By William Fisher
A new report on the challenges posed in the U.S. by violent extremists has found that terrorism plots by non-Muslims greatly outnumber those attempted by Muslims and that Muslim-American communities helped foil close to a third of al Qaeda-related terror plots threatening America since 9/11/01.
The report comes from the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), a not-for-profit organization advocating for the civil rights of American Muslims. The report consists largely of MPAC’s "Post-9/11 Terrorism Incident Database." Reportedly the first of its kind by a Muslim-American organization, the Database tracks plots by Muslim and non-Muslim violent extremists against the United States.
The author of the report, Alejandro J. Beutel, MPAC researcher and government liaison, told IPS, “This report demonstrates the validity of two of our guiding principles.”
“The first of these is that the choice between our rights and liberties and national security is a false choice; we can have both. The second is that law enforcement will be much more successful if it treats the American Muslim community as partners, not as adversaries.”
He added, “Because of the baseless spying by the FBI on our mosques, we are very cautious about our engagement with the Bureau.”
Key findings in the report: There were 72 total plots by domestic non-Muslim perpetrators against the United States since 9/11/01. In comparison, there have been 37 total plots by domestic and international Muslim perpetrators since 9/11/01; there are at least five incidents of non-Muslim domestic extremists possessing or attempting to possess biological, chemical or radiological weapons. One of those occurred since Obama's election. No such cases involving Muslim violent extremists have been reported since 9/11/01; evidence clearly indicates a general rise in violent extremism across ideologies.
The report says that, using Obama's election as a base measurement, since November 4, 2008 there have been 39 terror plots by non-Muslim domestic extremists. By comparison, there have been 16 plots by Muslim domestic and international extremists. Each of these cases constitutes close to 50% of all violent extremism cases since 9/11/01.
The report also found “little evidence of a rise in ideological extremism. It concluded that those involved in 13 out of the 15 post-election plots (86.7%) were engaged in ideological extremism before the vote. Of the 15, 10 (66%) were engaged in ideological extremism since 2007.
It declares that Al-Qaeda does not appear to be making new ideological gains into the American Muslim community. Instead, the data is pointing toward greater numbers of longstanding ideological extremists turning to violence.
The report asserts that Muslim communities have helped foil almost one out of every three Al Qaeda-related terror plots threatening America since 9/11/01. It says this highlights the importance of law enforcement partnering with citizens through community-oriented policing.
The report recommended that the government: Expand community-oriented policing initiatives; increase support for research on combating biased policing; expand investments in better human capital acquisitions; highlight citizen contributions to national security; and reform the fusion center process to increase coordination among law enforcement communities.
The report examined the challenges posed by violent extremists in two ways. The first was by examining the quantitative and qualitative nature of terrorism trials. Second, it looked at the number of actual and attempted attacks within the United States, including a comparative analysis of incidents involving Muslim and non-Muslim perpetrators.
The report appears amidst a resurgence of anti-Muslim sentiment in the U.S. Some of this has been triggered by the proposed building of an Islamic community center two blocks from “Ground Zero”, the site where the World Trade Centers once stood.
A number of individual and community groups, including some families of 9/11 victims, have blasted the Center idea as “a celebration of Islam.” Supporters see it as a vehicle for bringing diverse faiths closer together.
In communities throughout the U.S., there have been “copycat” campaigns to thwart mosque planning or construction.
The recent American midterm elections have also provided some candidates with platforms from which to verbally attack Muslims, including Muslim-Americans. These candidates have largely been Republicans and members of the Tea Party, on the extreme right wing of the political spectrum. While a few Democrats attempted to debunk the “all Muslims are terrorists” mantra, most remained silent.
Several recent unsuccessful terrorist plots have also contributed to heightened public anxiety – and the search for scapegoats. The so-called Times Square bomber was a home-grown terrorist who admitted attending training school in Pakistan; the “underwear bomber” who attempted to bring a passenger plane down over Detriot last Christmas day was a Nigerian believed to have been trained in Yemen. Both men are Muslims.
And the successful interception of two parcel bombs shipped as cargo from Yemen further raised the public’s level of apprehension that another terrorist attack was in the making.
The backlash takes a number of forms. For example, ordinary Muslims are experiencing renewed discrimination in the workplace. The New York Times reports that Muslim workers filed a record 803 such claims in the year ended Sept. 30, 2009. That was up 20 percent from the previous year and up nearly 60 percent from 2005, according to federal data.
The Times says the number of complaints filed since then will not be announced until January,” but Islamic groups say they have received a surge in complaints recently, suggesting that 2010’s figure will set another record.”
The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed several lawsuits connected with anti-Muslim discrimination. It sued JBS Swift, a meatpacking company, on behalf of 160 Somali immigrants; it filed a case against Abercrombie & Fitch, the
clothing retailer, for refusing to hire a Muslim who wore a head scarf; and it sued a Four Points by Sheraton hotel in Phoenix, charging that an Iraqi immigrant was called a “camel jockey.”
Finally, MPAC and similar groups are angry and disappointed at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which has acknowledged placing “agent provocateurs” inside mosques in attempts to root out terrorists, terrorist plots, and terrorist cells.
“We feel betrayed,” says Alejandro Beutel.
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
In Egypt, Does Anything Ever Change?
By William Fisher
In the face of police brutality, crackdowns on political parties, closing of media, arrests of citizen journalists, and a host of other violations ahead of Egypt’s Nov 28th parliamentary election, human rights advocates are calling on U.S. President Barack Obama to use American leverage to persuade Egypt to reform its electoral process, allow international monitors to assess the election, and conduct transparent and accountable balloting.
The Egyptian parliamentary election – and the presidential election to follow in September 2011 – will play out against a background of years of police brutality and political corruption, buttressed by a so-called Emergency Law. That law, which has been in effect for three decades, gives police and security services sweeping powers to arrest and detain with little or no due process.
But Administration critics say President Obama and his advisors have become too dependent on Egypt for its help to Israel regarding illegal smuggling from the Egyptian desert into Gaza, and helping maintain Arab neutrality vis a vis the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. While they acknowledge the value of this help, they contend that Egypt is acting in its own self-interest and would provide such help regardless of what the U.S. says about its electoral process.
One of the most vocal critics of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime is Human Rights First, a New York City-based legal advocacy organization. It is urging U.S. President Barack Obama to publicly call on Egyptian authorities stop harassing ruling opposition party figures and open the nation's upcoming parliamentary elections to international monitors.
Neil Hicks, HRF’s International Policy Advisor, says “The Egyptian government is using a 30-year ‘state of emergency’ to make arbitrary arrests and violently repress political activists. In preparation for upcoming elections this November, the government has silenced independent journalists, cracked down on activists and opposition candidates, and refused international election monitors. You need a license in Egypt to send a political text message!”
Hicks added, “The last round of elections in Egypt found policemen beating voters and officials grabbing ballot boxes. We cannot let that happen again.”
The Egyptian Government appears to be doing what it can to disrupt opposition plans to contest the Parliamentary election. For example, the Associated Press reports that Egyptian security detained 65 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood while they were hanging election posters. Authorities said the posters violated a new ban on religious expressions. The government has arrested some 250 members of the Brotherhood and 30 remain in jails.
Media suppression has also ratcheted up in the pre-election period. For example, Egypt’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA), imposed new restrictions on text-message news services and mobile phone companies, in an apparent attempt to pre-empt possible anti-government activism during the polls. And the Egyptian Ministry of Information now compels satellite channels to obtain licenses before broadcasting an event live or distributing news reports to other television channels.
The anti-media campaign has also included the firing of one of the country’s better-known veteran journalists, who was editor of the main opposition newspaper. He had recently also been fired from his television talk show.
In another media move, authorities closed the religious conservative satellite television network, Al-Badr, for inciting sectarian hatred, and shut down the studios that produced the political talk show “Al-Qahira il-Youm” (”Cairo Today”).
These actions have triggered widespread calls from many for international monitors to supervise the election, and from others a campaign to boycott the balloting altogether.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the retired head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has given up his brief flirt with the idea of opposing Mubarak in the presidential election. Instead he has called for a wholesale boycott. He says this is the “easiest, fastest, the most direct way to delegitimize the regime.”
Political dissident and head of Al-Ghad Party, Ayman Nour, called on the European Union (EU) to oversee parliamentary and presidential elections, requesting that the European Commission “play a greater role” in supporting human rights in Egypt.
Washington has had little to say of current developments. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, had taken an increasing interest in the need for political reform and human rights improvements inside Egypt, a position associated with his neoconservative vision of America spreading democracy around the world.
But the Bush position caused considerable friction between the two governments, and Obama returned to seeing Egypt as a peace process partner.
The Mubarak regime, however, has made the U.S. position difficult to maintain. For example, President Mubarak had promised to lift the state of emergency, which has been in effect since 1981 and significantly curbs civil liberties inside Egypt. But it chose to renew it instead. That drew a stiff protest from the Obama administration.
President Obama has also dramatically cut funds to promote democracy in Egypt. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that these cuts over the past year - amounting to around 50 percent - have drawn accusations that the Obama administration is easing off reform pressure to ensure Egypt’s support on Mideast policy, including the peace process with Israel.
Egypt has been one of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid ever since it
became the first Arab country to sign a peace accord with Israel, in 1979. Since the Bush administration, Washington has been reducing the nonmilitary part of the package. This year's aid is $1.55 billion, including $250 million in nonmilitary aid. In 2008, the Bush administration dedicated around $45 million of that to programs for Governing Justly and Democratically.
The Obama Administration’s slash in these pro-democracy programs has drawn a mixed response. Some contend they are ineffective and merely plant seeds of discord between the U.S. and Cairo. Others think they have a place.
Michele Dunne, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and editor of the online journal, the Arab Reform Bulletin, told IPS, “I think that the United States should advocate democratization and greater respect for human rights for Egyptians. This does not mean that the U.S. can make these things happen in Egypt, but we should be clear that we are in favor and willing to use the influence we have to promote them.”
She added, “Public comments can make clear to Egyptian citizens where the United States stands on these issues—which has a value in and of itself—but clearly are not enough to have an effect on the calculations of the Egyptian government. That would require a more comprehensive strategy that considers public comment, private diplomacy, assistance programs, and other forms of engagement with the Egyptian government and Egyptian citizens—which is exactly was has been missing from U.S. policy so far.”
As to pro-democracy programs, Dunne told IPS, these “are helpful partly for the resources they offer and even more so from the implied U.S. support for pro-democracy groups in Egypt. But they can only assist and support a pro-democracy movement from Egyptian society itself, not create one from outside.”
“By the way,” she said, “the obvious question is whether the United States can do this and still cooperate with the Egyptian government on the Arab-Israeli peace process and other issues. The track record suggests that the answer is yes. The Egyptian government takes its decisions on Israel and other regional issues for its own national security reasons, not to do a favor for the US.”
Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, minimizes the importance of the US AID pro-democracy programs. He told IPS:
“The real issue is what (or what not) the White House and State Department are saying publicly (and privately to the Egyptian government) about the upcoming elections.”
He continued: “I have no doubt that the 2010 parliamentary elections will be less competitive than the 2005 balloting. One of the most important reasons for this is the lack of public comment about the issue (e.g., pressure) from the United States. No serious observer of the Egyptian political scene can deny that this public and high profile rhetoric (and the attention it generated) from the President [George W. Bush] and the Secretary of State [Condoleeza Rice] was one of the primary reasons we saw a political liberalization in Egypt in 2005, including more competitive parliamentary elections at the end of 2005.”
“The Obama administration is unfortunately not interested in pushing the sclerotic Mubarak regime (Mubarak is 82, in declining health and without a vice president) to display even mild respect for political freedoms, including free and fair elections,” he said.
Mohamed ElBaradei has also weighed in on the issue of U.S. pressure on Egypt. He said: "Well, it is up to Barack Obama [whether to pressure Egypt on democracy]. It's up to any government to decide how to react to the denial of basic human rights anywhere in the world including Egypt. All I can say is this-those who believe that stability comes with repression are really shortsighted and should not be surprised if the Middle East continues to move toward radicalization."
In the face of police brutality, crackdowns on political parties, closing of media, arrests of citizen journalists, and a host of other violations ahead of Egypt’s Nov 28th parliamentary election, human rights advocates are calling on U.S. President Barack Obama to use American leverage to persuade Egypt to reform its electoral process, allow international monitors to assess the election, and conduct transparent and accountable balloting.
The Egyptian parliamentary election – and the presidential election to follow in September 2011 – will play out against a background of years of police brutality and political corruption, buttressed by a so-called Emergency Law. That law, which has been in effect for three decades, gives police and security services sweeping powers to arrest and detain with little or no due process.
But Administration critics say President Obama and his advisors have become too dependent on Egypt for its help to Israel regarding illegal smuggling from the Egyptian desert into Gaza, and helping maintain Arab neutrality vis a vis the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. While they acknowledge the value of this help, they contend that Egypt is acting in its own self-interest and would provide such help regardless of what the U.S. says about its electoral process.
One of the most vocal critics of President Hosni Mubarak’s regime is Human Rights First, a New York City-based legal advocacy organization. It is urging U.S. President Barack Obama to publicly call on Egyptian authorities stop harassing ruling opposition party figures and open the nation's upcoming parliamentary elections to international monitors.
Neil Hicks, HRF’s International Policy Advisor, says “The Egyptian government is using a 30-year ‘state of emergency’ to make arbitrary arrests and violently repress political activists. In preparation for upcoming elections this November, the government has silenced independent journalists, cracked down on activists and opposition candidates, and refused international election monitors. You need a license in Egypt to send a political text message!”
Hicks added, “The last round of elections in Egypt found policemen beating voters and officials grabbing ballot boxes. We cannot let that happen again.”
The Egyptian Government appears to be doing what it can to disrupt opposition plans to contest the Parliamentary election. For example, the Associated Press reports that Egyptian security detained 65 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood while they were hanging election posters. Authorities said the posters violated a new ban on religious expressions. The government has arrested some 250 members of the Brotherhood and 30 remain in jails.
Media suppression has also ratcheted up in the pre-election period. For example, Egypt’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA), imposed new restrictions on text-message news services and mobile phone companies, in an apparent attempt to pre-empt possible anti-government activism during the polls. And the Egyptian Ministry of Information now compels satellite channels to obtain licenses before broadcasting an event live or distributing news reports to other television channels.
The anti-media campaign has also included the firing of one of the country’s better-known veteran journalists, who was editor of the main opposition newspaper. He had recently also been fired from his television talk show.
In another media move, authorities closed the religious conservative satellite television network, Al-Badr, for inciting sectarian hatred, and shut down the studios that produced the political talk show “Al-Qahira il-Youm” (”Cairo Today”).
These actions have triggered widespread calls from many for international monitors to supervise the election, and from others a campaign to boycott the balloting altogether.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the retired head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has given up his brief flirt with the idea of opposing Mubarak in the presidential election. Instead he has called for a wholesale boycott. He says this is the “easiest, fastest, the most direct way to delegitimize the regime.”
Political dissident and head of Al-Ghad Party, Ayman Nour, called on the European Union (EU) to oversee parliamentary and presidential elections, requesting that the European Commission “play a greater role” in supporting human rights in Egypt.
Washington has had little to say of current developments. Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, had taken an increasing interest in the need for political reform and human rights improvements inside Egypt, a position associated with his neoconservative vision of America spreading democracy around the world.
But the Bush position caused considerable friction between the two governments, and Obama returned to seeing Egypt as a peace process partner.
The Mubarak regime, however, has made the U.S. position difficult to maintain. For example, President Mubarak had promised to lift the state of emergency, which has been in effect since 1981 and significantly curbs civil liberties inside Egypt. But it chose to renew it instead. That drew a stiff protest from the Obama administration.
President Obama has also dramatically cut funds to promote democracy in Egypt. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports that these cuts over the past year - amounting to around 50 percent - have drawn accusations that the Obama administration is easing off reform pressure to ensure Egypt’s support on Mideast policy, including the peace process with Israel.
Egypt has been one of the top recipients of U.S. foreign aid ever since it
became the first Arab country to sign a peace accord with Israel, in 1979. Since the Bush administration, Washington has been reducing the nonmilitary part of the package. This year's aid is $1.55 billion, including $250 million in nonmilitary aid. In 2008, the Bush administration dedicated around $45 million of that to programs for Governing Justly and Democratically.
The Obama Administration’s slash in these pro-democracy programs has drawn a mixed response. Some contend they are ineffective and merely plant seeds of discord between the U.S. and Cairo. Others think they have a place.
Michele Dunne, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and editor of the online journal, the Arab Reform Bulletin, told IPS, “I think that the United States should advocate democratization and greater respect for human rights for Egyptians. This does not mean that the U.S. can make these things happen in Egypt, but we should be clear that we are in favor and willing to use the influence we have to promote them.”
She added, “Public comments can make clear to Egyptian citizens where the United States stands on these issues—which has a value in and of itself—but clearly are not enough to have an effect on the calculations of the Egyptian government. That would require a more comprehensive strategy that considers public comment, private diplomacy, assistance programs, and other forms of engagement with the Egyptian government and Egyptian citizens—which is exactly was has been missing from U.S. policy so far.”
As to pro-democracy programs, Dunne told IPS, these “are helpful partly for the resources they offer and even more so from the implied U.S. support for pro-democracy groups in Egypt. But they can only assist and support a pro-democracy movement from Egyptian society itself, not create one from outside.”
“By the way,” she said, “the obvious question is whether the United States can do this and still cooperate with the Egyptian government on the Arab-Israeli peace process and other issues. The track record suggests that the answer is yes. The Egyptian government takes its decisions on Israel and other regional issues for its own national security reasons, not to do a favor for the US.”
Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, minimizes the importance of the US AID pro-democracy programs. He told IPS:
“The real issue is what (or what not) the White House and State Department are saying publicly (and privately to the Egyptian government) about the upcoming elections.”
He continued: “I have no doubt that the 2010 parliamentary elections will be less competitive than the 2005 balloting. One of the most important reasons for this is the lack of public comment about the issue (e.g., pressure) from the United States. No serious observer of the Egyptian political scene can deny that this public and high profile rhetoric (and the attention it generated) from the President [George W. Bush] and the Secretary of State [Condoleeza Rice] was one of the primary reasons we saw a political liberalization in Egypt in 2005, including more competitive parliamentary elections at the end of 2005.”
“The Obama administration is unfortunately not interested in pushing the sclerotic Mubarak regime (Mubarak is 82, in declining health and without a vice president) to display even mild respect for political freedoms, including free and fair elections,” he said.
Mohamed ElBaradei has also weighed in on the issue of U.S. pressure on Egypt. He said: "Well, it is up to Barack Obama [whether to pressure Egypt on democracy]. It's up to any government to decide how to react to the denial of basic human rights anywhere in the world including Egypt. All I can say is this-those who believe that stability comes with repression are really shortsighted and should not be surprised if the Middle East continues to move toward radicalization."
Monday, November 01, 2010
To Opt or Not to Opt
By William Fisher
Will U.S. local law enforcement be forced to participate in a program that it says will put city police in the position of enforcing federal immigration law and, in the process, divert scarce resources from essential community policing, discourage immigrants from working with police to solve crimes and increase racial profiling?
Or is it a voluntary program?
Those are the questions being raised by civil rights advocacy groups in a federal court filing seeking an injunction requiring the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency to turn over critical documents concerning the ability of communities to “opt-out of what they label “the massive deportation dragnet,” the Secure Communities -- S-Comm -- program.
The groups seek to clarify ICE’s statements, which they say have been “inconsistent and confusing.” In August, ICE released a memo entitled, “Setting the Record Straight” which sets forth an opt-out policy:
“If a jurisdiction does not wish to activate on its scheduled date in the Secure Communities deployment plan, it must formally notify its state identification bureau and ICE in writing (email, letter, or fax). Upon receipt of that information, ICE will request a meeting with federal partners, the jurisdiction, and the state to discuss any issues and come to a resolution, which may include adjusting the jurisdiction’s activation date in or removing the jurisdiction from the deployment plan.”
Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), later confirmed that process to be accurate.
But subsequent communications to and from ICE have muddied the waters, making it less clear that there is any opt-out policy at all. The Washington Post claims that opting out of Secure Communities “is not a realistic possibility, and never was.” This question takes on significance because a number of municipal and country law enforcement agencies have made it clear that they do not wish to participate in S-Comm.
Advocates who have reviewed the initial S-Comm documents from the FOIA case say they ”reveal a pattern of dishonesty. Information about the nascent program has been scarce, and the development of operational details has been shrouded in secrecy,” they say.
Sunita Patel, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told IPS, “The mis-named Secure Communities program is the Department of Homeland Security's current scheme to rope local cops into immigration enforcement. Though branded as a race-blind way to arrest certain people, the numbers show it's actually trap.”
And Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, told IPS,
“This is simply an exercise in racial profiling against Latinos.”
On August 10, the groups filing the new FOIA suit -- The National Day Laborer Organization Network (NDLON), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law -- released internal government documents newly obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in a New York federal court in April. According to advocates who have reviewed the documents, they reveal a pattern of dishonesty regarding the S-Comm program.
S-Comm, which currently operates in approximately 600 jurisdictions across the country, functions like the controversial 287(g) program and Arizona’s SB1070, making state and local police central to the enforcement of federal immigration law.
The program automatically runs fingerprints through immigration databases for all people arrested and targets them for detention and deportation even if their criminal charges are minor, eventually dismissed, or the result of an unlawful arrest.
Several local jurisdictions have already asked to opt-out, and were given a variety of responses. In May 2010, Sheriff Michael Hennessey of San Francisco requested an opt-out from ICE, but ICE directed them to speak to California state officials. The California Attorney General denied the Sheriff’s request and claimed that there was no opt-out option.
Arlington County, Virginia, held a community forum in July to discuss opting out of the program, at which the Chief of Police stated that ICE had told him that there was no opt-out -- Secure Communities was federally mandated.
Others, including Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California (San Jose), the Santa Clara Board, and the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, all contacted ICE asking for information about the opt-out policies. None received an immediate response.
In the meantime, in response to legislation before the Council of the District of Columbia to terminate Secure Communities, the Washington DC Chief of Police terminated the city’s Secure Communities program with ICE.
So now at least two counties, plus Washington, DC have decided not to participate in the program. Why?
The groups bringing the lawsuit claim that “People are concerned that, similar to the 287(g) program, there is no oversight of Secure Communities. The data provided by ICE thus far has shown that contrary to ICE’s intention to focus on immigrants with serious criminal convictions, the majority of people identified by Secure Communities have minor criminal convictions or have no criminal convictions.”
They add that, in some cases, “U.S. citizens have been wrongly identified by the program. There are also concerns that the program leads to racial profiling and pretextual arrests. Furthermore, local law enforcement agencies that suspect that persons in their jails may be deportable immigrants already have the ability to contact ICE directly.
The Secure Communities program, launched in 2008, is currently active in 658 jurisdictions in 32 states, according to ICE, who plans to activate the program in every jurisdiction in every state by 2013.
According to the groups, “The merger of immigration enforcement and local criminal justice agencies is not only bad public policy, it also sabotages local law enforcement agencies’ core mission of protecting public safety by undermining the trust of the communities they serve. It discourages people from turning to the police when they need to, even to report crimes. It undermines public safety by diverting scarce resources away from local policing and focuses them on false threats from people who look or sound foreign.”
Secure Communities, 287(g), and the Criminal Alien Program – the Obama administration’s signature immigration enforcement programs – all rely on heavy involvement from and cooperation with local law enforcement to siphon immigrants into the immigration enforcement and detention system and, ultimately, through deportation proceedings.
Meanwhile, in a related development, the Department of Justice (DOJ) will be in federal appellate court in San Francisco on Monday, November 1, urging the court to keep in place an injunction blocking the core provisions of SB 1070, Arizona's racial profiling law.
The American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of civil rights groups will also be present. They filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case in September, supporting the injunction and illustrating the serious harm that SB 1070 would cause.
Will U.S. local law enforcement be forced to participate in a program that it says will put city police in the position of enforcing federal immigration law and, in the process, divert scarce resources from essential community policing, discourage immigrants from working with police to solve crimes and increase racial profiling?
Or is it a voluntary program?
Those are the questions being raised by civil rights advocacy groups in a federal court filing seeking an injunction requiring the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency to turn over critical documents concerning the ability of communities to “opt-out of what they label “the massive deportation dragnet,” the Secure Communities -- S-Comm -- program.
The groups seek to clarify ICE’s statements, which they say have been “inconsistent and confusing.” In August, ICE released a memo entitled, “Setting the Record Straight” which sets forth an opt-out policy:
“If a jurisdiction does not wish to activate on its scheduled date in the Secure Communities deployment plan, it must formally notify its state identification bureau and ICE in writing (email, letter, or fax). Upon receipt of that information, ICE will request a meeting with federal partners, the jurisdiction, and the state to discuss any issues and come to a resolution, which may include adjusting the jurisdiction’s activation date in or removing the jurisdiction from the deployment plan.”
Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), later confirmed that process to be accurate.
But subsequent communications to and from ICE have muddied the waters, making it less clear that there is any opt-out policy at all. The Washington Post claims that opting out of Secure Communities “is not a realistic possibility, and never was.” This question takes on significance because a number of municipal and country law enforcement agencies have made it clear that they do not wish to participate in S-Comm.
Advocates who have reviewed the initial S-Comm documents from the FOIA case say they ”reveal a pattern of dishonesty. Information about the nascent program has been scarce, and the development of operational details has been shrouded in secrecy,” they say.
Sunita Patel, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told IPS, “The mis-named Secure Communities program is the Department of Homeland Security's current scheme to rope local cops into immigration enforcement. Though branded as a race-blind way to arrest certain people, the numbers show it's actually trap.”
And Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, told IPS,
“This is simply an exercise in racial profiling against Latinos.”
On August 10, the groups filing the new FOIA suit -- The National Day Laborer Organization Network (NDLON), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law -- released internal government documents newly obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in a New York federal court in April. According to advocates who have reviewed the documents, they reveal a pattern of dishonesty regarding the S-Comm program.
S-Comm, which currently operates in approximately 600 jurisdictions across the country, functions like the controversial 287(g) program and Arizona’s SB1070, making state and local police central to the enforcement of federal immigration law.
The program automatically runs fingerprints through immigration databases for all people arrested and targets them for detention and deportation even if their criminal charges are minor, eventually dismissed, or the result of an unlawful arrest.
Several local jurisdictions have already asked to opt-out, and were given a variety of responses. In May 2010, Sheriff Michael Hennessey of San Francisco requested an opt-out from ICE, but ICE directed them to speak to California state officials. The California Attorney General denied the Sheriff’s request and claimed that there was no opt-out option.
Arlington County, Virginia, held a community forum in July to discuss opting out of the program, at which the Chief of Police stated that ICE had told him that there was no opt-out -- Secure Communities was federally mandated.
Others, including Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California (San Jose), the Santa Clara Board, and the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, all contacted ICE asking for information about the opt-out policies. None received an immediate response.
In the meantime, in response to legislation before the Council of the District of Columbia to terminate Secure Communities, the Washington DC Chief of Police terminated the city’s Secure Communities program with ICE.
So now at least two counties, plus Washington, DC have decided not to participate in the program. Why?
The groups bringing the lawsuit claim that “People are concerned that, similar to the 287(g) program, there is no oversight of Secure Communities. The data provided by ICE thus far has shown that contrary to ICE’s intention to focus on immigrants with serious criminal convictions, the majority of people identified by Secure Communities have minor criminal convictions or have no criminal convictions.”
They add that, in some cases, “U.S. citizens have been wrongly identified by the program. There are also concerns that the program leads to racial profiling and pretextual arrests. Furthermore, local law enforcement agencies that suspect that persons in their jails may be deportable immigrants already have the ability to contact ICE directly.
The Secure Communities program, launched in 2008, is currently active in 658 jurisdictions in 32 states, according to ICE, who plans to activate the program in every jurisdiction in every state by 2013.
According to the groups, “The merger of immigration enforcement and local criminal justice agencies is not only bad public policy, it also sabotages local law enforcement agencies’ core mission of protecting public safety by undermining the trust of the communities they serve. It discourages people from turning to the police when they need to, even to report crimes. It undermines public safety by diverting scarce resources away from local policing and focuses them on false threats from people who look or sound foreign.”
Secure Communities, 287(g), and the Criminal Alien Program – the Obama administration’s signature immigration enforcement programs – all rely on heavy involvement from and cooperation with local law enforcement to siphon immigrants into the immigration enforcement and detention system and, ultimately, through deportation proceedings.
Meanwhile, in a related development, the Department of Justice (DOJ) will be in federal appellate court in San Francisco on Monday, November 1, urging the court to keep in place an injunction blocking the core provisions of SB 1070, Arizona's racial profiling law.
The American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of civil rights groups will also be present. They filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case in September, supporting the injunction and illustrating the serious harm that SB 1070 would cause.
Now Playing at GITMO: Kabuki Again
By William Fisher
A military jury at Guantanamo Bay sentenced a “child soldier” to 40 years in prison –unaware that Omar Khadr’s defense and prosecution lawyers had already agreed on an eight-year sentence and further agreed that the United States would send the Canadian home next year.
Under a plea bargain with a Pentagon official, Khadr would receive an eight-year sentence, in addition to the eight years he has been a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. But according to the plea arrangement reportedly reached between prosecution and defense, he would serve only one additional year at GITMO and the remaining seven in Canada, his home country. That means he could be released from prison at age 32, and perhaps sooner according to Canadian parole regulations.
The United States has pledged to support his return to Canada a year from now to serve out seven more years in a Canadian prison. While Canada has denied the repatriation idea publicly, it is known that the U.S. and Canadian government exchanged diplomatic notes on Oct. 23, declaring that “The Government of Canada is inclined to favorably consider Mr. Khadr's application to be transferred to Canada to serve the remainder of his sentence,'' or whichever portion Canada's National Parole Board decides is required.
But the Guantanamo jury, officially, didn’t know any of that. Their decision would apply only if it decided on a lighter sentence.
According to eye-witness Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald, “Jurors were told only that Guantánamo's youngest captive had pleaded guilty to five war crimes, including hurling the grenade that mortally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, during a July 2002 assault on an al Qaeda compound.” Khadr was 15 at the time of the attack.
The prosecution argued for a sentence of 25 years; defense lawyers urged repatriation to Canada. The jury disagreed with both, finding that Khadr should remain in prison until age 64.
The sentence of 25 years would have been far less than the sentence possible for all the crimes Khadr admitted to. Observers have said he pled guilty to so many crimes to avoid receiving a life sentence from the jury.
Moreover, some experts contacted by IPS were certain that the plea deal was known to the jurors.
David Frakt, who gained fame when he resigned as a Guantanamo Bay defense attorney because he believed military commissions were not designed to produce fair trials, told IPS, "I am not sure that we can safely assume that the jury was unaware of the eight year plea deal, because it was plastered all over the news even before the trial started. Although the jurors were instructed by the court not to read news accounts related to the trial, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them knew about it.”
What was the purpose of convening a jury to deliberate after a plea agreement had been reached? IPS reached out to constitutional scholars for answers. Here are some of them:
Daphne Eviatar, a senior attorney with the advocacy group Human Rights First and an eye-witness to the Khadr proceedings at GITMO, told IPS, “As the prosecutors said over and over to the jury, the government wanted them to ‘send a message’ -- to the American people, to al Qaeda, and to all the victims of this deadly war that the lives of U.S. service members are valued. One has to question, though, the choice of a 15-year-old child soldier forced into war by his father as the messenger.”
David Frakt told IPS, “Even if we accept that they did not know the specific terms of the pretrial agreement, they certainly knew that there was a plea deal, and they would have understood that the maximum sentence under the agreement was something less than the 25 years that the prosecution asked for, because it is standard practice for military prosecutors to ask for a sentence in excess of the agreed sentence cap. It is quite unusual for a military jury to give substantially in excess of what the prosecution requests. In fact, I’ve never seen it happen before.”
He added, “So they clearly were trying to send a message."
“Presumably, the message was intended to be a deterrent to other would-be terrorists and insurgents. In essence, they jurors were saying, “don’t mess with the U.S. military.” Given that the true extreme jihadists are quite willing to die for the cause, I doubt that the sentence will have the desired deterrent effect."
Scott Horton, a constitutional lawyer and Contributing Editor at Harper's Magazine, told IPS, "It can be argued that from the outset a prime function of the military commissions has been not to inform, but rather to deceive the public.”
“A plea bargain was struck, but the details of it were suppressed,” he said, adding:
“What the prosecution got out of the deal was a guilty plea to everything charged--indeed, Khadr would have pleaded to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby had they asked him to. This was then paraded before the public and the commission as a genuine guilty plea, with attendant melodrama, and the thrust behind it was suppressed. But the whole exercise we have seen is theatrics designed to cover the case that the prosecution case was weak and that the government severely mistreated this prisoner. The guilty plea and the courtroom drama will grab headlines, and the rest will be forgotten.”
Chip Pitts, a law lecturer at Stanford University law school, told IPS, “The result is entirely consistent with a process established to function more like the military show trials and Kangaroo courts the United States has traditionally condemned than one established to deliver justice. ‘Back to the USSR’?”
Bruce Fein, a conservative former senior justice department official in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, told IPS, the jury verdict was "a community expression of fear of international terrorism."
Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois law school, told IPS, the purpose was “to put the blame on a Child Soldier instead of themselves."
IPS posed another question to the legal experts it contacted: How unusual is it for a judge to send a jury out to deliberate on a verdict without telling them that the prosecution and the defense had already agreed on a plea arrangement?
Scott Horton’s view is that "It's impossible to speak of established practice in military commissions, because they're new, but this is the practice that has been established, starting with the al-Qosi case. Evidently this process is part of the agreed bargain."
Prof. Boyle responded: “These are Kangaroo Court proceedings. Of course they knew [of the plea deal]. As Groucho Marx said, ‘Military justice is to justice as military music is to music.’ And The Marx Brothers are in charge of the GITMO kangaroo court proceedings.”
A military jury at Guantanamo Bay sentenced a “child soldier” to 40 years in prison –unaware that Omar Khadr’s defense and prosecution lawyers had already agreed on an eight-year sentence and further agreed that the United States would send the Canadian home next year.
Under a plea bargain with a Pentagon official, Khadr would receive an eight-year sentence, in addition to the eight years he has been a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. But according to the plea arrangement reportedly reached between prosecution and defense, he would serve only one additional year at GITMO and the remaining seven in Canada, his home country. That means he could be released from prison at age 32, and perhaps sooner according to Canadian parole regulations.
The United States has pledged to support his return to Canada a year from now to serve out seven more years in a Canadian prison. While Canada has denied the repatriation idea publicly, it is known that the U.S. and Canadian government exchanged diplomatic notes on Oct. 23, declaring that “The Government of Canada is inclined to favorably consider Mr. Khadr's application to be transferred to Canada to serve the remainder of his sentence,'' or whichever portion Canada's National Parole Board decides is required.
But the Guantanamo jury, officially, didn’t know any of that. Their decision would apply only if it decided on a lighter sentence.
According to eye-witness Carol Rosenberg of The Miami Herald, “Jurors were told only that Guantánamo's youngest captive had pleaded guilty to five war crimes, including hurling the grenade that mortally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, during a July 2002 assault on an al Qaeda compound.” Khadr was 15 at the time of the attack.
The prosecution argued for a sentence of 25 years; defense lawyers urged repatriation to Canada. The jury disagreed with both, finding that Khadr should remain in prison until age 64.
The sentence of 25 years would have been far less than the sentence possible for all the crimes Khadr admitted to. Observers have said he pled guilty to so many crimes to avoid receiving a life sentence from the jury.
Moreover, some experts contacted by IPS were certain that the plea deal was known to the jurors.
David Frakt, who gained fame when he resigned as a Guantanamo Bay defense attorney because he believed military commissions were not designed to produce fair trials, told IPS, "I am not sure that we can safely assume that the jury was unaware of the eight year plea deal, because it was plastered all over the news even before the trial started. Although the jurors were instructed by the court not to read news accounts related to the trial, it wouldn’t surprise me if one of them knew about it.”
What was the purpose of convening a jury to deliberate after a plea agreement had been reached? IPS reached out to constitutional scholars for answers. Here are some of them:
Daphne Eviatar, a senior attorney with the advocacy group Human Rights First and an eye-witness to the Khadr proceedings at GITMO, told IPS, “As the prosecutors said over and over to the jury, the government wanted them to ‘send a message’ -- to the American people, to al Qaeda, and to all the victims of this deadly war that the lives of U.S. service members are valued. One has to question, though, the choice of a 15-year-old child soldier forced into war by his father as the messenger.”
David Frakt told IPS, “Even if we accept that they did not know the specific terms of the pretrial agreement, they certainly knew that there was a plea deal, and they would have understood that the maximum sentence under the agreement was something less than the 25 years that the prosecution asked for, because it is standard practice for military prosecutors to ask for a sentence in excess of the agreed sentence cap. It is quite unusual for a military jury to give substantially in excess of what the prosecution requests. In fact, I’ve never seen it happen before.”
He added, “So they clearly were trying to send a message."
“Presumably, the message was intended to be a deterrent to other would-be terrorists and insurgents. In essence, they jurors were saying, “don’t mess with the U.S. military.” Given that the true extreme jihadists are quite willing to die for the cause, I doubt that the sentence will have the desired deterrent effect."
Scott Horton, a constitutional lawyer and Contributing Editor at Harper's Magazine, told IPS, "It can be argued that from the outset a prime function of the military commissions has been not to inform, but rather to deceive the public.”
“A plea bargain was struck, but the details of it were suppressed,” he said, adding:
“What the prosecution got out of the deal was a guilty plea to everything charged--indeed, Khadr would have pleaded to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby had they asked him to. This was then paraded before the public and the commission as a genuine guilty plea, with attendant melodrama, and the thrust behind it was suppressed. But the whole exercise we have seen is theatrics designed to cover the case that the prosecution case was weak and that the government severely mistreated this prisoner. The guilty plea and the courtroom drama will grab headlines, and the rest will be forgotten.”
Chip Pitts, a law lecturer at Stanford University law school, told IPS, “The result is entirely consistent with a process established to function more like the military show trials and Kangaroo courts the United States has traditionally condemned than one established to deliver justice. ‘Back to the USSR’?”
Bruce Fein, a conservative former senior justice department official in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, told IPS, the jury verdict was "a community expression of fear of international terrorism."
Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois law school, told IPS, the purpose was “to put the blame on a Child Soldier instead of themselves."
IPS posed another question to the legal experts it contacted: How unusual is it for a judge to send a jury out to deliberate on a verdict without telling them that the prosecution and the defense had already agreed on a plea arrangement?
Scott Horton’s view is that "It's impossible to speak of established practice in military commissions, because they're new, but this is the practice that has been established, starting with the al-Qosi case. Evidently this process is part of the agreed bargain."
Prof. Boyle responded: “These are Kangaroo Court proceedings. Of course they knew [of the plea deal]. As Groucho Marx said, ‘Military justice is to justice as military music is to music.’ And The Marx Brothers are in charge of the GITMO kangaroo court proceedings.”
Friday, October 29, 2010
U.S. Slides in Corruption Survey
By William Fisher
Iraq and Afghanistan rank near rock-bottom in an index of corruption in 178 countries that found that “nearly three-quarters” of the countries surveyed
index showed serious corruption problems.
Iraq ranked 175 and Afghanistan 176 in the global index, just above Burma (Myanmar) and Somalia. These were the same ranks they achieved in 2009.
The United States, while still in the top 20 per cent of the world index, fell from 19th in 2009 to 22nd this year, again failing to score in the top 20. That put it behind Canada, Barbados and Chile in the Americas.
The survey was carried out by watchdog group Transparency International (TI) in Berlin. To form its index, TI compiles surveys that ask businessmen and analysts, both in and outside the countries they are analyzing, their perceptions of how corrupt a country is. Relying on the number of actual corruption cases would not work since laws and enforcement of laws differ significantly from country to country.
Scott Horton, a constitutional lawyer who is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, raised a delicate question in today’s column: “Is being occupied by the United States or receiving massive U.S. government contracts somehow correlated to corruption?”
Chip Pitts, a lecturer in law at Stanford University, at least partly answered Horton’s question. He told IPS, “The association between corruption and authoritarianism and war continues, but we shouldn’t forget that this is a ‘perceptions’ index. More subtle and masked corruption persists in nations like the US, where the role of the military-industrial-surveillance complex in fostering creeping authoritarianism at home and war abroad (in more overtly corrupt countries like Afghanistan and Iraq) is joined by massive, if under-appreciated theft like that in the recent financial bailout.”
He continued: “The publish-what-you-pay provisions in the latest financial reform legislation were a step ahead, but only a small step and still focused mainly on countries abroad. The ‘supply’ side of corruption here in the US (or e.g. in the EU nations and Japan) is also important and should be the subject of dramatically greater investigation, enforcement, and accountability, including against those illicitly profiting from 9/11 fears by incessantly and deceptively pushing the nation into trumped-up and privatized wars, war crimes, torture, ubiquitous surveillance, and airport and mobile bodyscanners. These ‘products’ clearly don’t work to make us safer -- but do add to the already obscene wealth of the merchants of fear, hate, and war.”
In his latest column in Harper’s, Horton wrote, “America is no longer seen as being in the top tier of least-corrupt countries, which includes Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Instead it belongs to the second tier, which includes Eastern and Southern Europe. The index has consistently shown the perception of corruption in the United States as steadily rising. My hunch is that this focuses on government contracting, but the notes released by TI point only to “widespread concern over a lack of government oversight.”
In the Index, Somalia, Afghanistan and Myanmar were found to be perceived as the most corrupt – the same rank as they had in the 2009 survey. And New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore were again seen as having the cleanest governments. Finland, Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland and Norway completed the top ten.
Huguette Labelle, the former Canadian civil servant who serves as chairwoman of Transparency International, told The New York Times that “the financial crisis and its aftermath had weighed on the United States’ ranking.”
“Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, while not itself attributable to the
government, reveals some of the problems that made the crisis possible,” Ms. Labelle said, adding, “People rely on government for early warning signals.” Sometimes the problem is “a lack of regulation or a lack of enforcement.”
“There was a vacuum of enforcement that allowed people to do bad things.
The problem is widespread as many countries have regulations on
the books but don’t enforce them, either because the state is captured by
interests that don’t want them enforced or because regulatory bodies don’t have the resources to do their work.’’
As many as 20 countries in the 36-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) convention that bans the bribery of foreign officials show little or no enforcement of the rules, the survey found.
TI said this sent “the wrong signal about their commitment to curb corrupt practices.’’
The TI index is the most commonly used measure for corruption in countries worldwide, though it has received criticisms over the years. The principal criticism stems from the difficulty in measuring corruption, which by definition happens behind the scenes. The index therefore needs to rely on third-party surveys that have been criticized as potentially unreliable.
Data can vary widely depending on the public perception of a country, the completeness of the surveys and the methodology used. The second issue is that data cannot be compared from year to year because TI uses different methodologies and samples every year. This makes it difficult to evaluate the result of new policies. The authors reply to these criticisms by reminding that the index is meant to measure perception and not "reality". They argue that "perceptions matter in their own right, since... firms and individuals take actions based on perceptions".
Iraq and Afghanistan rank near rock-bottom in an index of corruption in 178 countries that found that “nearly three-quarters” of the countries surveyed
index showed serious corruption problems.
Iraq ranked 175 and Afghanistan 176 in the global index, just above Burma (Myanmar) and Somalia. These were the same ranks they achieved in 2009.
The United States, while still in the top 20 per cent of the world index, fell from 19th in 2009 to 22nd this year, again failing to score in the top 20. That put it behind Canada, Barbados and Chile in the Americas.
The survey was carried out by watchdog group Transparency International (TI) in Berlin. To form its index, TI compiles surveys that ask businessmen and analysts, both in and outside the countries they are analyzing, their perceptions of how corrupt a country is. Relying on the number of actual corruption cases would not work since laws and enforcement of laws differ significantly from country to country.
Scott Horton, a constitutional lawyer who is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, raised a delicate question in today’s column: “Is being occupied by the United States or receiving massive U.S. government contracts somehow correlated to corruption?”
Chip Pitts, a lecturer in law at Stanford University, at least partly answered Horton’s question. He told IPS, “The association between corruption and authoritarianism and war continues, but we shouldn’t forget that this is a ‘perceptions’ index. More subtle and masked corruption persists in nations like the US, where the role of the military-industrial-surveillance complex in fostering creeping authoritarianism at home and war abroad (in more overtly corrupt countries like Afghanistan and Iraq) is joined by massive, if under-appreciated theft like that in the recent financial bailout.”
He continued: “The publish-what-you-pay provisions in the latest financial reform legislation were a step ahead, but only a small step and still focused mainly on countries abroad. The ‘supply’ side of corruption here in the US (or e.g. in the EU nations and Japan) is also important and should be the subject of dramatically greater investigation, enforcement, and accountability, including against those illicitly profiting from 9/11 fears by incessantly and deceptively pushing the nation into trumped-up and privatized wars, war crimes, torture, ubiquitous surveillance, and airport and mobile bodyscanners. These ‘products’ clearly don’t work to make us safer -- but do add to the already obscene wealth of the merchants of fear, hate, and war.”
In his latest column in Harper’s, Horton wrote, “America is no longer seen as being in the top tier of least-corrupt countries, which includes Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. Instead it belongs to the second tier, which includes Eastern and Southern Europe. The index has consistently shown the perception of corruption in the United States as steadily rising. My hunch is that this focuses on government contracting, but the notes released by TI point only to “widespread concern over a lack of government oversight.”
In the Index, Somalia, Afghanistan and Myanmar were found to be perceived as the most corrupt – the same rank as they had in the 2009 survey. And New Zealand, Denmark and Singapore were again seen as having the cleanest governments. Finland, Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland and Norway completed the top ten.
Huguette Labelle, the former Canadian civil servant who serves as chairwoman of Transparency International, told The New York Times that “the financial crisis and its aftermath had weighed on the United States’ ranking.”
“Bernard L. Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, while not itself attributable to the
government, reveals some of the problems that made the crisis possible,” Ms. Labelle said, adding, “People rely on government for early warning signals.” Sometimes the problem is “a lack of regulation or a lack of enforcement.”
“There was a vacuum of enforcement that allowed people to do bad things.
The problem is widespread as many countries have regulations on
the books but don’t enforce them, either because the state is captured by
interests that don’t want them enforced or because regulatory bodies don’t have the resources to do their work.’’
As many as 20 countries in the 36-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) convention that bans the bribery of foreign officials show little or no enforcement of the rules, the survey found.
TI said this sent “the wrong signal about their commitment to curb corrupt practices.’’
The TI index is the most commonly used measure for corruption in countries worldwide, though it has received criticisms over the years. The principal criticism stems from the difficulty in measuring corruption, which by definition happens behind the scenes. The index therefore needs to rely on third-party surveys that have been criticized as potentially unreliable.
Data can vary widely depending on the public perception of a country, the completeness of the surveys and the methodology used. The second issue is that data cannot be compared from year to year because TI uses different methodologies and samples every year. This makes it difficult to evaluate the result of new policies. The authors reply to these criticisms by reminding that the index is meant to measure perception and not "reality". They argue that "perceptions matter in their own right, since... firms and individuals take actions based on perceptions".
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Averting a PR Disaster
By William Fisher
With tongue in cheek, Constitutional experts today congratulated the U.S. Government for negotiating a plea deal with Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr, thus avoiding a trial in the Military Commission “puppet theater” that would have subjected them to the embarrassment of “a publicity nightmare of the highest order.”
The consensus among legal scholars contacted by IPS is that “before the end of 2012, Khadr will be home in Canada, and in very short order, he will be a free man.”
Details of the plea deal are not yet fully known, but it appears that Khadr will serve an eight-year sentence, the last seven years of which will be in Canada, his home country. Most of those contacted by IPS believe the Canadian Government will free him since he was only 15 at the time of his offenses and should not have been tried before a Military Commission in the first place.
One IPS source, Constitutional lawyer Scott Horton, who writes for Harper’s Magazine, called the plea deal “a meaningless charade.” He told IPS, “My best guess is this: before the end of 2012, Khadr will be home in Canada, and in very short order, he will be a free man. This is because, as the Canadian courts have already recognized, the entire process at Guantánamo is illegitimate and it furnishes no basis upon which a person can be imprisoned, not even on a ludicrous and highly coerced guilty plea.”
The benefit to the U.S., he said, is that “The U.S. is saved the spectacle of a trial which would have been a publicity nightmare of the highest order. Khadr gets to go home and probably to go free before too long. And the prosecutors get just one thing: a number of gullible reporters who misunderstand what is going on, and report it as a complete victory for them.”
On Monday, Khadr pled guilty to five charges, including murder, for throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in during a fierce firefight at an al-Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002. He was 15 years old at the time of the incident.
Khadr's defense team says he was pushed into fighting the US by his father, said to be a close associate of Osama bin Laden.
Khadr, now 24, also admitted planting improvised explosive devices and
receiving weapons training from al-Qaeda. His defense lawyers say that because Khadr was a child when the offenses occurred, he should not be tried for war-crimes.
David Frakt, who is widely known for his 2008 defense of Guantanamo detainee Mohammed Jawad, who, like Khadr, was facing charges for events alleged to have taken place when he was a minor, agrees.
He told IPS, “The conviction of this child soldier for non-existent war crimes is a disgraceful travesty and a stain on America's reputation. Although the plea bargain has saved the Administration from the unseemly spectacle of a trial, the United States will still go down in history as the first civilized nation to prosecute a child soldier as a war criminal.”
He added, “That this happened on President Obama's watch is beyond disappointing, and exposes the extreme hypocrisy of the Administration's claims of devotion to the rule of law and adherence to the laws of armed conflict.”
In defending Mohamed Jawad, Frakt argued that Jawad had been subjected to: "...pointless and sadistic treatment [in a] bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of anything goes, of torture.” He was subsequently released on a writ of habeas corpus.
Frakt, now a professor at Barry University law school, told IPS he believes that the officers on the military commission jury are capable of rendering a fair verdict and sentence.
But, he added, “the way that the Military Commissions Act is written, and the way it has been interpreted by the Department of Defense and by Khadr's trial judge, would have virtually guaranteed conviction on most, if not all, of the charges, potentially subjecting Khadr to a very lengthy sentence. Given the unreasonableness of both the U.S. and Canadian governments' posture toward Mr. Khadr, his lawyers are probably wise to advise him to take this deal. At least he now has a chance to get out of confinement while he is still relatively young and lead some semblance of a normal life.”
Chip Pitts, a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, told IPS, “This plea bargain shouldn’t be taken as indication of the legitimacy of the irredeemably tainted military commissions; it was precisely their illegitimacy and one-sidedness that led Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, a juvenile at the time of arrest who was brought into horror of war by his father and had maintained his innocence of the murder charges until the last minute, to finally succumb to the pressure of a potential life sentence and agree to a plea bargain (including to novel “war crimes” not recognized as such at the time).”
Pitts said the plea deal “will return him to Canada and freedom much earlier.”
But, he added, “The precedent set – of extracting a plea by threatening a child soldier with harsh charges and an unfair trial, instead of undertaking the rehabilitation contemplated by international treaties – is a notable setback for international human rights law. How is this different from Uganda’s bringing treason charges in 2002 against child soldiers from the Lord’s Resistance Army, or the DRC’s military court prosecutions against child soldiers? The implications, especially for child victims of war and legal treatment of children with still-developing brains, are disturbing.”
Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at the Seton Hall Law School, joined others in questioning the legitimacy of the Military Commissions. He told IPS, “Khadr's case, which underscored the gross mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody and the extent the U.S. government would go to hide it, reminds us that military commissions will continue to spark controversy and lack legitimacy as long as they continue. Khadr's plea may help bring the debacle to an end in his case, but it provides another example of how military commissions are designed to deny justice, not to deliver it."
Human Rights organizations were unanimous in condemning the Khadr proceedings. Rob Freer, Amnesty International’s USA researcher said, “While military trial proceedings may be coming to an end in Khadr’s case, the obligation on the U.S. authorities to address serious concerns about human rights violations suffered by him does not end.”
He added, “The U.S. authorities have ignored their international duties in the treatment of children, which was the case when Khadr was arrested eight years ago.”
And Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), declared, "Khadr's plea deal means that the United States will be spared the embarrassment of trying a child soldier in a tribunal that most of the world sees as illegitimate. Khadr's case, however, is emblematic of a set of larger problems with the military commissions that won't be resolved by a plea deal. These tribunals are simply incapable of providing fair trials, and they ought to be shut down altogether.”
With tongue in cheek, Constitutional experts today congratulated the U.S. Government for negotiating a plea deal with Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr, thus avoiding a trial in the Military Commission “puppet theater” that would have subjected them to the embarrassment of “a publicity nightmare of the highest order.”
The consensus among legal scholars contacted by IPS is that “before the end of 2012, Khadr will be home in Canada, and in very short order, he will be a free man.”
Details of the plea deal are not yet fully known, but it appears that Khadr will serve an eight-year sentence, the last seven years of which will be in Canada, his home country. Most of those contacted by IPS believe the Canadian Government will free him since he was only 15 at the time of his offenses and should not have been tried before a Military Commission in the first place.
One IPS source, Constitutional lawyer Scott Horton, who writes for Harper’s Magazine, called the plea deal “a meaningless charade.” He told IPS, “My best guess is this: before the end of 2012, Khadr will be home in Canada, and in very short order, he will be a free man. This is because, as the Canadian courts have already recognized, the entire process at Guantánamo is illegitimate and it furnishes no basis upon which a person can be imprisoned, not even on a ludicrous and highly coerced guilty plea.”
The benefit to the U.S., he said, is that “The U.S. is saved the spectacle of a trial which would have been a publicity nightmare of the highest order. Khadr gets to go home and probably to go free before too long. And the prosecutors get just one thing: a number of gullible reporters who misunderstand what is going on, and report it as a complete victory for them.”
On Monday, Khadr pled guilty to five charges, including murder, for throwing a grenade that killed a US soldier in during a fierce firefight at an al-Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002. He was 15 years old at the time of the incident.
Khadr's defense team says he was pushed into fighting the US by his father, said to be a close associate of Osama bin Laden.
Khadr, now 24, also admitted planting improvised explosive devices and
receiving weapons training from al-Qaeda. His defense lawyers say that because Khadr was a child when the offenses occurred, he should not be tried for war-crimes.
David Frakt, who is widely known for his 2008 defense of Guantanamo detainee Mohammed Jawad, who, like Khadr, was facing charges for events alleged to have taken place when he was a minor, agrees.
He told IPS, “The conviction of this child soldier for non-existent war crimes is a disgraceful travesty and a stain on America's reputation. Although the plea bargain has saved the Administration from the unseemly spectacle of a trial, the United States will still go down in history as the first civilized nation to prosecute a child soldier as a war criminal.”
He added, “That this happened on President Obama's watch is beyond disappointing, and exposes the extreme hypocrisy of the Administration's claims of devotion to the rule of law and adherence to the laws of armed conflict.”
In defending Mohamed Jawad, Frakt argued that Jawad had been subjected to: "...pointless and sadistic treatment [in a] bleak underworld of barbarism and cruelty, of anything goes, of torture.” He was subsequently released on a writ of habeas corpus.
Frakt, now a professor at Barry University law school, told IPS he believes that the officers on the military commission jury are capable of rendering a fair verdict and sentence.
But, he added, “the way that the Military Commissions Act is written, and the way it has been interpreted by the Department of Defense and by Khadr's trial judge, would have virtually guaranteed conviction on most, if not all, of the charges, potentially subjecting Khadr to a very lengthy sentence. Given the unreasonableness of both the U.S. and Canadian governments' posture toward Mr. Khadr, his lawyers are probably wise to advise him to take this deal. At least he now has a chance to get out of confinement while he is still relatively young and lead some semblance of a normal life.”
Chip Pitts, a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, told IPS, “This plea bargain shouldn’t be taken as indication of the legitimacy of the irredeemably tainted military commissions; it was precisely their illegitimacy and one-sidedness that led Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, a juvenile at the time of arrest who was brought into horror of war by his father and had maintained his innocence of the murder charges until the last minute, to finally succumb to the pressure of a potential life sentence and agree to a plea bargain (including to novel “war crimes” not recognized as such at the time).”
Pitts said the plea deal “will return him to Canada and freedom much earlier.”
But, he added, “The precedent set – of extracting a plea by threatening a child soldier with harsh charges and an unfair trial, instead of undertaking the rehabilitation contemplated by international treaties – is a notable setback for international human rights law. How is this different from Uganda’s bringing treason charges in 2002 against child soldiers from the Lord’s Resistance Army, or the DRC’s military court prosecutions against child soldiers? The implications, especially for child victims of war and legal treatment of children with still-developing brains, are disturbing.”
Jonathan Hafetz, a professor at the Seton Hall Law School, joined others in questioning the legitimacy of the Military Commissions. He told IPS, “Khadr's case, which underscored the gross mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody and the extent the U.S. government would go to hide it, reminds us that military commissions will continue to spark controversy and lack legitimacy as long as they continue. Khadr's plea may help bring the debacle to an end in his case, but it provides another example of how military commissions are designed to deny justice, not to deliver it."
Human Rights organizations were unanimous in condemning the Khadr proceedings. Rob Freer, Amnesty International’s USA researcher said, “While military trial proceedings may be coming to an end in Khadr’s case, the obligation on the U.S. authorities to address serious concerns about human rights violations suffered by him does not end.”
He added, “The U.S. authorities have ignored their international duties in the treatment of children, which was the case when Khadr was arrested eight years ago.”
And Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), declared, "Khadr's plea deal means that the United States will be spared the embarrassment of trying a child soldier in a tribunal that most of the world sees as illegitimate. Khadr's case, however, is emblematic of a set of larger problems with the military commissions that won't be resolved by a plea deal. These tribunals are simply incapable of providing fair trials, and they ought to be shut down altogether.”
What the Pentagon Didn’t Tell Us.
By William Fisher
Two revelations await the reader of the Wikileaks’ section dealing with civilian deaths in the Iraq War: Iraqis are responsible for most of these deaths; and the number of total civilian casualties is substantially higher than has been previously reported.
There were numerous gruesome but seemingly isolated events that caught the interest and attention of the press and the public. For example, on August 31, 2005, more than 950 people were killed in a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad, after the crowd had been panicked by a number of earlier attacks. And on August 14, 2007, in a rural area near the Syrian border, truck bombs murdered more than 500 Iraqis.
But, even more than these horrendous crimes, the action that catapulted the mass killings off the charts was a carefully planned, systematic strategy of religious and tribal cleansing. That campaign, Wikileaks says, reached its zenith in December 2006, which it calls the worst month of the war, That month saw the deaths of some 3,800 civilians, along with the killings of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers.
American soldiers, too, share responsibility for civilian killings, Wikileaks says. It reports many instances of American soldiers killing Iraqi civilians at checkpoints, from helicopters, and in operations.
Wikileaks says these killings were a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country.
Detailed analyses of the 391,832 documents disclosed by Wikileaks were published by The New York Times and several other invited media organizations, based on tens of thousands of secret field reports from the battlegrounds of Iraq. In July, Wikileaks released a smaller number of reports dealing with the war in Afghanistan.
According to the New York Times account, the current archive “contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice.”
Later, in February 2007, two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, were shot and killed by an Apache helicopter. The action was taken because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.”
However, in three other instances, Iraqis surrendered to helicopter crews without being shot.
The Times writes that, “The pace of civilian deaths served as a kind of pulse, whose steady beat told of the success, or failure, of America’s war effort. Americans on both sides of the war debate argued bitterly over facts that grew hazier as the war deepened.”
While no one really has an exact body count of Iraqi deaths, the Wikileaks’ numbers appear to be in line with those of several sources, including Iraq Body Count. That organization used press reports to track civilian deaths, a method frequently criticized by the Bush administration as unreliable and producing inflated numbers.
In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures. A 2008 Congressional report warned that record keeping in the war had been so problematic that such statistics should be looked at only as “guideposts.”
In a statement on Friday, Iraq Body Count, which did a preliminary analysis of the archive, estimated that it listed 15,000 deaths that had not been previously disclosed anywhere.
There are thousands of painful anecdotes of loss about individuals and their families in the Wikileaks archive.
There were multiple “misunderstandings” at checkpoints and these were often lethal. In one, sunlight reflecting off the windshield of a car that did not slow down led to the shooting death of a mother and the wounding of three of her daughters and her husband.
The Times writes that, “according to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter.”
The Wikileaks documents provide context for one of the most heinous crimes committed by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha. This action, says The New York Times, “is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.”
The Wikileaks documents do not detail the main causes of Iraqi deaths caused by Americans. And, since these reports cover the period starting in 2004, they do not report on civilian deaths caused by the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombardment preceding the U.S.-led invasion. But research by the International Committee of the Red Cross confirms that ten civilians die for every soldier killed in today’s wars.
Wikileaks is an international organization that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of sources. Its website was launched in 2006.
The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (June 7, 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, as its director.
Pfc. Bradley Manning. They called on the US government to release Manning and decried the evidence of war crimes perpetrated by US armed soldiers depicted in the logs and videos released by Wikileaks. Protesters affirmed that, if Bradley Manning is the source of the leaks, he deserves the gratitude of the entire world and should be heralded as a hero for his sacrifice. The protesters included a wide range of groups including labor activists, queer rights activists, legal scholars, anti-war activists and veterans.
He also has the support of Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department official who in 1967 leaked the so-called “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times. The top-secret documents revealed some of the untruths and deceptions that senior government officials foisted on the American public to win approval for the Vietnam War.
Two revelations await the reader of the Wikileaks’ section dealing with civilian deaths in the Iraq War: Iraqis are responsible for most of these deaths; and the number of total civilian casualties is substantially higher than has been previously reported.
There were numerous gruesome but seemingly isolated events that caught the interest and attention of the press and the public. For example, on August 31, 2005, more than 950 people were killed in a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad, after the crowd had been panicked by a number of earlier attacks. And on August 14, 2007, in a rural area near the Syrian border, truck bombs murdered more than 500 Iraqis.
But, even more than these horrendous crimes, the action that catapulted the mass killings off the charts was a carefully planned, systematic strategy of religious and tribal cleansing. That campaign, Wikileaks says, reached its zenith in December 2006, which it calls the worst month of the war, That month saw the deaths of some 3,800 civilians, along with the killings of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers.
American soldiers, too, share responsibility for civilian killings, Wikileaks says. It reports many instances of American soldiers killing Iraqi civilians at checkpoints, from helicopters, and in operations.
Wikileaks says these killings were a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country.
Detailed analyses of the 391,832 documents disclosed by Wikileaks were published by The New York Times and several other invited media organizations, based on tens of thousands of secret field reports from the battlegrounds of Iraq. In July, Wikileaks released a smaller number of reports dealing with the war in Afghanistan.
According to the New York Times account, the current archive “contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice.”
Later, in February 2007, two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, were shot and killed by an Apache helicopter. The action was taken because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.”
However, in three other instances, Iraqis surrendered to helicopter crews without being shot.
The Times writes that, “The pace of civilian deaths served as a kind of pulse, whose steady beat told of the success, or failure, of America’s war effort. Americans on both sides of the war debate argued bitterly over facts that grew hazier as the war deepened.”
While no one really has an exact body count of Iraqi deaths, the Wikileaks’ numbers appear to be in line with those of several sources, including Iraq Body Count. That organization used press reports to track civilian deaths, a method frequently criticized by the Bush administration as unreliable and producing inflated numbers.
In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures. A 2008 Congressional report warned that record keeping in the war had been so problematic that such statistics should be looked at only as “guideposts.”
In a statement on Friday, Iraq Body Count, which did a preliminary analysis of the archive, estimated that it listed 15,000 deaths that had not been previously disclosed anywhere.
There are thousands of painful anecdotes of loss about individuals and their families in the Wikileaks archive.
There were multiple “misunderstandings” at checkpoints and these were often lethal. In one, sunlight reflecting off the windshield of a car that did not slow down led to the shooting death of a mother and the wounding of three of her daughters and her husband.
The Times writes that, “according to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter.”
The Wikileaks documents provide context for one of the most heinous crimes committed by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha. This action, says The New York Times, “is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.”
The Wikileaks documents do not detail the main causes of Iraqi deaths caused by Americans. And, since these reports cover the period starting in 2004, they do not report on civilian deaths caused by the 2003 “Shock and Awe” bombardment preceding the U.S.-led invasion. But research by the International Committee of the Red Cross confirms that ten civilians die for every soldier killed in today’s wars.
Wikileaks is an international organization that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of sources. Its website was launched in 2006.
The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (June 7, 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, as its director.
Pfc. Bradley Manning. They called on the US government to release Manning and decried the evidence of war crimes perpetrated by US armed soldiers depicted in the logs and videos released by Wikileaks. Protesters affirmed that, if Bradley Manning is the source of the leaks, he deserves the gratitude of the entire world and should be heralded as a hero for his sacrifice. The protesters included a wide range of groups including labor activists, queer rights activists, legal scholars, anti-war activists and veterans.
He also has the support of Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department official who in 1967 leaked the so-called “Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times. The top-secret documents revealed some of the untruths and deceptions that senior government officials foisted on the American public to win approval for the Vietnam War.
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