"So?" - So This

By Cernig

Mickey Edwards, 16-year Republican Congressman from Oklahoma, founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation and Princeton scholar, has found his contrary voice to the Bush?Cheney GOP late in life - but, oh boy, is it a clear one.

The decision to go to war...to send young Americans off to battle, knowing that some will die -- is the single most difficult choice any public official can be called upon to make. That is precisely why the nation's Founders, aware of the deadly wars of Europe, deliberately withheld from the executive branch the power to engage in war unless such action was expressly approved by the people themselves, through their representatives in Congress.

Cheney told Raddatz that American war policy should not be affected by the views of the people. But that is precisely whose views should matter: It is the people who should decide whether the nation shall go to war. That is not a radical, or liberal, or unpatriotic idea. It is the very heart of America's constitutional system.

In Europe, before America's founding, there were rulers and their subjects. The Founders decided that in the United States there would be not subjects but citizens. Rulers tell their subjects what to do, but citizens tell their government what to do.

If Dick Cheney believes, as he obviously does, that the war in Iraq is vital to American interests, it is his job, and that of President Bush, to make the case with sufficient proof to win the necessary public support.

That is the difference between a strong president (one who leads) and a strong presidency (one in which ultimate power resides in the hands of a single person). Bush is officially America's "head of state," but he is not the head of government; he is the head of one branch of our government, and it's not the branch that decides on war and peace.

When the vice president dismisses public opposition to war with a simple "So?" he violates the single most important element in the American system of government: Here, the people rule.

It's been obvious to many of us for a very long time that the GOP had been taken over by people who would prefer that the people not rule. I'm glad to see more and more conservatives figuring that out for themselves in the last year of the Bush presidency. It might just help prevent a McSame presidency continuing Bush and Cheney's work.

Certainly McCain should be seen as going into the elections with all of his policies, along with his candidacy, already the lamest kind of ducks.

Crime And Cover-Up

By Cernig

You really should read the NY Times' editorial today. Both Tristero and BooMan have the same take on it - that it's about time the NYT and others in the mainstream woke up, smelled the coffee, and got as angry about Bush's impact on the underlying fabric of American civil liberty as leftie bloggers have been for years.

Here's a taste:

For more than two years now, Congress, the news media, current and former national security officials, think tanks and academic institutions have been engaged in a profound debate over how to modernize the law governing electronic spying to keep pace with technology. We keep hoping President Bush will join in.

Instead, the president offers propaganda intended to scare Americans, expand his powers, and erode civil liberties — and to ensure that no one is held to account for the illegal wiretapping he ordered after 9/11.

...The president will continue to claim the country is in grave danger over this issue, but it is not. The real danger is for Mr. Bush. A good law — like the House bill — would allow Americans to finally see the breathtaking extent of his lawless behavior.

The mainstream media gave Bush a pass on all his soft-totalitarian tricks for most of his presidency - the best part of eight long years - before finally deciding to speak up. Let's hope that they've already figured out that John McCain is just more of the McSame and won't give him the benefit of any doubt at all on his scaremongering tactics in the run-up to November.

Tanks In Tibet

By Cernig

Reports are coming in of tanks and machine-gun posts on the streets of the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, and another city, Xiahe, along with up to 100 dead. Unless, that is, you live in Beijing - in which case you're watching a blank screen when international satellite news reports talk about it.

The disruption comes just months before the Olympic Games, when China's leaders had hoped to display a 'harmonious society'. However, chaos has gripped Xiahe, which is home to a large community that considers itself part of greater Tibet even though it is outside of the Tibet Autonomous Region.

According to Sanjay Tashi of the Free Tibet Campaign, the city centre was filled with tear gas, cars were set on fire, government buildings ransacked and the banned Tibetan flag flew over a school.

Other witnesses said they saw 10 to 20 truckloads of riot police moving into the area. Police have fired tear gas rounds and arrested some protesters. But the crowd stormed the jail and released the prisoners, Tashi said.

In Lhasa, police have locked down the city, patrolling the streets and setting up checkpoints on many roads. Foreign tourists have been ordered to leave the central area, with many flying out of Tibet. Those who stay are restricted, though they say there has been no official curfew.

'The army and police forbid us from walking down the road, so our activity is confined to the hostel,' said one traveller. He said tanks and soldiers were patrolling the streets and guarding junctions. Other witnesses have reported troops setting up machine gun positions and there were unconfirmed reports of shooting.

The authorities blame Tibetan insurgents working on the orders of the Dalai Lama and have vowed to hunt down the perpetrators of what state media called 'sabotage'. Police warned that anyone who did not turn themselves in by Monday faced 'stern punishment by the law'.

...Overseas Tibetan groups say police killed at least 36 Tibetan protesters, including three monks. Free Tibet Campaign reports that 26 demonstrators were shot or blown up while demanding the release of political prisoners in Lhasa's notorious Drapchi prison. Other groups say the death toll could be more than 100.

The UN, US and UK have condemned Chinese repression - but not too loudly. After all, the Chinese hold all America's notes...and there's an Olympics coming. Wouldn't want to deprive the millions of their televised sport.

Bush Asserts Right To Open Your Mail

By Cernig

Mostly un-noticed, Bush has claimed for himself powers to open domestic mail without a warrant in a 2006 signing statement which directly contradicted the bill it was appended to.

Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 [2006]after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.

A White House spokeswoman disputed claims that the move gives Bush any new powers, saying the Constitution allows such searches.

Still, the move, one year after The New York Times' disclosure of a secret program that allowed warrantless monitoring of Americans' phone calls and e-mail, caught Capitol Hill by surprise.

"Despite the president's statement that he may be able to circumvent a basic privacy protection, the new postal law continues to prohibit the government from snooping into people's mail without a warrant," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the incoming House Government Reform Committee chairman, who co-sponsored the bill.

Experts said the new powers could be easily abused and used to vacuum up large amounts of mail.

"The [Bush] signing statement claims authority to open domestic mail without a warrant, and that would be new and quite alarming," said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

"You have to be concerned," a senior U.S. official agreed. "It takes executive-branch authority beyond anything we've ever known."

...Most of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act deals with mundane changes. But the legislation also explicitly reinforces protections of first-class mail from searches without a court's approval.

Yet, in his statement, Bush said he will "construe" an exception, "which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection in a manner consistent ... with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances."

Note that "exigent circumstances" doesn't just refer to some "ticking bomb" mythical scenario but also to any longstanding declared emergency - like the general 'war on terror". The administration could already ask for a FISA warrant to open any suspect mail - and the Postal Service already has the rigfht to delay delivery. But that's not good enough for power-hungry Dubya.

The same Congress who are now being so tame on telecom immunity promised to look into it back then. I hope you didn't hold your breath because we've not heard a damn thing about hearings on the matter.

Via Larisa, who asserts:

I left the Soviet Union only to find myself back where I came from. The label might say America, but it is clear that America is a long forgotten dream

That's soft totalitarianism for you, Larisa.

Update Post edited to show that the signing statement and bill date to December 2006, as does the Congressional promise to look into the matter. Hands up those who knew about that signing statement or who've heard anything about that promised oversight.

Stretching The Evidence To Fit

By Cernig

Eric Umansky emailed to point out his latest piece at MoJo, an examination of how the rules of evidence as commonly understood in civilized jurisprudence are being stretched all out of shape by the Bush administration as they try to secure minor terrorism convictions on chages of "aiding" terrorists.

The laws on material support provisions are far broader than commonly appreciated and the administration has used them as the basis for many of its controversial terrorism cases. It turns out you can aid terrorists in the criminal sense, and end up in jail, by just thinking. (Emphasis below is mine)

Material-support laws are not like other laws. Central to what the Department of Justice has described as an approach of "strategic overinclusiveness," they have underpinned many of the government's most controversial criminal terrorism cases, from the so-called Lackawanna Six—young men from upstate New York who trained at, and later fled from, a militant camp in Afghanistan—to José Padilla, the man once accused of being a "dirty bomber."

Indeed, look at the heavily criticized "foiled plot" cases over the past few years—the ones with an informant at the center offering encouragement and often much more—and you'll find material support charges underlying nearly all of them. Material-support statutes have been cited to deny thousands of immigrants—some on the run from actual terrorists (see file of "Kumar the Fisherman," above)—entrance into the country and are offered by the Pentagon as justification for detaining hundreds of people at Guantanamo, many of whom have provided little more "support" than being, for example, conscripted to cook for the Taliban.

There's a reason material support has become such a popular charge, a reason it's central to many of the government's most questionable cases: The laws are a prosecutor's dream. They don't require evidence of a plot or even of a desire to help terrorists. They give the government a shot at convictions traditional criminal laws could never provide. "The administration adopted the preventive paradigm, i.e. 'We've got to stop people before they've done something wrong,'" says David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who's the author of several books about the effect of anti-terror laws on the justice system. "There's tremendous pressure to expand grounds of criminal activity, to prosecute people who might represent a threat. The material-support provisions have been the principal vehicle for pushing that envelope."

...The core concept behind the criminal material-support laws—there are two—seems, at first glance, to be straightforward. The first law, passed in 1994 after the first World Trade Center bombing, bans almost any support of terrorist activity. The second law, passed in 1996 in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, criminalizes knowingly giving support, financial or otherwise, to groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations, even if the money is supposedly earmarked to support peaceful activities—say, a hospital for Hamas.

Think of the laws as "aiding and abetting"—only on steroids. It has always been illegal to support criminal activity. If a man drives a getaway car for bank robbers, then he can be charged for the robbery, too. Prosecutors have simply had to show that there was an intent to further the crime and some meaningful connection between the help and the crime itself.

What the material-support laws did was roll back those requirements. A taxi driver hired for a short drive by a Hezbollah politician—a driver who had no intention of engaging in terrorist activity—would, so long as he knew the politician was with Hezbollah, be guilty of providing material support. That's because the laws that define "material support" contain a long list of often nebulous activities, such as providing "property, tangible or intangible" or "service," and are applied whether or not those activities truly helped advance the cause of a terrorist group, and regardless of the suspect's intentions. The laws make little distinction between the taxi driver and, say, an arms merchant who sells detonators to Hezbollah. The Patriot Act extended the concept further, making it illegal to attempt or conspire to provide material support. Before, prosecutors had to prove you gave support. Now they just have to show you wanted to.

That change, along with other newly exploited vagueness in the existing material-support laws, opened up a whole new path for prosecutors. In the Padilla case and others, the government has argued successfully that a suspect is guilty of attempting to provide material support even if the plot he allegedly supported was purely a government concoction or, just as curious, even if the government hadn't said what group or plot the accused might have been supporting.

Prosecutors have only had to show that the accused expressed interest in helping—as the government puts it—the "global jihad movement." "Under our system you have to show a defendant has done something specific," says Peter Margulies, a national security scholar at Roger Williams law school in Rhode Island. "These charges are really a departure from the usual way of our doing justice."

Go read the whole thing, including the case studies Eric has appended to the main piece.

Between torture, the roll-back of the centuries-old practise of universal habeas corpus and now this, America under Bush has ceased to acknowledge the universal rule of law as understood by the rest of Western civilization.

Almost Every Telephone Customer In North America

By Cernig

Reading Michael Goldfarb's gloating yesterday over the imminent Dem capitulation on FISA, I was struck by a curious phrase:

...the industry now faces as much as $7.243 trillion in liability, as practically every telephone customer in North America is to be considered a victim...

He goes on to call any lawsuits that established such a liability both "frivolous" and a "threat to national security." It seems to me that they can't be both, though. If they're frivilous then the only liability is the cost of litigation, swiftly halted by the invocation of state secrecy, and the threat to national security is nil.

But what about that throwaway claim that almost every telephone user in North America - not just the U.S. - would have not just a chance at litigation but a real chance at establishing liability, in amounts sufficient to challenge health care or the Iraq occupation as a driver of the national debt? We're talking about a $20 million award per person here. Awards of that scale would have to follow some serious infringements of personal rights and would explain entirely why the Bush administration doesn't want to indemnify the telecoms.

Is Goldfarb talking out his ass here or has he just inadvertently spilled some insider beans? Well - he's a pretty well connected insider himself, isn't he? That's meant to be where he derives his authority for his smirking pose.

And then there's this, from Kevin Drum, who points to a WaPo quote of assistant attorney general for national security Kenneth Wainstein:

At the breakfast yesterday, Wainstein highlighted a different problem with the current FISA law than other administration officials have emphasized....In response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, Wainstein said FISA's current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because "essentially you don't know where the recipient is going to be" and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States.

Kevin writes:

But if there's no way to know in advance where the recipient of an email is going to be, then the Bush administration is basically asking for the ability to monitor all email communications that pass through a U.S. switch. And they interpret the text of PAA as giving them that authority. Right?

If that's what has been happening all along, then that entirely explains Goldfarb's claim.

New Pakistan Coalition To Reinstate Chief Justice

By Cernig

To the surprise of very few, the two winners of Pakistan's elections have agreed to a coalition government - and are saying one of the new government's first acts will be to reinstate sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry.

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said he had agreed "a common agenda" with the party of assassinated opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

He had been in talks with Ms Bhutto's widower, Asif Zardari, the new leader of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP).

Such a government could put renewed pressure on President Pervez Musharraf.

"We will work together to form the government in the centre and in the provinces," Mr Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz (PML-N), said at a joint news conference with Mr Zardari.

He said the two parties had agreed that the country's chief justice, sacked by President Musharraf in November, should be immediately reinstated.

What a way to shake Musharraf from his podium. Chaudry is on record as saying he thinks Musharraf's re-election was illegal, and the prospect of his court ruling thus was the real reason behind his dismissal in the first case. Such a move not only shows up Musharraf's clampdown in the wake of that dismissal for what it was - an entirely selfish move to hold power. It also paves the way for parliament and judiciary to act with common purpose in unseating Musharraf once and for all.

Shortly before the coalition press conference, Chaudry had spoken to lawyer supporters on a smuggled mobile phone - he's still under house arrest.

He told lawyers in Karachi that the recent election result showed that the Pakistani people had "repudiated" President Musharraf and that "unconstitutional measures" taken by him under emergency rule should be reversed.

"Victory is not far off now," he said.

"There are occasions when a nation passes through defining moments and the Pakistani nation is passing through this defining moment now.

"If we lose this opportunity no one can then change the affairs of this nation ever."

Supporters responded to his speech by chanting "go, Musharraf, go!"

Shortly after he spoke, police used tear gas on protesting lawyers in Karachi and there were other demonstrations in Quetta and Lahore.

Both the UK and the US administrations have been backing Musharraf in the wake of the elections, and asking the new coalition government to drop their demands for his resignation and Chaudry's reinstatement. Both have painted themselves into a corner by insisting Musharraf was a staunch ally in the "war on terror", a proposition which has dubious validity at best. McClatchy reported yesterday that there's considerable division inside the Bush administration, however, with the split predictably being along Bush ideologue/career State diplomat lines:

The Bush administration is pressing the opposition leaders who defeated Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to allow the former general to retain his position, a move that Western diplomats and U.S. officials say could trigger the very turmoil the United States seeks to avoid.

U.S. officials, from President Bush on down, said this week that they think Musharraf, a longtime U.S. ally, should continue to play a role, despite his party's rout in parliamentary elections Monday and his unpopularity in the volatile, nuclear-armed nation.

The U.S. is urging the Pakistani political leaders who won the elections to form a new government quickly and not press to reinstate the judges whom Musharraf ousted last year, Western diplomats and U.S. officials said Wednesday. If reinstated, the jurists likely would try to remove Musharraf from office.

Bush's policy of hanging on to Musharraf has caused friction between the White House and the State Department, with some career diplomats and other specialists arguing that the administration is trying to buck the political tides in Pakistan, U.S. officials said.

Officials in the White House and the intelligence community fear that the longer Pakistan remains without a new government, the deeper the gridlock, threatening the progress made in the elections toward greater stability and helping the country's Islamic extremists.

One Western diplomat said, however, that the strategy could backfire if Pakistanis feel betrayed after voting to kick Musharraf from office.

"This is dangerous," said the diplomat.

Shariff and the lawyers, however, have made it clear they aren't going to be dissuaded despite intense US and UK pressure.

an aide to Mr Sharif, who is due to meet today (THURS) with PPP leader, Asif Ali Zardari, confirmed there had been pressure to drop its demand for Mr Chaudhry’s return. “The suggestion has been there from Western countries for some time. In fact it was raised by [a senior British official] when he met Mr Sharif in London. [But] we are not willing to compromise on our stance. We feel it would be against the interest of the Pakistani people.”

This week senior US officials have already met with Mr Sharif and the other leading players in Pakistan’s unfolding political drama, urging an inclusive transition towards democracy. Yesterday morning, a US diplomat based in Lahore spent two hours with Aitzaz Ahsan, leader of the lawyers movement, laying out the US position.

Mr Ahsan, who has been under house arrest for three months, declined to detail the contents of his conversation with the diplomat, but he said: “There is no way other than to reinstate the judges. We are not going to let this pass. We will not let it be accepted as a norm.”

And its highly unlikely that the PPP, which has loudly accused Musharraf of having a hand in Bhutto's death, could survive an about-face on the issue.

Musharraf is, to borrow a cricket term, on a "very sticky wicket". By backing his soft-dictatorship against the democratic will of the Pakistani people, the US and UK tarnish themselves visibly as nations which only give lip service to their ideals - until democracy doesn't suit them.

Update China Hand at American Footprints, a must-read for anyone following Pakistan's continuing political turmoil, has this to say:

The Bush administration is pushing Pakistan into a corner.

It’s not a happy place.

It’s called Musharraf = Shah of Iran territory.

And it really doesn’t have to be that way.

After all, the opposition to Musharraf comes from respectable, clean-shaven democratic, dollar-worshiping moderates, not the bearded religious fanatics of our dark fantasies.

Ineed, the Bush administration and conservative pundits were just as pleased as everyone else when Islamist parties nosedived in the Pakistani elections - but now that it's time to support their favorite local general-in-a-suit, they're rolling out the "ZOMG!! Islamofascists With Nukes!" fearmongering again. As China Hand points out, thereby they create the danger of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

(My thanks to Kat for research, as always)

FOX News' Top Law Analyst Says Protect America Act Unconstitutional

By Cernig

Andrew P. Napolitano, "a New Jersey Superior Court judge from 1987 to 1995, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel" and has written that FISA and warrantless seraches of all kinds are unconstitutional and that eforts to weaken Fourth Amendment protection still further ammount to an "Invasion of America" by UnAmerican idealogues.

Of course, he hasn't done so for FOX, but rather for the LA Times in an op-ed yesterday:

The FISA statute itself significantly -- and, in my opinion, unconstitutionally -- lowered the 4th Amendment bar from probable cause of "crime"to probable cause of "status." However, in order to protect the 4th Amendment rights of the targets of spying, the statute erected a so-called wall between gathering evidence and using evidence. The government cannot constitutionally prosecute someone unless it has evidence against him that was obtained pursuant to probable cause of a crime, a standard not met by a FISA warrant.

Congress changed all that. The Patriot Act passed after 9/11 and its later version not only destroyed the wall between investigation and prosecution,they mandated that investigators who obtained evidence of criminal activity pursuant to FISA warrants share that evidence with prosecutors. They also instructed federal judges that the evidence thus shared is admissible under the Constitution against a defendant in a criminal case. Congress forgot that it cannot tell federal judges what evidence is admissible because judges, not politicians, decide what a jury hears.

Then the Bush administration and Congress went even further. The administration wanted, and Congress has begrudgingly given it, the authority to conduct electronic surveillance of foreigners and Americans without even a FISA warrant -- without any warrant whatsoever. The so-called Protect America Act of 2007, which expired at the end of last week, gave the government carte blanche to spy on foreign persons outside the U.S., even if Americans in the United States with whom they may be communicating are spied on -- illegally -- in the process. Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee last year that hundreds of unsuspecting Americans' conversations and e-mails are spied on annually as a consequence of the warrantless surveillance of foreigners outside the United States.

So where does all this leave us? Even though, since 1978, the government has gotten more than 99% of its FISA applications approved, the administration wants to do away with FISA altogether if at least one of the people whose conversations or e-mails it wishes to monitor is not in the U.S. and is not an American.

Those who believe the Constitution means what it says should tremble at every effort to weaken any of its protections. The Constitution protects all "persons" and all "people" implicated by government behavior. So the government should be required, as it was until FISA, to obtain a 4th Amendment warrant to conduct surveillance of anyone, American or not, in the U.S. or not.

If we lower constitutional protections for foreigners and their American correspondents, for whom will we lower them next?

And then they came for the dissenters.

Taped! Pakistan Official Admits Elections Rigged

By Cernig

As violence hits Pakistani polling stations and campaign offices - someone wants to discourage voter turnout big style - Human Rights Watch has released a tape it says is the Pakistani Attorney General admitting that the elections will be "massively rigged".

Human Rights Watch said a journalist made the recording during a telephone interview with Attorney General Malik Qayyum when Qayyum took a second call without disconnecting the first, allowing his end of the second conversation to be overheard and recorded.

In the recording, Qayyum, Pakistan's top legal officer, can be heard advising the caller to accept a ticket he is being offered by an unidentified political party for a seat, Human Rights Watch said.

"They will massively rig to get their own people to win," Qayyum said, according to a transcript released by Human Rights Watch. "If you get a ticket from these guys, take it."

The potentially incendiary recording was made the day that elections were announced for Jan. 8, according to Human Rights Watch, which said the Urdu-language recording could be heard on its Web site, www.hrw.org. The polls for the national assembly and four provincial legislatures were postponed until this Monday after large-scale violence ignited by the Dec. 27 assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

The recording was certain to add to widespread fears that the polls will be rigged in favor of the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, the party that supports the authoritarian and hugely unpopular president, Pervez Musharraf, a retired army general who seized power in a 1999 coup.

On Thursday, Musharraf warned the opposition that it must accept the outcome of Monday's voting, without resorting to massive street protests.

"Let there be no doubt that anyone will be allowed to resort to lawlessness in the garb of allegations about rigging in the elections," Musharraf was quoted as telling a seminar of government officials in Islamabad by the state-run Associated Press of Pakistan. "Let this serve as a warning to all those who think they can disturb the peace of the country. They will not be allowed. Do not test the resolve of the government."

"No agitation, anarchy or chaos can be acceptable," he said. "I assure you that the elections will be fair, free, and transparent and peaceful."

There will be no exit polls conducted during the elections tomorrow, a ban imposed by Musharraf that the Bush administration is just fine with despite exit polls being key evidence in previous color-coded revolutions. The head of the organisation the US government has contracted to monitor elections is on record as saying exit polls shouldn't be conducted when they could lead to unwelcome unrest or revolutions.

Pakistan Elections

By Cernig

A new BBC World Service poll shows Musharraf of Pakistan plumbing depths of unpopularity even Dubya hasn't yet reached.

Only 15% of people asked said they approved of the job he was doing, while 72% disapproved.

That compared with an approval rate of 30% at the end of last year. Three-quarters of the people asked said they would like him to resign.

49% said Musharraf's re-election was illegal and invalid, the same number who aren't optimistic about Pakistan's future. Almost two-thirds of the people questioned said they thought the new parliament should re-instate sacked former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Over half of those polled by the BBC think the elections will be rigged or unfairly run. It looks like they have good reason for thinking so.

The report [Bhutto] had with her on the day she died talks of election violence, intimidation and corrupt officials. According to the PPP, nothing has changed.

Senator Enver Beg says more than 100 parliamentary candidates who support President Pervez Musharraf are close relatives of the people who are running the elections, district by district.

"They will use government machinery, government finances and government funds. They will use government transport," he said.

"They have the police under their control. District officials have been transferred in violation of the law. I call this dishonest."

The PPP has filed more than 1,200 complaints with the election commission, but has received virtually no response.


"I'm sorry to say," said Senator Beg, "that the election commission is deaf, dumb and blind. They just take all these complaints and throw them in the dustbin."

...The international pressure group Human Rights Watch says the election commission simply isn't politically impartial.

As the BBC notes, the question isn't really whether the vote will be fair - but whether Pakistanis will accept an unfair vote in the interests of stability or will protest in the inevitable aftermath of accusation and denial.

Update Musharraf is warning the opposition parties to not even squeak.

They should not be under any illusion that they will bring people to the streets after the election. Nothing of that sort will be allowed," Musharraf said in comments at a seminar telecast on Thursday by state-run Pakistan Television.

"In this situation of extremism and terrorism, no agitation, anarchy or chaos can be acceptable."

While continuing to insist that the thing that walks like a duck and quacks like a duck isn't actually a duck:

Opposition parties have accused the government of trying to rig the polls to favor Musharraf's allies and have threatened to launch protests if they feel cheated.

"Don't show arrogance, if you win, and show grace, if you lose, accept the results," Musharraf said, rejecting the opposition's allegations.

"I am conscious of the fact that the elections should be free, fair and transparent and they have to be seen free, fair and transparent and also peaceful. The entire world is watching us," he said.

"I guarantee that these will be free and fair."

He said there could be lower-level tactical irregularities by candidates but the government would not be involved.

Riiiight.

Surveillance society goes international

By Libby

The Bush administration has been treating international travelers like criminals for a long time now and keeps demanding even more onerous infringements on privacy such as requiring EU states "to supply personal data on all air passengers overflying but not landing in the US in order to gain or retain visa-free travel to America." Well, two can play that game and now the EU jumps on the bandwagon.

The European Commission will propose Wednesday that all foreign travelers into and out of Europe, including U.S. citizens, should be fingerprinted. If approved by the European Parliament, the measure would mean that precisely identifying information on tens of millions of citizens will be added in coming years to databases that could be shared by friendly governments around the globe.

At this rate it won't be long before there will be no place on earth that is free of overweening scrutiny of our everyday lives by every single government.

The plan is part of a vast and growing trend -- especially across the Atlantic -- to collect and share data electronically for the purposes of tracking and identifying people in the name of national security and immigration control. U.S. government computers now have access to data on financial transactions; air travel details such as name, itinerary and credit card numbers; and the names of those sending and receiving express-mail packages -- even a description of the contents.

Meanwhile, the latest trend at US customs checkpoints is the seizing of laptops, cameras and cell phones from legitimate business travelers. In many cases the items are either not returned at all or information on the device has been tampered with before it's released back to the owner.

So they're building overloaded databases chock full of our most personal information and personal electronic storage devices are being seized without warrants and deliberately compromised by government authorities. What possibly could go wrong with that?

When -- not if -- martial law is declared

By Libby

I've taken a lot of criticism over the last year about my speculation that our government is preparing to declare martial law. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll get the last laugh, only it's no laughing matter and it's a lot bigger than just Blackwater. Consider InfraGard.

In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that "350 of our nation's Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard."

InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members.

Don't count on seeing this reported in the mainstream media. I expect the major media conglomerates are also members. But I would ask my learned critics to read this eyewitness account and reconsider their mockery of my 'paranoia.'

This business owner says he attended a small InfraGard meeting where agents of the FBI and Homeland Security discussed in astonishing detail what InfraGard members may be called upon to do.

"The meeting started off innocuously enough, with the speakers talking about corporate espionage," he says. "From there, it just progressed. All of a sudden we were knee deep in what was expected of us when martial law is declared. We were expected to share all our resources, but in return we'd be given specific benefits." These included, he says, the ability to travel in restricted areas and to get people out. But that's not all.

"Then they said when -- not if -- martial law is declared, it was our responsibility to protect our portion of the infrastructure, and if we had to use deadly force to protect it, we couldn't be prosecuted," he says.

This is how 9/11 changed everything. Our government created a "Surveillance-Industrial Complex." Private contractors now have a license to kill Americans at will.

It's as I've been saying all along. We're in no more danger from terrorists than we were on 9/10/01 but we're in infinitely more danger from our own government because in the shock and fear of the moment, we allowed the Bush administration to trample our civil rights into oblivion, in trade for a false sense of security. [h/t Marie Coady and Mycos]

Then they came for the fat people... Updated

By Libby

I would have thought this was an Onion piece if the blogger hadn't called the Mississippi legislators who were responsible for this bipartisan atrocity. Two Republicans and a Democrat drafted a bill that they intend to bring forward that forbids restaurants from serving the obese and includes enforcement parameters that would revoke the business permits of establishments found in non-compliance.

Lead author, Republican Rep. Mayhall said "[h]e wrote it because of the 'urgency of the obesity crisis and need for government action.' He hopes it will 'call attention to the serious problem of obesity and what it is costing the Medicare system.'"

Prime example of "liberal fascism," isn't it? Too bad it's being perpetrated by conservatives. Wonder how the wingers are going to deal with that?

Update: Ask and you get an answer. Unsurprisingly, it appears the wingers intend to ignore the fact this legislation is a product of Republican conservatives or disingenuously imply that it's some kind of liberal plot to socialize medicine.

15 Year Old Boy Arrested, Implicated In Bhutto Plot

By Cernig

The AP reports Pakistani authorities as saying they've made a breakthrough in the Bhutto assassination case:

A 15-year-old detained near the Afghan border has confessed to joining a team of assassins sent to kill Benazir Bhutto, officials said Saturday, announcing the first arrests in the case since the attack that killed the opposition leader.

...Interior Secretary Kamal Shah confirmed the arrest of two people in the town of Dera Ismail Khan in North West Frontier province, and said one — a teenage boy — had confessed involvement in the Dec. 27 attack that killed Bhutto. He said interrogators were trying to get corroborating testimony from the other detainee before accepting the confession.

Is it just me that thinks that's because it is taking longer to torture a quite possible false confession out of the grown man than it did the 15 year old boy? Just how seriously can we take this claim?

In North West Frontier province, a senior intelligence official said the 15-year-old suspect in the Bhutto assassination told investigators that a five-person squad was dispatched to Rawalpindi, where Bhutto was killed, by Baitullah Mehsud, a militant leader with strong ties to al-Qaida and an alliance with the Taliban in nearby Afghanistan.

The official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the boy was arrested Thursday and was also involved in a plot to attack Shiites during the Ashoura festival on Sunday.

the plot, it seems, involved dumping a "small quantity" of cyanide into the public water supply. It's unclear just how effective such a move would be, since the Rawalpindi municipal water supply (about 200 million litres per day) would dilute the cyanide greatly and the oral lethal dose is in the order of 7 miligrams per kilo of body weight or about half a gram for an average person. Do the math - to be sure of lethal doses you aren't talking about "small quantities".

In Dera Ismail Khan, a town 170 miles southwest of Islamabad where the teenager was arrested, a district police commander said the suspect had made "a sensational disclosure." The officer also asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.

But Maulvi Mohammed Umar, a purported spokesman for Mehsud, dismissed the report. "It is just government propaganda ... we have already clarified that we are not involved in the attack on Benazir Bhutto."

The CIA concluded that Mehsud was behind Bhutto's killing shortly after it occurred, an American intelligence official has said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Since CIA director Michael Hayden is already on record as saying Mehsud was responsible, it's very unclear why some other official feels the need to confirm his opinion while remaining anonymous, unless it's because press types love their cloak-and-dagger exclusives so much. The fact remains, however, that others within the US intelligence community aren't as certain as Hayden about who ordered Bhutto's killing and believe Musharraf's government is blaming one of its biggest internal rivals (who helpfully has ties to the taliban and very distant ties through them to Al Qaeda) to dupe the West and Pakistani opinion.

All in all, an incredibly convenient tale with some serious questions hanging over it that, as is depressingly common, went unasked by the stenographers of the mainstream press.

The Usual Suspects

By Cernig

The CIA has placed the blame for Benazir Bhutto's assassination on a combination of Al Qaeda, America's primary enemy, and South Waziristan tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistan's primary internal enemy. How convenient.

Offering the most definitive public assessment by a U.S. intelligence official, Hayden said Bhutto was killed by fighters allied with Mehsud, a tribal leader in northwestern Pakistan, with support from al-Qaeda's terrorist network. That view mirrors the Pakistani government's assertions.

The same alliance between local and international terrorists poses a grave risk to the government of President Pervez Musharraf, a close U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism, Hayden said in 45-minute interview with The Washington Post. "What you see is, I think, a change in the character of what's going on there," he said. "You've got this nexus now that probably was always there in latency but is now active: a nexus between al-Qaeda and various extremist and separatist groups."

But there's some question over the accuracy of hayden's pronouncement.

"This was done by that network around Baitullah Mehsud. We have no reason to question that," Hayden said.

...Some administration officials outside the agency who deal with Pakistani issues were less conclusive, with one calling the assertion "a very good assumption."

One of the officials said there was no "incontrovertible" evidence to prove or rebut the assessment.

So not everyone agrees with Hayden's assessment. Why could that be? Here comes the outrageous spin which is more important than accuracy:

Hayden said that the United States has "not had a better partner in the war on terrorism than the Pakistanis." The turmoil of the past few weeks has only deepened that cooperation, he said, by highlighting "what are now even more clearly mutual and common interests."

Oh, I get it - fixing the intelligence around the policy again, rather than admitting the policy of supporting and arming Musharraf's regime was an utter failure. Spin rather than actually addressing questions about Musharraf's government's catch and release of terrorist bigwigs and failure to even chase Bin Laden (who supposedly needs dialysis) or Mullah Omar (MI6 even provided his telephone number and address at an ISI safe house in Quetta).

Same old, same old. If you're a despot with a faux-democratic smokescreen, willing to mouth platitudes about the War on Some Terror and buy expensive military toys, you've no better friend than the Bush administration.

Update Looks like I'm not the only one who is highly sceptical about Hayden's pronouncement. Larisa at Raw Story reports that several former and current officials and intelligence agents from both the US and Britain don't believe it either. Don't bother holding your breath for the Scotland Yard report either. the Pakistani authorities have banned them from looking into who might be responsible and told them to restrict their investigations to only the exact cause of her death.

Is this freedom?

By Libby

My critics often dismiss my complaints about the Bush administration's relentless destruction of our civil rights by telling me how lucky I am to be living in a free country where I'm able to criticize my government without fear of penalty. They might want to talk to John Nirenberg about that.

John walked from Boston to Washington DC to express his support for impeachment. His wife joined him at the end of the march to stand with him on the steps of the National Archives in a peaceful protest. They weren't allowed to assemble there -- on taxpayer funded property. They were told by guards that this was a place of business and apparently that business doesn't include the right of citizens to hold signs criticizing the president. They didn't make an issue of it and staged a small gathering across the street. But then they wanted to go inside the building and view the Constitution and Bill of Rights so carefully protected for posterity in its state of the art viewing tomb. No luck with that either.

As John's wife Allison reports at the March in My Name site, she was stopped and told she couldn't enter wearing the yellow rain poncho with a protest slogan on it. The slogan -- "Save the Constitution"!*

The rent-a-cop wouldn't provide a copy of the regulation that prohibited her entrance or provide any further explanation. He simply and steadfastly forbade her to enter for wearing a coat that expressed the desire to save the most important document in our history. She finally left without viewing it. How free does that sound to you?

Read the whole story at the link and there's more at The American Street. You can see these are not rabblerousing activists. They are ordinary citizens who were denied their most basic rights. Furthermore, it's not a rare occurrence.

Thus, I say to my critics, we used to be a free country, but that was before this administration instituted perverted the use* of free speech zones. You're only free to assemble, if you agree. Dissent is only allowed by decree within government proscribed corrals, located as far as possible from the president's eyes so as not to disturb, as his mother put it, his beautiful mind.

Who can honestly call that freedom? [via]

[* - Post edited in response to comments.]

Morocco - 6 Men Jailed Over Cross-Dressing Party

By Cernig

Hey Rudy G, don't go anywhere near Morocco:

A Moroccan appeal court on Tuesday upheld the convictions of six men jailed for homosexual acts after video images of a man dressed as a woman dancing at a party sparked street protests and a police investigation, lawyers said.

The six were arrested in late November after rumours spread that a party they had held in the northern town of Ksar el Kebir was really an illegal gay wedding.

The national press pounced on the story, and Islamist groups condemned what they saw as an attack on public morals and demanded an official investigation.

Hundreds of angry residents marched through Ksar el Kebir to demand "justice" and put pressure on the authorities to hand out harsh sentences.

The six men were found guilty and given jail sentences by a lower court last month. They had all pleaded not guilty.

The appeal court upheld a 10-month sentence against the party's alleged organiser, identified as F., for homosexuality and the illegal sale of alcohol, defence lawyer Mohamed Sebbar said.

The five others had their jail terms cut to between two and four months from between four and six months, he said. All six had pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Note there's no proof of the alleged "crimes" other than one guy in a frock.

Were this Iran, I find myself thinking, faux-outrage warmongers like Malkin would already be on this one like flies on horseapples. Iran has a truly shabby human rights record, it's true, and one that should be loudly condemned by the world, but what they do turns true protest at such a record into just more ammunition in the ongoing campaign to demonise that nation and pave the way for public acceptance of attacks.

But Morocco?

Morocco has been designated a major non-Nato US ally by President Bush, in recognition of the country's support in the US-led war on terror.
The category also includes Israel, Egypt, Kuwait, and pro-western Asian nations.

The designation is expected to make it easier for American companies to sell arms to Morocco.

The US is also expected to sign a free-trade agreement with Morocco later this month.

Ah well, that's different.

The ISI And The Militants

By Cernig

The NY Times today has a long report on how the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, began and directed most of the worlds major Islamist terrorist outfits as proxies of Pakistani foreign policy. But, get this, they say they don't do that post-9/11 and that the militants have escaped their previously tight control.

Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so.

...The threat from the militants, the former intelligence officials warned, is one that Pakistan is unable to contain. “We could not control them,” said one former senior intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “We indoctrinated them and told them, ‘You will go to heaven.’ You cannot turn it around so suddenly.”

The article goes on to describe how Musharraf really is trying to fight the good fight, honestly. But he's being stymied by entrenched opponents within the ISI who want to retain some ability to use Islamist terror groups as proxies and he has little ability to change that.

Is anyone actually believing this BS? It appears so.

And yet a long litany of catch-and-release of major terrorist leaders, of terror groups still acting as direct arms of Pakistani policy in e.g. Mumbai, of public pardons not just once but multiple times for supposedly hostile Islamist leaders like the man accused of ordering Bhutto's assassination (possibly falsely), of obviously staged and quite laughably fallible assassination "attempts" on Musharraf himself, all point towards a very different interpretation.

That Musharraf, through hand-picked loyalists, has full control over the ISI and that protestations both that Pakistan is fully on board in the War on Some Terror and that the ISI is full of loose cannons are simply spin for gullible Westerners, designed to defuse foreign pressure on Pakistan in the wake of Bhutto's death and still keep the arms aid flowing.

SWAT outrage of the week

By Libby

As I often say, when we allowed the civil rights of drug consumers to be abridged because who cares about druggies anyway, it would come back to haunt us. The government won't stop there; they'll just keep pushing the envelope and here's a case on point. This one wasn't over drugs, it was about the refusal of medical care.

Nearly a dozen members of a police SWAT team in western Colorado punched a hole in the front door and invaded a family's home with guns drawn, demanding that an 11-year-old boy who had had an accidental fall accompany them to the hospital, on the order of Garfield County Magistrate Lain Leoniak.

The boy's parents and siblings were thrown to the floor at gunpoint and the parents were handcuffed in the weekend assault, and the boy's father told WND it was all because a paramedic was upset the family preferred to care for their son themselves.

The basic story here is the kid fell down and hit his head. He comes from a poor family living in a trailer park in Glenwood Springs, Colorado and is one of six of ten siblings still living at home with his parents. One suspects they can't afford health insurance.His father was a medic in Vietnam and opted to take the kid home instead of to the hospital.

Apparently a witness to the fall called an ambulance anyway, and the paramedics showed up at the house uninvited and were allowed to check the boy out. They found no evidence of traumatic damage but wanted to take the boy in to the hospital for testing. The father refused.

The next day social services showed up and examined the child. They took no action at the time. Now two days later...

[F]ollowing an afternoon shopping trip to town, the family settled in for the evening, only to be shocked with the SWAT team attack.

The sheriff said the decision to use SWAT team force was justified because the father was a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist" and had made threats and "comments" over the years.

However, the sheriff declined to provide a single instance of the father's illegal behavior. "I can't tell you specifically," he said.

"He was refusing to provide medical care," the sheriff said.

Now to begin with, the estimated population of Glenwood Springs in July 2006 was 8765. Why the hell does a town of that size even need a SWAT team? They don't and if not for the forfeiture laws, they wouldn't have been able to afford one.

In the second place, the father made a decision that all too many uninsured families are forced to make. He had to balance the medical need against the financial debt he would incur by playing it safe. He was within his rights to make that decision on the side of being able to feed his family instead of paying huge hospital bills. Finally, Radley has an update and "as it turns out, the kid was fine. After the raid, a doctor examined him, and told him to drink some fluids and take a Tylenol." So the father made the right call.

Which leaves us to ponder justifying the raid because the the father is a "self-proclaimed constitutionalist." I take that to mean that the dad values his privacy and doesn't want the government sticking its nose into his business. One guesses he doesn't like cops and the cops don't like him. But whatever the particulars are in this case, it should be a matter of great concern to all of us when our government can forcibly enter our homes and enforce their own judgements on what should be entirely private decisions. Isn't that the definition of a police state?

[h/t Peter]

All In A Day's Work

By Cernig

Imagine an America where judges rule that torture is all in a days’ work for the Secretary of Defense and senior generals or that foreigners are not really human.

A cyberpunk vision of a dystopian future?

Nope - America 2008. Jeralyn has the details.