERS

WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — About three-quarters of Iraqis believe that American forces are provoking more conflict than they are preventing in Iraq and that they should be withdrawn within a year, according to a poll conducted by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, a group from the University of Maryland.

The poll of 1,150 people, conducted Sept. 1 to 4, had a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points. It found growing support for attacks against American-led forces, with a majority of Iraqis now favoring them.

The poll was released Wednesday, a day after President Bush declassified portions of a national intelligence report that asserted the Iraq war had become a “cause célèbre” that was breeding deep resentment in the Muslim world and helping Islamist militants cultivate supporters.

The poll found that 78 percent of Iraqis believe that the American military presence causes more conflict than it prevents, including 97 percent of Sunnis, 82 percent of Shiites and 41 percent of Kurds.

Among Iraq’s three main communities, only Kurds tended to see the American military presence as a stabilizing force, with 56 percent agreeing with that statement versus 17 percent of Shiites and 2 percent of Sunnis.

Most Iraqis — 71 percent — said American soldiers should be withdrawn within a year, but only 37 percent favored an American withdrawal in the next six months. Only Sunnis wanted American forces out within six months, and only Kurds favored a longer United States presence, as much as two years or more.

The poll also found growing support for attacks on American forces, with 61 percent of the respondents saying they approved, compared with 47 percent in January. Support for the attacks was strongest among Sunnis, at 92 percent. But support among Shiites rose to 62 percent in September from 41 percent in January. Only 16 percent of Kurds favored attacks on American troops.

The poll used face-to-face interviews and a complicated methodology to try to obtain a representative sample.

Legal Battle Over Detainee Bill Is Likely

2006-09-29T11:04:00.000-06:00

From the LA Times:

The Senate on Thursday approved President Bush's plan to question and try foreign terrorism suspects before military judges — without oversight by the federal courts.

Bush is expected to receive a bill he can sign into law in the next few days, but legal challenges almost assuredly will be pursued against the prosecution process, which the administration considers a key element in its war on terrorism.

The measure's most disputed provision would block foreign prisoners held by the military from turning to the federal courts to end their imprisonment. By preventing detainees from challenging their confinement in court, it sets up a potential constitutional conflict before the Supreme Court.

Click here to read the article.

Senate Passes Bill on Detainee Interrogations

2006-09-28T20:15:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

The Senate today passed a bill, backed by the White House, that sets the rules for interrogating and prosecuting detainees in the war on terrorism, allowing the CIA to continue a formerly secret program to extract information from key suspected terrorists and establishing special military tribunals to try them.

The bill, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, passed by a vote of 65 to 34 after senators rejected four amendments supported mostly by Democrats.

The bill is nearly identical to a bill passed yesterday by the House, which will vote on adopting the Senate language Friday.

Click here to read the full article.

UN Relief Coordinator Calls Israel's Actions in Final Days of War With Hezbollah "Outrageous"

2006-09-26T15:22:00.000-06:00

Last Wednesay, in an article titled "Israel Hopes to Complete Its Withdrawal From Lebanon on Friday," the New York Times published the following on comments by the UN relief coordinator:

In Beirut on Tuesday, the United Nations relief coordinator, David Shearer, said Israeli artillery had scattered at least 350,000 unexploded cluster bomblets over southern Lebanon toward the end of the fighting. “The outrageous fact is that nearly all of these munitions were fired in the last three to four days of the war,” Mr. Shearer said.

If Mr. Shearer's comments are true, they are further evidence that the Israeli Defense Forces acted with a callous disregard to innocent civilian lives. It is truly criminal that Israel, knowing full well that a cease-fire was imminent, would scatter so many cluster bomblets over southern Lebanon.

--JB

In Tiny Courts of N.Y., Abuses of Law and Power

2006-09-25T23:25:00.000-06:00

In today's edition of the New York Times, the paper begins a three part series looking at "justice" administered by small courts in New York state. The first part of the series is unbelievable and I never thought I would read about these types of "justice" occurring in present day America. I'm sure all of the articles in the series will be interesting, but you can click here to read the first part of the series. I'm sure there will be a link to the next two articles once they are available, but this is definitely worth reading. Here is just a small portion of the first article:

The New York Times spent a year examining the life and history of this largely hidden world, a constellation of 1,971 part-time justices, from the suburbs of New York City to the farm towns near Niagara Falls.

It is impossible to say just how many of those justices are ill-informed or abusive. Officially a part of the state court system, yet financed by the towns and villages, the justice courts are essentially unsupervised by either. State court officials know little about the justices, and cannot reliably say how many cases they handle or how many are appealed. Even the agency charged with disciplining them, the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, is not equipped to fully police their vast numbers.

But The Times reviewed public documents dating back decades and, unannounced, visited courts in every part of the state. It examined records of closed disciplinary hearings. It tracked down defendants, and interviewed prosecutors and defense lawyers, plaintiffs and bystanders.

The examination found overwhelming evidence that decade after decade and up to this day, people have often been denied fundamental legal rights. Defendants have been jailed illegally. Others have been subjected to racial and sexual bigotry so explicit it seems to come from some other place and time. People have been denied the right to a trial, an impartial judge and the presumption of innocence.

United States Detains Associated Press Photographer Without Charge

2006-09-24T20:25:00.000-06:00

From the Associated Press:

U.S. Holds AP Photographer in Iraq 5 Mos
U.S. Military Holds AP Photographer in Iraq 5 Months Without Charges or Public Hearing
By ROBERT TANNER
The Associated Press
- The U.S. military in Iraq has imprisoned an Associated Press photographer for five months, accusing him of being a security threat but never filing charges or permitting a public hearing.
Military officials said Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, was being held for "imperative reasons of security" under United Nations resolutions. AP executives said the news cooperative's review of Hussein's work did not find anything to indicate inappropriate contact with insurgents, and any evidence against him should be brought to the Iraqi criminal justice system.
Hussein, 35, is a native of Fallujah who began work for the AP in September 2004. He photographed events in Fallujah and Ramadi until he was detained on April 12 of this year.
"We want the rule of law to prevail. He either needs to be charged or released. Indefinite detention is not acceptable," said Tom Curley, AP's president and chief executive officer. "We've come to the conclusion that this is unacceptable under Iraqi law, or Geneva Conventions, or any military procedure."
Hussein is one of an estimated 14,000 people detained by the U.S. military worldwide 13,000 of them in Iraq. They are held in limbo where few are ever charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom.
In Hussein's case, the military has not provided any concrete evidence to back up the vague allegations they have raised about him, Curley and other AP executives said.
The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an alleged leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. "He has close relationships with persons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device (IED) attacks and other attacks on coalition forces," according to a May 7 e-mail from U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jack Gardner, who oversees all coalition detainees in Iraq.
"The information available establishes that he has relationships with insurgents and is afforded access to insurgent activities outside the normal scope afforded to journalists conducting legitimate activities," Gardner wrote to AP International Editor John Daniszewski.
Hussein proclaims his innocence, according to his Iraqi lawyer, Badie Arief Izzat, and believes he has been unfairly targeted because his photos from Ramadi and Fallujah were deemed unwelcome by the coalition forces.
That Hussein was captured at the same time as insurgents doesn't make him one of them, said Kathleen Carroll, AP's executive editor.
"Journalists have always had relationships with people that others might find unsavory," she said. "We're not in this to choose sides, we're to report what's going on from all sides."
AP executives in New York and Baghdad have sought to persuade U.S. officials to provide additional information about allegations against Hussein and to have his case transferred to the Iraqi criminal justice system. The AP contacted military leaders in Iraq and the Pentagon, and later the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.
The AP has worked quietly until now, believing that would be the best approach. But with the U.S. military giving no indication it would change its stance, the news cooperative has decided to make public Hussein's imprisonment, hoping the spotlight will bring attention to his case and that of thousands of others now held in Iraq, Curley said.
One of Hussein's photos was part of a package of 20 photographs that won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography last year. His contribution was an image of four insurgents in Fallujah firing a mortar and small arms during the U.S.-led offensive in the city in November 2004.
In what several AP editors described as a typical path for locally hired staff in the midst of a conflict, Hussein, a shopkeeper who sold cell phones and computers in Fallujah, was hired in the city as a general helper because of his local knowledge.
As the situation in Fallujah eroded in 2004, he expressed a desire to become a photographer. Hussein was given training and camera equipment and hired in September of that year as a freelancer, paid on a per-picture basis, according to Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography. A month later, he was put on a monthly retainer.
During the U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah in November 2004, he stayed on after his family fled. "He had good access. He was able to photograph not only the results of the attacks on Fallujah, he was also able to photograph members of the insurgency on occasion," Lyon said. "That was very difficult to achieve at that time."
After fleeing later in the offensive, leaving his camera behind in the rush to escape, Hussein arrived in Baghdad, where the AP gave him a new camera. He then went to work in Ramadi which, like Fallujah, has been a center of insurgent violence.
In its own effort to determine whether Hussein had gotten too close the insurgency, the AP has reviewed his work record, interviewed senior photo editors who worked on his images and examined all 420 photographs in the news cooperative's archives that were taken by Hussein, Lyon said.
The military in Iraq has frequently detained journalists who arrive quickly at scenes of violence, accusing them of getting advance notice from insurgents, Lyon said. But "that's just good journalism. Getting to the event quickly is something that characterizes good journalism anywhere in the world. It does not indicate prior knowledge," he said.
Out of Hussein's body of work, only 37 photos show insurgents or people who could be insurgents, Lyon said. "The vast majority of the 420 images show the aftermath or the results of the conflict blown up houses, wounded people, dead people, street scenes," he said.
Only four photos show the wreckage of still-burning U.S. military vehicles.
"Do we know absolutely everything about him, and what he did before he joined us? No. Are we satisfied that what he did since he joined us was appropriate for the level of work we expected from him? Yes," Lyon said. "When we reviewed the work he submitted to us, we found it appropriate to what we'd asked him to do."
The AP does not knowingly hire combatants or anyone who is part of a story, company executives said. But hiring competent local staff in combat areas is vital to the news service, because often only local people can pick their way around the streets with a reasonable degree of safety.
"We want people who are not part of a story. Sometimes it is a judgment call. If someone seems to be thuggish, or like a fighter, you certainly wouldn't hire them," Daniszewski said. After they are hired, their work is checked carefully for signs of bias.
Lyon said every image from local photographers is always "thoroughly checked and vetted" by experienced editors. "In every case where there have been images of insurgents, questions have been asked about circumstances under which the image was taken, and what the image shows," he said.
Executives said it's not uncommon for AP news people to be picked up by coalition forces and detained for hours, days or occasionally weeks, but never this long. Several hundred journalists in Iraq have been detained, some briefly and some for several weeks, according to Scott Horton, a New York-based lawyer hired by the AP to work on Hussein's case.
Horton also worked on behalf of an Iraqi cameraman employed by CBS, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, who was detained for one year before his case was sent to an Iraqi court on charges of insurgent activity. He was acquitted for lack of evidence.
AP officials emphasized the military has not provided the company concrete evidence of its claims against Bilal Hussein, or provided him a chance to offer a defense.
"He's a Sunni Arab from a tribe in that area. I'm sure he does know some nasty people. But is he a participant in the insurgency? I don't think that's been proven," Daniszewski said.
Information provided to the AP by the military to support the continued detention hasn't withstood scrutiny, when it could be checked, Daniszewski said.
For example, he said, the AP had been told that Hussein was involved with the kidnapping of two Arab journalists in Ramadi.
But those journalists, tracked down by the AP, said Hussein had helped them after they were released by their captors without money or a vehicle in a dangerous part of Ramadi. After a journalist acquaintance put them in touch with Hussein, the photographer picked them up, gave them shelter and helped get them out of town, they said.
The journalists said they had never been contacted by multinational forces for their account.
Horton said the military has provided contradictory accounts of whether Hussein himself was a U.S. target last April or if he was caught up in a broader sweep.
The military said bomb-making materials were found in the apartment where Hussein was captured but it never detailed what those materials were. The military said he tested positive for traces of explosives. Horton said that was virtually guaranteed for anyone on the streets of Ramadi at that time.
Hussein has been a frequent target of conservative critics on the Internet, who raised questions about his images months before the military detained him. One blogger and author, Michelle Malkin, wrote about Hussein's detention on the day of his arrest, saying she'd been tipped by a military source.
Carroll said the role of journalists can be misconstrued and make them a target of critics. But that criticism is misplaced, she said.
"How can you know what a conflict is like if you're only with one side of the combatants?" she said. "Journalism doesn't work if we don't report and photograph all sides."
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright © 2006 ABC News Internet Ventures

--JB

Bush Administration Refuses to Cooperate with Chile in 1976 Assassination Investigation Involving Pinochet

2006-09-24T19:50:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

September 21, 2006
Chile Seeks U.S. Files on 1976 Assassination
By LARRY ROHTER
SANTIAGO, Chile — Thirty years after a Chilean-organized hit squad assassinated former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American colleague on the streets of Washington, investigators here are drawing closer to implicating this country’s former dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, in the killings.
But they say their efforts are being hindered by a parallel investigation in the United States that has been stalled since President Bush took office and that is withholding potentially important documents.
Mr. Letelier, one of the most visible leaders of the opposition to the Pinochet dictatorship, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed on Sept. 21, 1976, when a bomb planted under his car exploded as they were riding to work.
Even after 9/11, the Letelier assassination remains the most audacious act of state-sponsored terrorism committed on American soil.
“Every day it is clearer that Pinochet ordered my brother’s death,” said Fabiola Letelier, a prominent human rights lawyer here. “But for a proper and complete investigation to take place we need access to the appropriate records and evidence.”
General Pinochet was detained in London in 1998 by prosecutors seeking to bring him to justice for abuses committed during his 17-year rule.
Afterward, the Clinton administration came under new pressure from the Letelier and Moffitt families, and it released more than 24,000 declassified diplomatic and intelligence cables. It also reopened an investigation of the assassination, sending an F.B.I. team to Chile in 2000 to interview more than 40 witnesses.
That mission resulted in a recommendation that the United States indict General Pinochet, but Attorney General Janet Reno decided to leave the decision to her successors in the Bush administration.
The case remains politically delicate in Washington, where previous Republican administrations supported the Pinochet dictatorship as a bulwark against leftist encroachment in Latin America during the cold war.
Though President Bush, whose father was director of central intelligence at the time of the assassination, promised to “direct every resource at our command” to defeating terrorism, the American investigation continues to languish, Ms. Letelier and Chilean officials say.
They and others complain that hundreds of secret documents are being kept out of Chilean hands.
“It’s been six years, three times longer than the original investigation that fingered the hit team, and nothing has happened,” said Peter Kornbluh, a Chile specialist at the National Security Archive, which obtained the release of the original trove of documents. “I’ve filed Freedom of Information Act requests, but the documents that come closest to Pinochet are still being withheld, ostensibly as evidence.”
No one in the Bush administration would comment on the case. William Blier, head of the unit in the office of the United States Attorney in Washington that is in charge of the case, declined a request for information on the status of the investigation. He referred the question to a press spokesman, Channing Phillips, who also would not discuss any aspect of the case.
Other lawyers involved in the case on the victims’ side said the Bush administration’s performance contrasted with promises made after Sept. 11 to put pressure on states that sponsored terrorism.
“It is stunning to me that with all the energy being put into the war on terror,” the Bush administration “has been completely unresponsive to our queries,” said Sam Buffone, a Washington lawyer representing Ms. Moffitt’s husband, Michael Moffitt.
“The most basic lesson of that war is that anyone responsible for an act of domestic terrorism will never get away with it, no matter how long it takes,” Mr. Buffone said. “But that rule seems to have been honored in the breach for Augusto Pinochet.”
General Pinochet, now 90, ailing and discredited here, ruled Chile from Sept. 11, 1973, to March 1990. Since mid-2004, investigations in the United States and in Chile have uncovered an illicit fortune of more than $27 million that he hid abroad.
He is now facing tax fraud and forgery charges, two indictments for human rights violations and several other investigations of murders, kidnappings and disappearances that occurred during his rule.
John Dinges, co-author of “Assassination on Embassy Row” and a professor at Alberto Hurtado University here, said, “The evidence against Pinochet is as strong in the Letelier case as any of the other cases he is facing.”
He noted that the dossier now included damning testimony from central officials. Among them are Gen. Manuel Contreras, the former chief of the National Intelligence Directorate, or DINA, General Pinochet’s secret police, and Michael Townley, an American-born former DINA agent.
Facing intense diplomatic pressure, the Pinochet government handed Mr. Townley over to the United States in 1978. He admitted organizing and carrying out the assassination with Cuban exiles recruited for the task. He served a short prison term and was enrolled in the witness protection program.
General Pinochet refused to extradite other officials of the intelligence directorate who were Chilean citizens. But in 1995 General Contreras was convicted here of the Letelier assassination and sentenced to seven years in prison.
In interviews, including one with The New York Times in November 2004, General Contreras, currently serving a prison term here for the disappearance and torture of political prisoners, said General Pinochet had known and approved of all the actions he took.
But he has not specifically said that General Pinochet, whom American diplomatic cables show as irate about Mr. Letelier’s activities in exile, ordered the killing.
Most recently, Chilean courts agreed to consider a request that General Pinochet be stripped of his immunity in a related case: the murder of Eugenio Berrios, a DINA agent nicknamed Pinochet’s Mad Scientist, whose headless body was found on a beach in Uruguay in 1995.
Mr. Berrios had been spirited into exile there in 1992, in anticipation that he would soon be called to testify in an investigation of the Letelier and other assassinations.
In March, Chile asked that three senior Uruguayan military officers said to be involved in the Berrios killing be extradited here. Uruguayan courts complied, and the men were recently interrogated by a Chilean investigative judge, Alejandro Madrid, whose inquiry into the Berrios case inevitably led him to the Letelier assassination.
“The Chileans have been remarkable, exemplary, in going forward on Pinochet,” E. Lawrence Barcella, the lead prosecutor in the original trial of Mr. Letelier’s assassins in 1980, said in a telephone interview from Washington. “In my view, outliving those you kill is not a defense, and I hope nobody stops trying” to build the case against General Pinochet.

--JB

How Great is the Terrorist Threat?

2006-09-24T15:45:00.000-06:00

In the most recent edition of Foreign Affairs, there is a roundtable discussion on how great a threat terrorism truly is to America. On one side of the debate is John Mueller, who argues that the hype of the terrorist threat is overblown by politicians for political gain. On the other side are multiple scholars arguing against such claims, but the whole things is an interesting read.

A link to the discussion can be found by clicking here, while a link to Mueller's article can be accessed by clicking here.

I thought one of the most interesting statistics came from Mueller's article when he writes:

But while keeping such potential dangers in mind, it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al QaedaÂlike operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000).

Investigation Reveals Concealment of Detainee Deaths in Afghanistan

2006-09-24T13:04:00.000-06:00

The Los Angeles Times just printed a special investigative report about the concealment of two detainee deaths in Afghanistan by an Army National Guard Unit. The report is pretty disturbing not just for the brutality, but also because it was covered up for so long. Below is part of the article:

Apparently unknown to Army officials, two detainees had died in the team's custody in separate incidents during the unit's final month in eastern Afghanistan. Several other detainees allege that they were badly beaten or tortured while held at the base in Gardez. One victim, an unarmed peasant, was shot to death while being held for questioning after a fierce firefight. The other, an 18-year-old Afghan army recruit, died after being interrogated at the firebase. Descriptions of his injuries were consistent with severe beatings and other abuse. A member of the Special Forces team told The Times his unit held a meeting after the teen's death to coordinate their stories should an investigation arise. "Everybody on the team had knowledge of it," the soldier said, insisting on anonymity. "You just don't talk about that stuff in the Special Forces community. What happens downrange stays downrange…. Nobody wants to get anybody in trouble. Just sit back, and hope it will go away." What distinguishes these two fatalities from scores of other questionable deaths in U.S. custody is that they were successfully concealed — not just from the American public but from the military's chain of command and legal authorities. The deaths came to light only after an investigation by The Times and a nonprofit educational organization, the Crimes of War Project, led the Army to open criminal inquiries on the incidents. Two years later, the cases remain under investigation and no charges have been filed.

Click here to read the full report.

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Hurting U.S. Terror Fight

2006-09-23T23:46:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

The war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, motivating a new generation of potential terrorists around the world whose numbers may be increasing faster than the United States and its allies can reduce the threat, U.S. intelligence analysts have concluded.

A 30-page National Intelligence Estimate completed in April cites the "centrality" of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the insurgency that has followed, as the leading inspiration for new Islamic extremist networks and cells that are united by little more than an anti-Western agenda. It concludes that, rather than contributing to eventual victory in the global counterterrorism struggle, the situation in Iraq has worsened the U.S. position, according to officials familiar with the classified document.

Click here to read the article.

American Democracy in Trouble?

2006-09-20T22:25:00.000-06:00

A recent poll by the New York Times shows widespread dissatisfaction with Congress by the American people. Only 25% of people surveyed approved of the way Congress is handling their job and only a slightly higher percentage thought their congressional representative should keep their job. However, despite these dismal job approval numbers of Congress and those of President Bush and the Republican Party in general, most analysts do not predict that the Democrats will take back either branch of Congress in the upcoming elections. For example, according to the Cook Political Report there are only about 40 seats that are somewhat competitive, and of those there are 19 in the "tossup" status. Since the Democrats need a net pickup of 15 to take back the House, which would mean they would have to win 15 of those 19, while still holding all their current seats, a pretty difficult task. This lack of competitiveness is due to multiple factors such as the power of incumbency and redistricting, as well as voter turnout (which is extremely low in non-Presidential elections).

Competitive elections are vital to a healthy democracy, and creating competitive congressional districts is an important part of ensuring that elected officials remain responsive to the voters. Taking the power of redistricting out of the hands of state legislatures--who are concerned not with creating competitive and meaningful elections, but rather with the creation of safe districts--is the first step to improving responsiveness in the U.S. Congress. A much more fair and reasonable alternative is to create independent redistricting commissions, a process that is more likely to decrease political gerrymandering by politicians.

Some other possible solutions to low turnover in Congress are:

Alternative Voting Methods
Increasing the Size of Congress
strengthening the VRA
Term Limits

Some people will respond to what I have written in this post by saying that the Democrats have just lost touch with the American people and are just a disfunctional party. While there may be some truth to this, I don't believe it explains what is happening overall, as most Americans now have a more favorable view of the Democrats than the Republicans. I do wonder, however if this shows signs of hope for a third party hoping to break through the two-party deadlock on American politics or whether American democracy is breaking (or both). Either way, it is troubling to me when few people bother to vote in elections and that when they do vote they are unable to replace the country's legislature with representatives that respond to their needs. Any questions or comments are welcome.

World Bank Profits From Poor Countries - Report

2006-09-20T09:53:00.000-06:00

From the Inter Press Service via Common Dreams News Center:

The World Bank receives more from developing countries than what it disburses to them says a new report released Tuesday as finance ministers endorsed a controversial new Bank plan to tackle corruption in developing countries.

The Social Watch Report 2006, released here at the annual meetings of the Bank group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), stressed the need to reform the current international financial structure. Net transfers (disbursements minus repayments minus interest payments) to developing countries from the Bank and the International Bank for Reconstruction (IBRD), have been negative every year since 1991, the report pointed out.

The IBRD is now not making any contribution to development finance other than providing funds to service its outstanding claims. The International Development Association (IDA), which provides interest-free credits and grants to the poorest developing countries to boost their economic growth, is the only source of net financing from the Bank.

But these disbursements amount to only 4-5 billion US dollars a year. Taken together, the contribution of the Bank to the external financing of developing countries is negative by some 1.2 billion dollars, thus ‘‘failing to fulfil the purpose of its mission'', said Social Watch, an international network of over 400 citizens' organisations in 60 countries monitoring commitments to eradicate poverty.

Meanwhile, critics say the Bank has embarked on a public relations offensive using the good governance and poverty eradication rhetoric to mask its unpopular neo-liberal agenda of ‘deregulation', privatisation, and removal of government subsidies for essential services.

Good governance is not an end in itself, but the foundation of the path out of poverty, said Bank group president Paul Wolfowitz in his address to the annual meeting of the Board of Governors on Tuesday. ''It leads to faster and stronger growth. It ensures every development dollar is used to fight poverty, hunger and disease.'' Wolfowitz said that governance, a ‘‘much broader concept than anti-corruption'', was aimed at poverty reduction and would not be used as a new conditionality for lending.

Click here to read the entire article.

Leader of Coup in Thailand Sets Timetable

2006-09-20T09:45:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

Thailand will probably not restore democracy for at least a year, Gen. Sondhi Boonyaratkalin, the commander who seized power in a bloodless coup, announced today.

Speaking to reporters for the first time since tanks and troops under his command took to the streets of the capital late Tuesday night, General Sondhi offered a political timetable for the country’s democratic rehabilitation. An interim government would be chosen within two weeks, he said, and the process of writing a new constitution would follow.

“Drafting a new constitution should not take more than one year,” General Sondhi said; new elections could be then expected sometime around October 2007.

As Thais awoke this morning to news of the coup, General Sondhi’s junta sought to consolidate its control, banning public gatherings, threatening to shut down or block telecommunications and urging “farmers and laborers” — many of whom are strong supporters of the ousted government — to stay out of politics.

Click here to read the full article.

Canadians Fault U.S. for Its Role in Torture Case

2006-09-19T00:49:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

A government commission on Monday exonerated a Canadian computer engineer of any ties to terrorism and issued a scathing report that faulted Canada and the United States for his deportation four years ago to Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured.

The report on the engineer, Maher Arar, said American officials had apparently acted on inaccurate information from Canadian investigators and then misled Canadian authorities about their plans for Mr. Arar before transporting him to Syria.

“I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constituted a threat to the security of Canada,” Justice Dennis R. O’Connor, head of the commission, said at a news conference.

The report’s findings could reverberate heavily through the leadership of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, which handled the initial intelligence on Mr. Arar that led security officials in both Canada and the United States to assume he was a suspected Al Qaeda terrorist.

The report’s criticisms and recommendations are aimed primarily at Canada’s own government and activities, rather than the United States government, which refused to cooperate in the inquiry.

But its conclusions about a case that had emerged as one of the most infamous examples of rendition — the transfer of terrorism suspects to other nations for interrogation — draw new attention to the Bush administration’s handling of detainees. And it comes as the White House and Congress are contesting legislation that would set standards for the treatment and interrogation of prisoners.

Click here to read the full article.

Study Shows More Have Died in Darfur Than Previously Thought

2006-09-16T15:35:00.000-06:00

From Newsweek:

Sociologist John Hagan completed his book “Justice in the Balkans,” a critical look at the Hague Tribunal and war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, just as violence erupted in Sudan’s western province of Darfur in 2003. Now more than three years later, the Northwestern University professor has turned to correcting historical errors in real time. His study, coauthored with University of Wisconsin professor Alberto Palloni and to be published tomorrow in the journal Science, provides the first rigorous estimate of the death toll in Darfur. The two scientists found that 200,000 to 400,000 people have died since violence began, rather than the tens of thousands widely reported in the media.

The war-torn environment of Darfur has made accurate estimates difficult to come up with. To arrive at their tally, Hagan and Palloni drew on a wide range of previous studies and surveys performed in West Darfur. These include the World Health Organization’s survey of people in displacement camps, pulled together in 2004 with the cooperation of the Sudanese Ministry of Health, surveys from Médecins Sans Frontières and other studies by the U.S. State Department and the United Nations. The scientists estimate that 1 million people have been displaced in West Darfur alone.

Click here to read the entire article.

Overhauls Proposed in Benefits for Jobless

2006-09-14T18:16:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

September 14, 2006
Overhauls Proposed in Benefits for Jobless
By ERIK ECKHOLM

The nation’s unemployment insurance system, which has hardly changed since its inception in 1935, should be revamped to aid more workers displaced by a transforming economy, economists said this week as they released overhaul proposals.

Currently, because of tight state eligibility requirements and because a growing number of workers do not have long-term, full-time jobs, unemployment insurance is paid to just over a third of those who are laid off, government data show, and coverage is less likely among the lower-income workers who most need it.

“The nation’s unemployment insurance program is seriously out of date, given the changes over the last 70 years in the U.S. labor market,” said Lori G. Kletzer, an economist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Kletzer and Howard Rosen of the Institute for International Economics in Washington are the authors of one of two proposals for revamping the system that were released on Tuesday by the Brookings Institution in Washington.

The system was intended to provide workers with half their former wages during temporary periods between jobs, though it seldom reaches that level today. In 2004, some 8.8 million workers who qualified received an average weekly benefit of $262, often for up to 26 weeks, though benefits varied by state. The costs, which totaled $41 billion that year, are paid by federal and state payroll taxes paid mainly by employers.

Benefits are seldom available to the self-employed, to those working intermittently or to many of the lowest-paid workers.

At the same time, Dr. Kletzer and Dr. Rosen said, the nature of unemployment is changing. In the last six years, despite lower overall rates of unemployment, the average period of joblessness for laid-off workers was 16 weeks, compared with 12 weeks in the 1970’s.

Because of globalization and changes in the economic structure, more workers are forced to change industries and a significant minority take jobs paying less than before, indicating a trend “from temporary layoff to permanent displacement,” according to the paper by Dr. Kletzer and Dr. Rosen.

They propose stronger federal guidelines to end the wide disparities in eligibility and benefit rules among the states and to extend coverage to a broader group of workers.

They call for a new system of personal accounts for self-employed workers, allowing them to contribute pretax money, with matching grants from the federal government up to $200 a year, to help cushion income drops or pay for job training and searches.

They also propose a wage insurance program to help offset declines in income for a period of years when workers switch to jobs paying less than they had been making. This would apply only to workers making $15 an hour or less.

To help pay some $13 billion in added costs for these programs, Dr. Kletzer and Dr. Rosen suggest raising the federal unemployment tax, which for 22 years has been levied on only the first $7,000 of each worker’s income. After tax credits are counted, employers now pay a maximum of $56 a year for each covered worker, the scholars said.

In the second paper, Jeffrey R. Kling, an economist at the Brookings Institution, proposed a more radical overhaul. Dr. Kling would scrap the existing unemployment insurance system and replace it with personal accounts and loans to help people through short-term joblessness and a large program of wage-loss insurance to help low- and moderate-income workers when they are forced to take new jobs at lower salaries.

By curbing government payments to those who experience only short-term joblessness, he said, this new plan could operate with the same total money as the current system but would provide more help to the neediest.

Little Progress Made in Lobbying Reform in Congress

2006-09-14T18:10:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

Nine months after Congressional leaders vowed to respond to several bribery scandals with comprehensive reforms, their pledges have come to next to nothing.

On Wednesday, leaders of the House prepared to take up a rule requiring individual lawmakers to sign their names to some of the pet projects they tuck into major tax and spending bills. As an internal House rule, the requirement would be in effect only until the end of the session, just a few weeks away.

While reform advocates denounced the proposal as nearly toothless, its bite was still too sharp for many in Congress. By Wednesday night the resolution appeared to be bogged down in a three-way squabble among Republicans, Democrats and the powerful members of the House Appropriations Committee.

“It has been a very pathetic showing,” said Mary Boyle, a spokeswoman for the reform group Common Cause. Even with one congressman in jail, a well-known lobbyist on the way and several other members and staff members still under investigation, she said: “The response to this has been nothing. It has been silence.”

The resolution was a chance for House Republican leaders to make good on at least some element of their pledges in January, when Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the majority leader, declared his party’s agenda at risk “because of a growing perception that Congress is for sale” and Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois declared that “now is the time for action.”

The Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff had recently pleaded guilty to paying bribes to members of Congress, including treating some to a lavish golf trip to Scotland. Former Representative Randy Cunningham, Republican of California, had pleaded guilty to accepting bribes from a military contractor. Both scandals involved lobbyists paying bribes for “earmarks” — the special interest projects inserted into major spending bills by individual lawmakers, often anonymously and with little scrutiny. House Republican attempts at new rules have been dismissed as paltry by both reform advocates and Democrats. Mr. Hastert initially called for a ban on all Congressional travel at private expense and tightening the limits on lobbyists’ gifts to lawmakers and staff (the current limit is $50, or $250 if the recipient is considered a friend). Others pushed for doubling the one-year waiting period before departing lawmakers and staff members can lobby their former colleagues.

But the lobbying reform bill that passed the House this year was scaled back to drop all these ideas. Instead, it focused on requiring lobbyists to disclose more of their dealings with members and staffs. The Senate passed a very different bill, and aides in both chambers say they are not expected to be reconciled into a final bill this year.

The final thrust of the House reform agenda was a measure to address earmarks — a favorite idea of Mr. Boehner. He initially called for substantive restrictions on their insertion in spending bills but eventually settled for a measure to at least illuminate the murky practice by requiring the public identification of the member who sought each earmark.

But the Republican leaders’ draft resolution defined earmarks only as funds for organizations outside the federal government, like cities, universities, museums or nonprofit groups. It would not apply to earmarks directing money to the Defense Department or other federal agencies to execute projects, which account for the vast majority of the federal money spent on earmarks.

Click here to read the full article.

Chicago Minimum Wage Ordinance Fails

2006-09-14T18:08:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

A first-in-the-nation effort to impose minimum wage regulations on “big box” stores like Wal-Mart unraveled here on Wednesday, as the Chicago City Council fell three votes short of overriding Mayor Richard M. Daley’s veto of the measure.

It was an extraordinary shift from just weeks ago, when the aldermen voted 35 to 14 in favor of the measure, which was to place Chicago at the forefront of nationwide efforts to demand more for employees of large retail stores, including Wal-Mart, Target and Home Depot. The ordinance would have required the retailers to pay at least $10 an hour by 2010, well above the federal and state minimum wages, along with at least $3 an hour in benefits.

The Council’s 35 votes in July were one more than enough to block a veto by Mr. Daley, something he had never before issued. But pressure from the mayor and intense lobbying by the national retailers and local business groups scraped away enough support to uphold the veto.

Click here to read the full article.

Bush Seeks to Allow Interrogation Methods Recently Forbidden by Pentagon

2006-09-13T17:04:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

September 8, 2006
The Legal Debate
Interrogation Methods Rejected by Military Win Bush’s Support
By ADAM LIPTAK
Many of the harsh interrogation techniques repudiated by the Pentagon on Wednesday would be made lawful by legislation put forward the same day by the Bush administration. And the courts would be forbidden from intervening.
The proposal is in the last 10 pages of an 86-page bill devoted mostly to military commissions, and it is a tangled mix of cross-references and pregnant omissions.
But legal experts say it adds up to an apparently unique interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, one that could allow C.I.A. operatives and others to use many of the very techniques disavowed by the Pentagon, including stress positions, sleep deprivation and extreme temperatures.
“It’s a Jekyll and Hyde routine,” Martin S. Lederman, who teaches constitutional law at Georgetown University, said of the administration’s dual approaches.
In effect, the administration is proposing to write into law a two-track system that has existed as a practical matter for some time.
So-called high-value detainees held by the C.I.A. have been subjected to tough interrogation in secret prisons around the world.
More run-of-the-mill prisoners held by the Defense Department have, for the most part, faced milder questioning, although human rights groups say there have been widespread abuses.
The new bill would continue to give the C.I.A. the substantial freedom it has long enjoyed, while the revisions to the Army Field Manual announced Wednesday would further restrict military interrogators.
The legislation would leave open the possibility that the military could revise its own standards to allow the harsher techniques.
John C. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Justice Department official who helped develop the administration’s early legal response to the terrorist threat, said the bill would provide people on the front lines with important tools.
“When you’re fighting a new kind of war against an enemy we haven’t faced before,” Professor Yoo said, “our system needs to give flexibility to people to respond to those challenges.”
In June, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court ruled that a provision of the Geneva Conventions concerning the humane treatment of prisoners applied to all aspects of the conflict with Al Qaeda. The new bill would keep the courts from that kind of meddling, Professor Yoo said.
“There is a rejection of what the court did in Hamdan,” he said, “which is to try to judicially enforce the Geneva Conventions, which no court had ever tried to do before.”
Indeed, the proposed legislation takes pains to try to ensure that the Supreme Court will not have a second bite at the apple. “The act makes clear,” it says in its introductory findings, “that the Geneva Conventions are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights.”
Though lawsuits will almost certainly be filed challenging the bill should it become law, most legal experts said Congress probably had the power to restrict the courts’ jurisdiction in this way.
The proposed legislation would provide retroactive immunity from prosecution to government agents who used harsh methods after the Sept. 11 attacks. And, as President Bush suggested on Wednesday, it would ensure that those techniques remain lawful.
“As more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical,” Mr. Bush said. “And having a C.I.A. program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information.”
Mr. Bush said he had never authorized torture but indicated that aggressive interrogation techniques short of torture remained important tools in the administration’s efforts to combat terrorism.
“I cannot describe the specific methods used — I think you understand why,” he said. “If I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe and lawful and necessary.”
A senior intelligence official said that the new legislation, if enacted, would make it clear that the techniques used by the C.I.A. on senior Qaeda members who had been held abroad in secret sites would not be prohibited and that interrogators who engaged in those practices both in the past and in the future would not face prosecution.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not discuss the techniques the agency had used or was prepared to use.
Other senior administration officials, all of whom declined to speak on the record, said there was no intention to undercut the interrogation rules in the new Army Field Manual, which does not include some of the most extreme techniques used on some suspected terrorists in American custody.
The intent of the legislation, they said, is to prevent the prosecution of interrogators under amendments to the War Crimes Act that were passed in the 1990’s.
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions bars, among other things, “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” The administration says that language is too vague.
That is nonsense, said Harold Hongju Koh, the dean of Yale Law School and a State Department official in the Clinton administration. “Outrages upon personal dignity is something like Abu Ghraib or parading our soldiers in Vietnam before the television cameras,” he said. “Unconstitutionally vague means you don’t know it when you see it.”
But the new legislation would interpret “outrages upon personal dignity” relatively narrowly, adopting a standard enacted last year in an amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act proposed by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. The amendment prohibits “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” and refers indirectly to an American constitutional standard that prohibits conduct which “shocks the conscience.”
There is substantial room for interpretation, legal experts said, between Common Article 3’s strict prohibition of, for instance, humiliating treatment and the McCain amendment’s ban only on conduct that “shocks the conscience.”
The proposed legislation, said Peter S. Margulies, a law professor at Roger Williams University, “seems to be trying to surgically remove from our compliance with Geneva the section of Common Article 3 that deals with humiliating and degrading treatment.”
The net effect of the new legislation in the interrogation context, Professor Yoo said, is to allow the C.I.A. flexibility of the sort that the revisions to the Army Field Manual have denied to the Pentagon. The bill lets the C.I.A. “operate with a freer hand” than the Defense Department “in that space between the Army Field Manual and the McCain amendment,” he said.
Dean Koh said the administration’s new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions would further isolate the United States from the rest of the world.
“Making U.S. ratification of Common Article 3 narrower and more conditional than everyone else’s,” he said, “by its very nature suggests that we are not prepared to make the same commitment that every other nation has made.”
The bill proposed by the White House would also amend the War Crimes Act, which makes violations of Common Article 3 a felony. Those amendments are needed, the administration said, to provide guidance to American personnel.
The new legislation makes a list of nine “serious violations” of Common Article 3 federal crimes. The prohibited conduct includes torture, murder, rape, and the infliction of severe physical or mental pain. By implication, some legal experts said, the bill endorses the use of those interrogation techniques that are not mentioned.
The proposed legislation in any event represents a further retreat from international legal standards by an administration already hostile to them, some scholars said. “It’s strong evidence that this administration doesn’t accept international legal processes,’’ said Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University.
Neil A. Lewis contributed reporting from Washington.

--JB

Is the U.S. Winning the War on Terror?

2006-09-10T13:22:00.000-06:00

The LA Times headlining article asks the question, "Is the U.S. winning the war on terror?" I think its an important question to ask as many disturbing statistics (many of which are highlighted in the article) seem to show it is not. Here are some of the main points from the article:

• Al Qaeda, the initial focus of the "global war on terror," has been disrupted and dispersed. But it has been succeeded by a looser network of affiliates and homegrown terrorists — like those who carried out bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005 — who could grow to be just as dangerous.

• The war in Iraq has become a training ground for Islamic extremists from Saudi Arabia and other countries, and some have returned home with expertise in urban warfare and explosives. Some experts fear the Persian Gulf's oil terminals could be among their next targets.

• Wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon have damaged the image of the U.S. in much of the Muslim world and made it easier for terrorist organizations to win recruits. The wars and controversies over U.S. treatment of detainees also have made it more difficult for allied governments to cooperate with American counterterrorism programs, diplomats say.

• When Foreign Policy magazine surveyed more than 100 experts earlier this year, 84% said they did not believe the United States was winning the war on terrorism. In a Los Angeles Times poll, fewer than one-fourth of Americans said they believed the nation was "winning"; more than half said it was too soon to tell... One metric that administration officials don't like talking about involves how people in other countries view the U.S. The results of a multi-country poll sponsored this year by the Pew Charitable Trusts are sobering. When people in largely Muslim nations were asked whether they approved of "U.S.-led efforts to fight terrorism," 82% in Egypt said no, as did 74% in Jordan, 77% in Turkey and 50% in Pakistan. Some European countries showed similar results: 76% of those surveyed in Spain and 57% in France said they did not approve.

Click here to access the full article, well worth reading.

While there has also been a lot recently written about the state of Iraq and whether we are "winning" there, recent polls show much disapproval of the U.S. by Iraqis as well as the fact that Iraq is proving to be a great recruiting tool for creating new terrorists.

Also check out a recent op-ed in the Washington Post entitled, "Losing the War on Terror."

Genocide in Darfur

2006-09-10T11:49:00.000-06:00

In Sunday's edition of the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote an excellent op-ed titled "Why Genocide Matters" which appears below:

September 10, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Why Genocide Matters
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

When I spoke at Cornell University recently, a woman asked why I always harp on Darfur.

It’s a fair question. The number of people killed in Darfur so far is modest in global terms: estimates range from 200,000 to more than 500,000.

In contrast, four million people have died since 1998 as a result of the fighting in Congo, the most lethal conflict since World War II. And malaria annually kills one million to three million people — meaning that three years’ deaths in Darfur are within the margin of error of the annual global toll from malaria.

So, yes, you can make an argument that Darfur is simply one of many tragedies and that it would be more cost-effective to save lives by tackling diarrhea, measles and malaria.

But I don’t buy that argument at all. We have a moral compass within us, and its needle is moved not only by human suffering but also by human evil. That’s what makes genocide special — not just the number of deaths but the government policy behind them. And that in turn is why stopping genocide should be an even higher priority than saving lives from AIDS or malaria.

Even the Holocaust amounted to only 10 percent of World War II casualties and cost far fewer lives than the AIDS epidemic. But the Holocaust evokes special revulsion because it wasn’t just tragic but also monstrous, and that’s why we read Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel. Teenage girls still die all the time, and little boys still starve and lose their parents — but when this arises from genocide, the horror resonates with all humans.

Or it should. But for whatever reason, Sudan’s decision to kill people on the basis of tribe and skin color has aroused mostly yawns around the globe. Now Sudan is raising the stakes by starting a new military offensive in Darfur — and by eliminating witnesses.

The government charged Paul Salopek, an ace Chicago Tribune correspondent, with espionage in an effort to keep foreign reporters away (on Saturday it released him after a month in prison). And even African Union peacekeepers may be forced out of Darfur by the end of this month.

Twelve aid workers have been killed since May — more than in the previous three years. These killings are forcing aid groups to pull back, and the U.N. warns that if the humanitarian operation collapses, the result will be “hundreds of thousands of deaths.” If all foreign witnesses are pushed out, the calamity is barely imaginable.

We urgently need U.N. peacekeepers, even over Sudan’s objections. (If Sudan sees them coming, it will hurriedly consent.) The U.S. should also impose a no-fly zone from Chad and work with France to keep Chad and the Central African Republic from collapsing into this maelstrom.

President Bush showed an important flash of leadership on Darfur early this year, but lately he has fallen quiet again. He should appoint a special envoy for Darfur and use his bully pulpit to put genocide on the international agenda — for starters, by employing his speech to the U.N. General Assembly this month to remind the world of the children being tossed onto bonfires in Sudan. He could also announce that the U.S. will choose candidates to support for U.N. secretary general based in part on their positions on the genocide.

You can see how your member of Congress does on Darfur at www.darfurscores.org. Information about Darfur rallies next Sunday in New York and other cities worldwide is at www.savedarfur.org.

If we don’t act, the slaughter may end up claiming more than one million lives, but this is about more than body count. This time the teenagers are not named Anne and Elie, but Fatima and Ahmed, but the horror is the same.

Iranian Leader Wants Purge of Liberals From Universities

2006-09-06T12:43:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Tuesday for a purge of liberal and secular professors from Iranian universities, the IRNA news agency reported.

“Today, students have the right to strongly criticize their president for the continued presence of liberal and secular professors in the country’s universities,” he told a group of young conservatives on National Youth Day, according to the news agency.

Mr. Ahmadinejad said the work to replace secular professors had started, but “bringing change is very difficult.”

“Our educational system has been affected by 150 years of secular thought and has raised thousands of people who hold Ph.D.’s,” he said. “Changing this system is not easy and we have to do it together.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s comments appeared to be part of a continuing crackdown on social and political freedoms that began with his election last year.

As part of the crackdown, about 110,000 illegal satellite dishes have been confiscated in the past five months, one senior official, Ahmad Roozbehani, was quoted in the news media as saying. Opposition channels that broadcast mostly out of the United States have a large audience in Iran.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s call to rid the universities of secular professors is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution of 1980 to 1987, the period after the 1979 Islamic Revolution when many liberal or Western professors were fired or forced to conform to the revolutionary line. The Supreme Cultural Revolution Council, which was set up during that time and oversaw the purges, is now headed by Mr. Ahmadinejad.

Click here to read the entire article.

Revised Army Rules to Prohibit Torture

2006-09-05T23:16:00.000-06:00

From the Los Angeles Times:

Bowing to critics of its tough interrogation policies, the Pentagon is issuing a new Army field manual that provides Geneva Convention protections for all detainees and eliminates a secret list of interrogation tactics.

The manual, set for release today, also reverses an earlier decision to maintain two interrogation standards — one for traditional prisoners of war and another for "unlawful combatants" captured during a conflict but not affiliated with a nation's military force. It will ban the use of such controversial methods as forcing prisoners to endure long periods of solitary confinement, using military dogs to threaten prisoners, putting hoods over inmates' heads and strapping detainees to boards and dunking them in water to simulate drowning, defense officials said.

The manual and its related policy directives — the legal framework for interrogations — originally were to be released in the spring. But when State Department officials and Republican senators on the Armed Services Committee raised objections, they were pulled back.

The Pentagon's decision to drop the objectionable provisions appears to mark a victory for advocates of closer U.S. adherence to the protections of the Geneva Convention, an international agreement on the treatment of prisoners and others during wartime. Human rights groups said they planned to study the manual carefully to see what parts of the international treaty it included and what it left out.

Click here to read the entire article.

Over U.S. Objections, Israel Approves West Bank Homes

2006-09-05T10:00:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

September 5, 2006

By STEVEN ERLANGER

JERUSALEM, Sept. 4 — The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, authorized construction bids on Monday for another 690 homes in the occupied West Bank in the face of pro forma American criticism.

The houses will be built in Maale Adumim and Betar Illit, two settlements near Jerusalem that the Israeli government says it intends to keep in any agreement with the Palestinians.

Mr. Olmert, whose Kadima Party was elected earlier this year on a promise to pull thousands of Israeli settlers out of the West Bank, beyond the route of Israel’s separation barrier, has been clear about keeping and expanding settlements inside the barrier, even though they are on land occupied since the 1967 war.

The Construction and Housing Ministry published advertisements on Monday seeking construction proposals for the largest settlement activity undertaken by this government. Israel has also promised President Bush that it will pull down more than 20 illegal outposts created since March 2001, but has not done so.

The Bush administration’s position is that Israel should not expand settlements in the West Bank, because it makes the process of a final agreement harder. In general, much of the world considers Israeli settlements in territory seized in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem, to be illegal, which Israel disputes.

Stewart Tuttle, the spokesman for the American Embassy in Israel, said Monday that “in general it’s a principle of the road map — a foundation to reach peace in the region — that Israel not only remove illegal outposts, but also not expand settlements in the West Bank.”

The road map is the multistage peace plan supported by the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations and agreed to in principle by the Palestinians and Israel. The Palestinians, in the first stage, are supposed to begin the disarming and dismantling of armed militias and terrorist groups.

The United States, Mr. Tuttle said, opposes “any actions that would prejudice final status negotiations, which would include the final borders of Israel and Palestine.”

But such criticism has had little effect on Israeli policy in the past, and is not expected to matter in this case. In general, Israel says it is not “expanding” settlements, but “thickening” them within existing built-up areas.

A former United States ambassador here, Daniel C. Kurtzer, tried to get Israel to agree with the United States on mapping the existing built-up areas of settlements in order to make it clear when settlements were being expanded. But Israel — which has detailed satellite maps of nearly every building in the West Bank — regularly refused.

The mayor of Maale Adumim, Benny Kashriel, said Monday that many units were under construction. “In short, it is just a matter of completing construction within a town,” he said. Maale Adumim has a population of 31,615 and looks like a Jerusalem suburb. The construction in Betar Illit is intended to house haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews.

The government’s move was criticized in Israel as well. “Instead of dismantling outposts and freezing construction in the settlements, the Olmert government is constructing further units and plans to authorize tens of illegal outposts,” said Yariv Oppenheimer, the director of the leftist lobby Peace Now. “All these actions are in contradiction of the Israeli commitment to the road map, and the commitment of the Labor and Kadima Parties to their voters.”

Mr. Olmert is also facing tough budget pressures. He has supported more military spending after the recent war in Lebanon and his coalition partner, Labor, supports more social spending and opposes cuts proposed by the Finance Ministry. Because of the sharp criticism of tuition increases and cuts in child support, publication of the budget was delayed Monday.

Labor’s leader, Defense Minister Amir Peretz, is being widely criticized for his performance, and aides to Mr. Olmert believe that Labor is creating a crisis over the budget to try to restore some of its credibility as a left-leaning party.

Mr. Olmert appeared before Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Policy and Defense on Monday for the first time since the war in Lebanon. He said that a war with Syria would be handled with full force.

He also confirmed that his plan for another unilateral withdrawal from part of the occupied West Bank was being shelved for now as the government concentrates on rebuilding the north.

“What I saw as right several months ago has changed now,” Mr. Olmert said, according to an aide and Israel Radio. “At this moment, the issue of the realignment is not in the order of priorities as it was two months ago.”

The capture of three Israeli soldiers on raids into Israel from Gaza and Lebanon and the heavy use of rockets by Hezbollah have brought many Israelis around to the thinking of the Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. He argues that it would be unsafe for Israel to hand over large areas of the West Bank to a Palestinian Authority led by Hamas, which refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, even though it says it is prepared to negotiate a long-term “truce” with Israel in its pre-1967 borders.

In Lebanon, a Qatari airliner landed at the Beirut airport on Monday afternoon with 142 passengers, piercing an Israeli air and sea blockade that was imposed July 12, at the start of the war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas. The Israeli Army said it had given its permission.

Like almost everything in Lebanon now, the blockade is murky. Israel has recently allowed relief flights and a limited shuttle service to Amman, Jordan, where passengers can board flights for other destinations.

But the flight on Monday was the first to arrive directly from a distant country, and it was greeted by local and Arab television crews as a mild triumph.

The maritime blockade continues, however, and is viewed as much more serious by many Lebanese merchants, who complain that their supplies are running short.

Kofi Annan: Israel's cease-fire violations in Lebanon 70, Hezbollah 4

2006-09-04T18:42:00.000-06:00

Here is an article that describes how Israel is continuing to violate human rights in Lebanon:

New York Times
September 1, 2006
Villagers See Violations of a Cease-Fire That Israel Says Doesn’t Exist
By ROBERT F. WORTH
AITA AL SHAAB, Lebanon, Aug. 29 — A group of local men were unloading bags of donated food from a truck here Tuesday morning when the tok-tok-tok of heavy machine-gun fire rang out.
Men shouted; children screamed and ran. Then, as it became clear the firing was just the Israeli tanks again up on the hillside above town, they went back to their routines.
The shooting — and occasional mortar fire — goes on regularly around this village, a Hezbollah stronghold near the border.
To local people, it is sheer provocation, and a flagrant breach of the cease-fire that ended the fighting on Aug. 14.
To the Israelis, it is legitimate self-defense. Aita al Shaab “still has many Hezbollah fighters in it,” said Miri Eisin, an Israeli government spokeswoman. “They don’t wear uniforms and are wary about showing their weapons, and we use all means to differentiate between those with weapons and those without.”
More broadly, the shooting underscores two fundamentally different views of the uneasy truce that has held in southern Lebanon for the past two weeks. Secretary General Kofi Annan cited numbers from the United Nations forces on Tuesday indicating that Israel had violated the cease-fire nearly 70 times, while Hezbollah had done so only 4 times.
But the Israelis do not believe there is a cease-fire to violate. “We are at a cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, not a cease-fire,” Ms. Eisin said. She added that Israel had the explicit right to self-defense under United Nations Resolution 1701, which does not use the term cease-fire.
That difference is apparent every day across southern Lebanon. Israeli tanks crisscross the dry brown hills, shooting into the fields and smashing up houses and stone walls. Teams of Israeli soldiers have planted their nation’s flag atop bluffs here and sometimes detained Lebanese men, releasing them days later. No one seems to know where the mobile Israeli units are based, or how to avoid them.
Amid all that, the blue-helmeted United Nations soldiers sit in their vehicles like helpless tourists, many unable to speak Arabic or English.
Israel has made clear that its troops will not leave Lebanon until the Lebanese Army and a strengthened United Nations peacekeeping force are capable of taking over its positions.
But to many in this village — where the war began on July 12 when Hezbollah fighters crossed the border to kidnap two Israeli soldiers — Israel’s recent actions look like intimidation.
“Israel is trying to scare us and make us leave,” said Nuha Srour, a stern-faced schoolteacher in a black robe and head scarf, as machine-gun fire went on in the distance. “They were surprised we came back here after the bombing.”
Perhaps no one has witnessed the confusion of south Lebanon more vividly than Muhammad al-Hussein, a 32-year-old farmer from the village of Qantara.
Last week he and his brother were driving to a neighboring village to buy parts for a truck. They knew the Israelis had been operating a checkpoint in the area, but were told they had withdrawn and that the road — an essential link to other towns — was safe.
Instead, they found themselves passing a group of Israeli soldiers, who stopped them, Mr. Hussein recalled. The soldiers handcuffed and blindfolded the two brothers, and drove them to Israel.
For the next four days, shackled hand and foot, Mr. Hussein was interrogated about his family and village, he said. He was released Monday after United Nations and Lebanese Army officials lodged complaints with Israel.
On Monday evening, sitting on a terrace rimmed with pomegranate trees with a group of relatives and friends back home, Mr. Hussein could smile about his ordeal. He said the Israelis had fed him, and had not struck or mistreated him. But he seemed profoundly nervous about encountering them again, and unsure how to avoid it.
“Even if you gave me a truckload of gold and diamonds, I would not go back to that place,” he said of the road, just a mile or so from his village, where the Israelis had picked him up.
At the same time, Mr. Hussein also appeared to be nervous about Hezbollah. Asked whether the Israelis had asked him about the militia, he said no, and then refused to say anything about the subject.
Israel’s activities have mostly taken place at night with patrols staying clear of towns. But on occasion they have made themselves oddly conspicuous.
On Sunday, an Israeli flag could be seen flying prominently from a bluff just outside the Lebanese village of Shabaa, where a group of Israeli soldiers were posted with a military bulldozer. Photographers snapped pictures throughout the day, and Israeli soldiers warned approaching reporters to stay clear.
Lebanese Army officials complained about the flag to the United Nations, who contacted Israel about the matter. Israeli soldiers took the flag down, a spokesman for the United Nations force, Alexander Ivanko, said Monday.
But an hour after Mr. Ivanko spoke, the flag was still flying in the same spot. Another Israeli flag was raised over the weekend on a hilltop near the village of Marwaheen. On Tuesday, it appeared to have been removed.
The flags and the continuing presence of Israeli soldiers here have further angered villagers already stunned by the extent of the Israeli bombing. Even some Christians, whose villages were largely spared the destruction visited on Shiite areas, say the war has fueled their support for Hezbollah.
In Aita al Shaab, public support for Hezbollah is almost total. One street where a number of Hezbollah fighters lived — commonly known even before the war as Hezbollah Street — was almost totally destroyed. Several families have returned to the ruins anyway, defiantly insisting on staying in their charred, stinking homes. Others are living alongside the ruins in green tents donated by aid groups.
“They destroyed our school in the village, but we will teach the children under the trees,” said Ms. Srour, the schoolteacher. “And we will teach them to hate Israel and love the resistance.”
Ms. Srour said Israeli tanks had fired so close to her house on Sunday that several of her relatives — who had returned from Beirut only a week earlier — left the village again, fearing the war was on again.
As in many southern villages, the blackened and bomb-scarred ruins here are bedecked with yellow Hezbollah banners proclaiming — somewhat paradoxically — a “divine victory” for the resistance.
But not far away, Muhammad Srour, a cleric and cousin of the schoolteacher, offered a slightly different view as he poked through the shattered ruins of his house, gathering a few remaining clothes and books into plastic bags.
“We’ve been beaten so badly that we still don’t want to admit we’ve been beaten,” he said.
Steven Erlanger contributed reporting from Jerusalem for this article, and Lynsey Addario from Aita al Shaab.

-- JB

Security Forces Violate Human Rights with Impunity in Chechnya

2006-09-04T18:38:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

August 30, 2006
In Chechen’s Humiliation, Questions on Rule of Law
By C. J. CHIVERS
ARGUN, Russia, Aug. 26 — The humiliation of Malika Soltayeva, a pregnant Chechen woman suspected of adultery, was ferocious and swift.
Ms. Soltayeva, 23, had been away from home for a month and was reported missing by her family. When she returned, her husband accused her of infidelity and banished her from their apartment. The local authorities found her at her aunt’s residence. They said they had a few questions.
What followed was no investigation. In a law enforcement compound in this town in east-central Chechnya, the men who served as Argun’s police sheared away her hair and her eyebrows and painted her scalp green, the color associated with Islam. A thumb-thick cross was smeared on her brow.
Ms. Soltayeva, a Muslim, had slept with a Christian Russian serviceman, they said. Her scarlet letter would be an emerald cross. She was forced to confess, ordered to strip, and beaten with wooden rods and hoses on her buttocks, arms, legs, hands, stomach and back.
“Turn and be condemned by Allah,” one of her tormentors said, demanding that she position herself so he could strike her more squarely.
The torture of Ms. Soltayeva, recorded on a video obtained by The New York Times, and other recent brutish acts and instances of religious policing, raise questions about Chechnya’s direction.
Since 2004, the war in Chechnya has tilted sharply in the Kremlin’s favor, as open combat with separatists has declined in intensity and frequency. Moscow now administers the republic and fights the remaining insurgency largely through paramilitary forces led by Ramzan A. Kadyrov, the powerful young Chechen premier.
Mr. Kadyrov’s public persona is flamboyantly pro-Russian. He praises President Vladimir V. Putin and has pledged to rebuild Chechnya and lead it back to the Kremlin’s fold. “I cannot tell you how great my love for Russia is,” he said in an interview this year.
But beneath this publicly professed loyalty, some of Chechnya’s indigenous security forces — with their evident anti-Slavic racism, institutionalized brutality, culture of impunity and intolerant interpretation of a pre-medieval Islamic code — have demonstrated the vicious behavior that Russia has said its latest invasion of Chechnya, in 1999, was supposed to stop.
Human rights groups and Chechen civilians say that these security forces’ ambitions and loyalties are uncertain and that their actions are unchecked. The republic’s course, they say, is dangerous for Russians and Chechens alike.
Few people have yet compared the current disorder with the end of the brief period of Chechen autonomy, in the late 1990’s, when rebels and foreign Islamic mercenaries operated terrorist training camps in the forests, and when Islamic courts sentenced criminals to execution by firing squads, which were broadcast on Chechen television news. But Mr. Kadyrov’s police and security forces, known as kadyrovsty, are staffed mostly with uneducated young men, some of whom have been fighting for years, including many former rebels who have changed sides.
Recent videos of their conduct, provided to The New York Times by outraged Chechens, show an unsettling pattern.
One shows a man and a woman in the town of Shali, each married to someone else, who were suspected of flirting in a car this summer. The police swarmed around the couple, jeering at them, and directed the man to kick the woman. The couple was then forced to dance a brief lezginka, a traditional and often sexually charged dance. The police kicked the woman, too, and pulled her scarf and hair.
Although the faces of several of the officers are clear, they have yet to come under investigation by higher authorities.
Another instance of unrestrained behavior occurred in late July in Kurchaloi, when one of Mr. Kadyrov’s units killed a rebel, Akhmad Dushayev, and beheaded his body. The severed head was displayed on a pipe in the town’s center, residents said in interviews.
Videos show that, later, the kadyrovsty, many in police uniforms, casually amused themselves with the head, joking as they displayed it in a garage. Another video shows the head adorned with a cap and with a cigarette in its mouth.
Residents said the police justified the beheading by saying that Mr. Dushayev had previously cut off the head of a pro-Kremlin Chechen fighter, and that the vengeance was fair play.
Ms. Soltayeva’s own experience, much of which was captured on video, was an accumulation of terror, pain and loss.
She was seized March 19, and mocked throughout a torture session that lasted nearly two hours. “Call for Sergei!” one of the policemen said, using the name of her assumed lover as he beat her. “Sergei! Help!”
Next they told her to dress, and drove her to her husband’s courtyard and made her dance before her neighbors. “Look how ugly you are,” another policeman said.
When she staggered away, several of them kicked her with their heavy black boots. Two days later she miscarried, and has been largely out of public view since.
The episode, which took place five months ago, was not investigated, even though videos showing the torture were passed along on cellphones throughout Argun and other Chechen towns. The videos circulated widely enough that accurate details of her abuse were known by roughly half of the Chechens interviewed by The New York Times.
“It is just outrageous lawlessness,” Ms. Soltayeva said in an interview in Grozny, Chechnya’s capital.
As is common in crumbling marriages, the details of Ms. Soltayeva’s family life and behavior are in dispute. Her former husband’s family says she had an affair with a Russian serviceman she met at a store where she worked as a cashier. She says that she did not, and that she was faithful to her husband even though he beat her.
Her whereabouts in the weeks leading up to her beating are also a source of contention.
Ms. Soltayeva said she was away from home because she had been abducted by masked men who eventually released her, a phenomenon in Chechnya that is common enough that her own family says they believe her. Her husband’s family, and the police, say that she left Chechnya to try to live with her Russian lover, and that she returned when it did not work out.
Natalya Estemirova, a staff member at the Grozny office of Memorial, a private human rights group, said she tried to bring the case to the Chechen authorities, but they threatened Ms. Soltayeva with criminal charges for falsely claiming to have been kidnapped. They showed no interest in the police violence, she said.
Allegations of state-sponsored horrors, and claims that Russian and Chechen officials have allowed servicemen to commit crimes with impunity, have been a regular accompaniment to the Chechen wars.
Human rights groups have documented mass graves, extralegal executions, widespread use and tolerance of torture, illegal detention, rape, robbery and kidnapping.
Some cases have seemed a matter of policy, as when suspected rebel supporters have been abducted during police and military sweeps. Other cases appeared to flow from the rage, drunkenness or frustration of ordinary soldiers fighting a savage guerrilla war.
What has made several recent cases different is that many of the kadyrovsty, unsophisticated gunmen who have had little contact with the world beyond Chechnya, have acquired cellphones with small video cameras and have casually, even gleefully, recorded their own crimes.
The video sequences are then shared, multiplying as they swiftly pass from phone to phone.
In a long interview earlier this year, Mr. Kadyrov said that his units were being professionalized and that the armed men under his command integrated into formal government structures. He insisted that they would be able to provide security and competent policing.
[On Aug. 29, The Times provided Mr. Kadyrov’s office with four videos of Ms. Soltayeva’s torture. Mr. Kadyrov said through a spokeswoman that upon viewing them he had ordered the Chechen Interior Ministry to investigate. “Criminal charges will be brought against all responsible for this,” said the spokeswoman, Tatyana Georgiyeva.]
Ms. Estemirova said that the unit in Argun that seized Ms. Soltayeva had been formally disbanded in the spring, but that its members were simply transferred into new “professional” battalions, known as North and South.
“They were assimilated into North and South and never checked by prosecutors,” she said. “Now they are more difficult to arrest.”

--JB

Sudan Heightens War in Darfur Region

2006-09-04T17:48:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Sept. 4 -- The Sudanese government has dramatically intensified the war in Darfur in a bid to finish off the tenacious, three-year-old rebellion before a U.N. peacekeeping force can deploy there, say analysts, rebels and officials from the African Union monitoring mission.

Four months after what was hailed as a groundbreaking peace deal was signed in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, bombing raids on villages and increasingly aggressive ground attacks are allowing government forces to drive back rebels while also pushing tens of thousands of civilians into already overflowing camps.

The African Union's 7,000-strong monitoring force, meanwhile, has been threatened with expulsion by the government and, under its current mandate, is scheduled to end its mission in Darfur by month's end. Many humanitarian groups also have curtailed operations there because of the dangers presented by the new fighting.

Aid groups warn that conditions could grow far worse without the African Union's moderating influence and ability to provide crucial, if limited, protection for humanitarian operations such as food delivery and health care. Even with the African Union force in place, 12 humanitarian workers have been killed since the peace deal was signed May 5, including an International Rescue Committee nurse killed in fighting Friday.

The U.N. Security Council last week approved a peacekeeping force of up to 22,500 that would take the place of the African Union troops, but Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has sought to block it from being deployed. Two students were killed and 10 wounded in the North Darfur capital of El Fasher on Monday as troops violently dispersed a rally supporting the deployment of a U.N. force, news reports said.

The new push by government forces and the uncertainty surrounding peacekeeping efforts could produce a fundamental shift in the fighting in Darfur, which has already left at least 100,000 dead and 2 million displaced. Aid workers say that in recent weeks, civilian casualties, rapes and looting have grown more widespread. Tens of thousands of Darfuris have surged into camps, voting with their feet against a peace deal that many there regard as deeply flawed.

Click here to read the article.

Iraqi Casualties Are Up Sharply, Study Finds

2006-09-01T22:51:00.000-06:00

From the New York Times:

During the period from the establishment of the new Iraqi government on May 20 until Aug. 11, the average number of weekly attacks jumped to almost 800. That was a substantial increase from earlier this year and almost double the number of the first part of 2004.

As a consequence, Iraqi casualties increased 51 percent over the last reporting period. The document notes that, based on initial reports, Iraqi casualties among civilians and security forces reached nearly 120 a day, up from about 80 a day in the pervious reporting period from mid-February to mid-May. About two years ago they were running about 30 a day.

“Although the overall number of attacks increased in all categories, the proportion of those attacks directed against civilians increased substantially,” the Pentagon noted. “Death squads and terrorists are locked in mutually reinforcing cycles of sectarian strife, with Sunni and Shia extremists each portraying themselves as the defenders of their respective sectarian groups.”

The Pentagon report, titled “Measuring Security and Stability in Iraq,” is mandated by Congress and issued quarterly. It covers a broad range of subjects, including the economy, public attitudes, and security.

Click here to read the entire article.

U.S. Report: More Nicotine in Cigarettes

2006-08-30T17:21:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

The level of nicotine that smokers typically consume per cigarette has risen about 10 percent in the past six years, making it harder to quit and easier to get hooked, according to a new report released Tuesday by the Massachusetts Department of Health.

The study shows a steady climb in the amount of nicotine delivered to the lungs of smokers regardless of brand, with overall nicotine yields increasing by about 10 percent.

Massachusetts is one of three states to require tobacco companies to submit information about nicotine testing according to its specifications and the only state with data going back to 1998.

Click here to read tbe full article.

Calif. to Cap Greenhouse Gas Emissions

2006-08-30T17:18:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

California would become the first state to impose a limit on all greenhouse gas emissions, including those from industrial plants, under a landmark deal reached Wednesday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative Democrats.

The agreement marks a clear break with the Bush administration and puts California on a path to reducing its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by an estimated 25 percent by 2020.

The bill still needs lawmakers' approval, but that appears likely, given that Democrats control the Legislature.

Click here to read the entire article.

Bush to Meet with Autocrat

2006-08-29T11:17:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

President Bush launched an initiative this month to combat international kleptocracy, the sort of high-level corruption by foreign officials that he called "a grave and corrosive abuse of power" that "threatens our national interest and violates our values." The plan, he said, would be "a critical component of our freedom agenda."

Three weeks later, the White House is making arrangements to host the leader of Kazakhstan, an autocrat who runs a nation that is anything but free and who has been accused by U.S. prosecutors of pocketing the bulk of $78 million in bribes from an American businessman. Not only will President Nursultan Nazarbayev visit the White House, people involved say, but he also will travel to the Bush family compound in Maine.

Nazarbayev's upcoming visit, according to analysts and officials, offers a case study in the competing priorities of the Bush administration at a time when the president has vowed to fight for democracy and against corruption around the globe. Nazarbayev has banned opposition parties, intimidated the press and profited from his post, according to the U.S. government. But he also sits atop massive oil reserves that have helped open doors in Washington.

Nazarbayev is hardly the only controversial figure received at the top levels of the Bush administration. In April, the president welcomed to the Oval Office the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, who has been accused of rigging elections. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hosted Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of Equatorial Guinea, who has been found to have millions of dollars stashed in overseas bank accounts.

Click here to read the entire article.

Amnesty International Accuses Israel of War Crimes in Lebanon

2006-08-27T16:26:00.000-06:00

August 24, 2006
Human Rights Group Accuses Israel of War Crimes
By JOHN KIFNER
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Aug. 23 —

Amnesty International accused Israel on Wednesday of war crimes in its monthlong battle with Hezbollah, saying its bombing campaign amounted to indiscriminate attacks on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure and population.
“Many of the violations examined in this report are war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility,” Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, said in a report on the Israeli campaign. “They include directly attacking civilian objects and carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks.”
“During more than four weeks of ground and aerial bombardment by the Israeli armed forces, the country’s infrastructure suffered destruction on a catastrophic scale,” the report said, contending this was “an integral part of the military strategy.”
“Israeli forces pounded buildings into the ground,” the report went on, “reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble and turning villages and towns into ghost towns as their inhabitants fled the bombardments.
“Main roads, bridges and petrol stations were blown to bits. Entire families were killed in airstrikes on their homes or in their vehicles while fleeing the aerial assaults on their villages. Scores lay buried beneath the rubble of their houses for weeks, as the Red Cross and other rescue workers were prevented from accessing the areas by continuing Israeli strikes.”
Mark Regev, the spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, categorically rejected the claim that Israel had “acted outside international norms or international legality concerning the rules of war.” Unlike Hezbollah, he said, Israel did not target the civilian population, nor did it indiscriminately target Lebanese civilian infrastructure.

He added: “Our job was made very difficult by the fact that Hezbollah adopted a deliberate policy of positioning itself inside civilian areas and breaking the first fundamental distinction under the rules of war, by deliberately endangering civilians. Under the rules of war, you are legally entitled to target infrastructure that your enemy is exploiting for its military campaign.”
Citing a variety of sources, the Amnesty International report said Israel’s air force had carried out more than 7,000 air attacks, while the navy had fired 2,500 shells. The human toll, according to Lebanese government statistics, was estimated at 1,183 deaths, mostly civilians, about a third of them children; 4,054 wounded; and 970,000 people displaced, out of a population of a little under four million.

“Statements from the Israeli military officials seem to confirm that the destruction of the infrastructure was indeed a goal of the military campaign,” the report said. It said that “in village after village the pattern was similar: the streets, especially main streets, were scarred with artillery craters along their length. In some cases, cluster bomb impacts were identified.”
“Houses were singled out for precision-guided missile attacks and were destroyed, totally or partially, as a result,” the report said. “Business premises such as supermarkets or food stores and auto service stations and petrol stations were targeted.

“With the electricity cut off and food and other supplies not coming into the villages, the destruction of supermarkets and petrol stations played a crucial role in forcing local residents to leave.”

The Amnesty International report said the widespread destruction of apartments, houses, electricity and water services, roads, bridges, factories and ports, in addition to several statements by Israeli officials, suggested a policy of punishing the Lebanese government and the civilian population in an effort to get them to turn against Hezbollah.
“The evidence strongly suggests that the extensive destruction of public works, power systems, civilian homes and industry was a deliberate and integral part of the military strategy rather than collateral damage,” the report said.

It also noted a statement from the Israeli military chief of staff, Lt. Gen Dan Halutz, calling Hezbollah a “cancer” that Lebanon must get rid of “because if they don’t, their country will pay a very high price.”
The Amnesty International report came as a number of international aid and human rights agencies used the current lull in fighting to assess the damage.
The United Nations Development Program said the attacks had obliterated most of the progress Lebanon had made in recovering from the devastation of the civil war years. “Fifteen years of work have been wiped out in a month,” Jean Fabre, a spokesman for the organization in Geneva, told reporters.
Another urgent issue, aid groups say, is the number of unexploded bomblets from cluster bombs littering the southern villages. Tekimiti Gilbert, the operations chief of a United Nations mine removal team, told reporters in Tyre: “Up to now there are at least 170 cluster bomb strikes in south Lebanon. It’s a huge problem. There are obvious dangers with people, children, cars. People are tripping over these things.”
United Nations officials say at least five children have been killed by picking up the bomblets scattered about by the cluster bombs.
Despite the cease-fire, southern Lebanon remained tense on Wednesday. Three Lebanese soldiers were killed trying to defuse a rocket that had not exploded. An Israeli soldier was killed and two others wounded when, according to the Israeli military, they walked over a minefield that Israel had previously buried.
The Israeli military also said it had fired artillery rounds from the disputed territory of Shabaa Farms to the Lebanese village of Shabaa. There were no reports of casualties.
Greg Myre contributed reporting from Jerusalem for this article.

Visit http://www.amnesty.org/for access to the entire report.

--JB

State Dept. Probes Use of Israeli Bombs

2006-08-26T21:26:00.000-06:00

From the Washington Post:

The State Department said yesterday that it has begun a preliminary investigation into allegations that Israel violated U.S. rules prohibiting the use of American-made cluster bombs in civilian areas during the recent war in Lebanon.
State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos said the investigation began after human rights groups complained that cluster weapons had been found across Lebanon and were responsible for many civilian deaths.
"We have heard the allegations they were used, and we are taking a look at that," he said.
Three types of U.S.-made cluster bombs are said to have been used by Israel. Israel also makes its own cluster munitions.
The State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls will verify whether U.S.-made cluster bombs were used during the conflict with Hezbollah and will examine whether the weapons -- which scatter small bombs, or "bomblets," across wide areas -- were used "inappropriately," Gallegos said.

Click here to read the entire article.

--Tom Hayes

Child Labor in Africa

2006-08-24T17:22:00.000-06:00

The New York Times has an interesting article about child labor in Africa, which can be accessed by clicking here. One amazingly sad part of the article reads:

Across the globe, the number of children forced to work is in sharp decline.

But sub-Saharan Africa, in places like Lusaka and for children like Alone, is the exception. Here, more than one in four children below age 14 works, whether full time or for a few hours a week, nearly the same percentage as the worldwide average in 1960.

It is by far the greatest proportion of working children in the world.

By the United Nations’ latest estimate, more than 49 million sub-Saharan children age 14 and younger worked in 2004, 1.3 million more than at the turn of the century just four years earlier.

An Interesting Idea

2006-08-18T08:52:00.000-06:00

Check out yourquestion.org, an interesting website and idea devoted to sharing information and knowledge. The website asks for questions from anyone about anything, of which 100 will be chosen and discussed on September 9th in Berlin by some of the worlds leading thinkers. I think its a pretty cool idea and you can ask your own question or rate others. It's definitely worth checking out.

Human Rights Activists in Iran

2006-08-17T14:59:00.000-06:00

Below is an editorial from the Tuesday August 15th edition of the New York Times about human rights activists in Iran, the editorial while short, is well worth reading.

August 15, 2006

Editorial

Who’s Afraid of Shirin Ebadi?

Under cover of the international furor over its nuclear activities and its support for Hezbollah, Iran is trying to silence its most prominent human-rights activist, and, by extension, all of the Iranians who speak for fundamental rights.

Shirin Ebadi, the lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, has been threatened with arrest unless she closes the Center for Protecting Human Rights in Tehran. The center provides free legal representation to journalists, students and dissidents who face prosecution for peaceful assembly and criticizing the government. Ms. Ebadi and the center’s lawyers have represented Iran’s leading dissident, Akbar Ganji. Most recently, Ms. Ebadi has been defending women who say they were beaten and detained by the police for demonstrating for women’s rights in June.

One of the center’s co-founders, Abdolfattah Soltani, spent several months in prison last year, and in July drew a five-year sentence on charges of opposing the state and disclosing confidential information to diplomats. He is free awaiting the outcome of his appeal, but there is no timetable for the decision.

In the meantime, other prominent Iranians are languishing in prison, among them, Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoini, a former member of Parliament, who was arrested in June as he prepared to take part in the women’s rights demonstration, and Ramin Jahanbegloo, one of Iran’s best-known scholars, who was arbitrarily arrested in April.

The European Union recently expressed alarm at the deterioration of human rights in Iran, as have Human Rights Watch and other nongovernmental organizations. The United States and Europe need to engage with Iran. But they also need to make clear that Tehran’s poor treatment of its citizens as well as its nuclear ambitions are unacceptable.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

--Tom Hayes