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UN Promises Delivery of Freedom Flotilla Cargo to Gaza
Six weeks after the Freedom Flotilla ships were forcibly boarded in international waters, their passengers illegally jailed and the cargo impounded by the Israeli authorities, the office of the United Nations Special Co-ordinator for the Middle East (UNSCO) has promised to deliver the full humanitarian aid cargo to UN. agencies in Gaza.
“The cargo finally being processed for delivery this week consists of supplies prevented by Israel from entering Gaza for the last three years. On the MV Rachel Corrie, the cargo ship of the Free Gaza Movement, we were carrying 20 tons of paper, plus pens & books for schools & universities, over 50 tons of medical supplies & 550 tons of cement for Al Shifa Hospital. Instead of docking in Gaza & distributing the supplies to the intended recipients, Israel impounded cargo, searched, then handed over to an overburdened UN, who can give no guarantees that it will get to the intended schools or NGO’s.” said Niamh Moloughney, coordinator of the Free Gaza Movement – Ireland.
The Rebuilding Alliance, one of the U.S. organizations to place humanitarian cargo on the Rachel Corrie is none-the-less hopeful that the backpacks, sports equipment, and building materials donated by hundreds of Americans will be delivered to the designated Gaza non-governmental organizations (NGO’s).
“When we first learned of the Freedom Flotilla, we asked our partner NGO’s in Gaza what we could send that would matter most to them, given the 3 year-long blockade,” said Donna Baranski-Walker, Executive Director of the Rebuidling Alliance, a San Mateo CA-based nonprofit. “They asked Americans to send messages to children, along with backpacks, sports equipment, and cement to build a kindergarten.”
Added Ms. Moloughney, “Israel has insisted that cargo be brought into Ashdod for delivery, but this ignores the overall illegitimacy of Israel’s closure policy. It also means that once more Israel profits from its illegal acts. The ‘easing’ of the blockade means nothing to families whose homes and businesses are still in ruins and allows them only to be consumers of Israeli goods.”
The Free Gaza Movement repeats that only a complete end to Israel’s punitive closure policy will suffice in starting to repair the economy of this decimated slice of the Mediterranean, the only territory in the world that does not have access to its own sea.
“We ask people throughout the world to press their governments to open Gaza, not just for aid but for movement and trade as well, to truly end the collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population,” said Huwaida Arraf, chair of the Free Gaza Movement. “That’s why we will continue to send ships to Gaza loaded with civilian supplies Israel refuses to allow into Gaza – and on return, fill our ships with goods from Gaza for export. We look forward to international cooperation in developing a sea route certification system to assure aid, fair trade and the safety of all.”
Israel continues to hold all of the vessels that it illegally commandeered, including the seven ships of the Freedom Flotilla, as well as the Spirit of Humanity, which Israel hijacked in June 2009.
Prison Planet
Pakistan Cannot Play Both Sides Forever
The Wikileaks revelations about murderous collusion between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and the Afghan Taliban have underlined the central role that country plays in the sponsorship of terrorism. This is despite the US disbursing $1 billion a year to enable the Pakistanis to fight it. In this respect, it would seem that enemies like Iran or Syria are a secondary problem.
And the collusion goes far beyond corrupt and dozy Pakistani border guards turning a blind eye to the Taliban launching cross-border raids on coalition troops in Afghanistan. It also means ISI involvement in planning the insurgents’ operations, as well as even more murky links alleged between ISI figures and mysterious “Arabs”. That’s the preferred synonym, by the way, for members of al-Qaeda, who are embedded with the Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks, which the ISI once sponsored to fight the Soviet invasion.
Let’s not forget, too, that Pakistani weddings seem to be the preferred excuse for British jihadists – as well as for the likes of would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad – to visit the many terrorist training camps there.
Although Pakistani collusion with terrorists is a deplorable fact of life for Western forces fighting the Afghan Taliban, we have a simultaneous dependence on Pakistan’s tacit collusion in aerial drone strikes on al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. This has ensured that it was David Cameron, speaking in Bangalore on his trip to India, who criticised Pakistan’s “export of terror”, rather than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. He was right to do so.
Pakistan is the world’s most dangerous source of international terrorism, responsible for 70 per cent of conspiracies to bring murder and mayhem to Britain, not forgetting serial atrocities perpetrated in India. Whereas Saudi Arabia has finally got a grip on its indigenous jihadists (after blithely allowing them to slaughter people elsewhere), Pakistan’s weak democracy and powerful military – within which the ISI nestles like a parasite – seem powerless to grip a problem which threatens not only its neighbours, but through a large diaspora, Western domestic security, too.
The conventional wisdom is that this problem only dates back to the 1980s, when the ISI was co‑opted into a broader Western (and Saudi) campaign to encourage Islamic resistance against the atheist Soviets in Afghanistan. That idea enables many Leftists to spout cheap theories that the CIA was responsible for creating al‑Qaeda, a movement whose origins in fact lie in the domestic politics of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Others, such as the Indian journalist Sadand Dhume, argue that the problem stems from Pakistan having Islam inscribed in its identity, from the green crescent flag to former prime minister Zulfikar Bhutto’s advertisement of “an Islamic Bomb”. Pan-Islamism is in the country’s DNA, they argue, in ways that are simply not true of other Muslim states such as Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia or Turkey. Without Islam, the self-styled “Land of the Pure” is an unjustifiable congeries of regions cobbled from the wreckage Mountbatten left in British India.
Whatever the truth, Pakistan is host to a bewildering array of terrorist movements. They include Baluchi and Punjabi separatists, Kashmiri irredentists (who would like to annex Indian Kashmir); the Afghan Taliban, whose leadership around Mullah Omar is believed to be in Quetta; remnant al-Qaeda, presumed to be in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas; and the Pakistani Taliban, whose intention is to convert Pakistan into a strictly Islamist state.
The Pakistani state has consistently indulged those groups which ostensibly conform to its strategic interests, notably in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The familiar excuse is that these are “freedom fighters” rather than terrorists. That is why although Lashkar-e-Taiba is widely known to have been responsible for the atrocity in Mumbai, it continues to operate inside Pakistan, allegedly as a religious charitable organisation, while sundry terrorists have either escaped from custody or dodged the executioner after being convicted. The perceived closeness to India of the Karzai regime in Kabul explains the favour Pakistan shows towards the Afghan Taliban. This is partly a reflection of Pashtun solidarity, but also of a longer-term aim of strengthening its defences for any major confrontation with India.
One imagines that the spooks of the ISI thought they were being outrageously Machiavellian in their multiple dealings with terrorists they construed as freedom fighters. They would not be alone. Of course, terrorism has had a baleful impact on Pakistan itself. While from 2003 to 2008, some 13,185 Pakistanis were killed by terrorists, the figure for 2009 was 11,585, victims of 723 major incidents. The state itself has come under direct attack, including the murder of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and an assault on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi after the military belatedly acted against indigenous Taliban with selective rigour.
Two questions present themselves. Are enough conditions being attached to that $1 billion a year that the West disburses on Islamabad? And what contingency planning is there should the feeble, nuclear-armed, Pakistani state succumb to the incubuses its own elites have played such a deplorable role in creating?
Telegraph U.K.
DOJ Accused of Stalling on MOVE Act for Voters in Military
The Department of Justice is ignoring a new law aimed at protecting the right of American soldiers to vote, according to two former DOJ attorneys who say states are being encouraged to use waivers to bypass the new federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment (MOVE) Act.
The MOVE Act, enacted last October, ensures that servicemen and women serving overseas have ample time to get in their absentee ballots. The result of the DOJ’s alleged inaction in enforcing the act, say Eric Eversole and J. Christian Adams — both former litigation attorneys for the DOJ’s Voting Section — could be that thousands of soldiers’ ballots will arrive too late to be counted.
“It is an absolute shame that the section appears to be spending more time finding ways to avoid the MOVE Act, rather than finding ways to ensure that military voters will have their votes counted,” said Eversole, director of the Military Voter Protection Project, a new organization devoted to ensuring military voting rights. “The Voting Section seems to have forgotten that it has an obligation to enforce federal law, not to find and raise arguments for states to avoid these laws.”
Adams, a conservative blogger (www.electionlawcenter.com) who gained national attention when he testified against his former employer after it dropped its case against the New Black Panther Party, called the DOJ’s handling of the MOVE Act akin to “keystone cops enforcement.”
“I do know that they have adopted positions or attempted to adopt positions to waivers that prove they aren’t interested in aggressively enforcing the law,” Adams told FoxNews.com. “They shouldn’t be going to meeting with state election officials and telling them they don’t like to litigate cases and telling them that the waiver requirements are ambiguous.”
The MOVE act requires states to send absentee ballots to overseas military troops 45 days before an election, but a state can apply for a waiver if it can prove a specific “undue hardship” in enforcing it.
Sen. John Cornyn,R-Texas – who co-sponsored MOVE – wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder on July 26 saying he is concerned that the Department of Justice is allowing states to opt out of the new law. Click here to read the letter.
“Military voters have been disenfranchised for decades, and last year Congress acted,” Cornyn said in a statement to FoxNews.com. ”But according to recent information, the Department of Justice has expressed reluctance to protect the civil rights of military voters under the new law. All our men and women in uniform deserve a chance to vote this November, and the Obama administration bears responsibility for ensuring that they have it.
“For far too long in this country, we have failed to adequately protect the right of our troops and their families to participate in our democratic process. The MOVE Act was supposed to end this sad history. The right to participate in democratic elections is fundamental to the American experience.”
In his letter to Holder, Cornyn cites minutes from the 2010 winter meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS), during which Rebecca Wertz, deputy chief of the DOJ’s voting section, told state election officials that the legislative language regarding waivers is not completely clear. Wertz described the provisions of the law as “fairly general” and “somewhat of an open question as to what type of information” a state needs to submit in order to for their waiver application to be granted. She said it was also unclear whether waivers are for one election only, or if they apply to future elections.
According to the meeting’s minutes, obtained by FoxNews.com, Wertz also said “that the DOJ is working to find effective ways to disseminate any information guidance that can help states with different questions about MOVE interpretation. She invited questions and dialogue from states, and said that litigation is always the last resort.”
Cornyn wrote, “If these are the positions of the DOJ, then they fly in the face of the clear statutory language, undermine the provisions in question, and jeopardize the voting rights of our men and women in uniform.”
He said the language of the law makes it clear that there is no ambiguity when it comes to states’ eligibility for being granted a waiver, and that the statute does not leave room for the Justice Department to decide whether to enforce its requirements.
“If a state is not in compliance with the statute, there is little room for “dialogue” or negotiation, and the Voting Section should take immediate steps to enforce the law and safeguard military and overseas voting rights, including pursuing litigation whenever necessary,” Cornyn wrote. “The comments by the DOJ official, as reported in the NASS minutes, appear to ignore Congress’ clear legislative language and could facilitate the disenfranchisement of our men and women in uniform.”
Cornyn, who discussed Eversole’s allegations at a meeting with Defense Department officials last week, called for Holder to immediately provide guidelines to state election officials; to ensure that states are required to abide by the law; and to provide Cornyn himself with a state-by-state breakdown of which states have already applied for waivers and which are expected to be in noncompliance with MOVE in the November midterm election. He also called for full transparency in the waiver process.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Xochitl Hinojosa, declined to comment, other than to say Cornyn’s letter is being reviewed.
FoxNews.com obtained waiver applications submitted by Washington and Hawaii.
Defense Department spokeswoman Major April Cunningham told FoxNews.com that New York, Delaware, Maryland, Alaska and Virgin Islands had also applied for waivers. (Cornyn’s co-sponsor for the MOVE Act was New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, a Democrat.)
“All waivers are currently under review. The Defense Department must respond, under the law, after consultation with the Department of Justice, no later than 65 days before the election, which is August 29, 2010,” said Robert Carey, director of the Federal Voting Assistance Program.
“The voting section has taken this haphazard approach to enforcing military voting law,” said Eversole. “The voting section is asserting itself into statute to make a statute that’s not ambiguous, ambiguous. Can you imagine any other agency giving prospective defendants advice like this?”
“Everybody in Washington knows it doesn’t matter how good the law is; it comes down to who’s enforcing it,” said Adams. “This stuff should be transparent and online for the citizens of these states to comment on, the fact that it’s being done behind closed doors tells you everything you need to know about how it will affect the voters.”
Adams and Eversole separately pointed out that the DOJ’s website lacks any mention of the MOVE Act. In fact, the section on military voting includes the outdated and nonbinding 30-day recommendation for sending out ballots. There is no mention of the the current 45-day mandate.
But the DOJ’s online voting section includes a detailed section devoted to helping felons learn how get their voting rights back.
“It is just offensive to most Americans that we can send soldiers to the front lines but they can’t vote,” said Eversole. “This is an issue that tugs at the heartstrings of America and people can’t understand why we can’t get that right. This is something we have to get right. We should be fighting as hard for their rights as they’re fighting for ours.”
FOX News
GOP Senate Candidate Ken Buck Calls Birthers “Dumbasses”
Colorado Republican Senate candidate Ken Buck has once again talked himself into some trouble – this time by calling certain tea-party activists “dumbasses” for questioning the legitimacy of President Obama’s birth certificate.
According to the Denver Post, Buck was caught on tape saying in June, “Will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on camera.” He added, laughing: “God, what am I supposed to do?”
Buck was speaking to a Democratic operative who had secretly recorded the conversation.
Buck, who enjoys strong support from the Tea Party movement, has since somewhat walked back the remarks, though he focused on language, not content.
“I’m not suggesting the language was appropriate,” Buck told the Post today. “But after 16 months of being on the campaign trail, I was tired and frustrated that I can’t get that message through that we are going to go off a cliff if we don’t start dealing with this debt.”
In separate comments on Sunday, Buck said the so-called “Birthers” have been distracting his campaign from more important issues like the economy. Earlier this year, he suggested that he may support legislation that would ensure presidential candidates are U.S. citizens, but he has since shied away from the issue.
Jane Norton, Buck’s chief rival in the state’s Republican primary, quickly jumped on his remarks. In a statement, she said, “My opponent has given more profanity-laced tirades than he has specifics on reforming our unaffordable system of entitlement.” She added: “Ken Buck’s childish insults about tea partiers once more raise the question: exactly who is Ken Buck, and can we really trust him? And just as pointedly, does Ken Buck have the temperament and character to be a United States Senator?”
But Lu Busse, who runs the 9/12 Project Colorado Coalition, told an NBC affiliate in Denver that while she wishes Buck had used better language, she understands that he misspoke.
“He could have not called us a name,” said Busse. “It would have been better to say, ‘Why do these people’ and he shouldn’t have used a bad name, but I don’t see it as he meant anything personal to me or to the other people in the Tea Party movement. It was just an unguarded moment and he was frustrated.”
This is not the first time Buck has caused a stir for making questionable comments. Buck found himself in the midst of controversy last week after Norton released a campaign spotlighting Buck’s comment that voters should vote for him because he doesn’t “wear high heels.”
A week earlier, Buck was criticized after saying the following about former Congressman Tom Tancredo, who said that the biggest threat to the country was Mr. Obama: “[I] can’t believe that guy [Tancredo] opens his mouth.”
CBS News
Why Some Republicans Want to ‘Restore’ the 13th Amendment
If there is an aspect of the human condition that is unaddressed by the platform of the Republican Party of Iowa, adopted last month at the state convention in Des Moines, you’d have to look awfully hard to find it. Its 387 enumerated planks and principles range widely over politics, culture, and economics, from sweeping statements of belief (“America is good”) to the fine nuances of agricultural policy (“We support the definition of manure as natural fertilizer”) and touching on the mythical “North American Union” (against) and the gold standard (for). Even so, it’s a little startling to come upon section 7.19, which calls for “the reintroduction and ratification of the original 13th Amendment, not the 13th amendment in today’s Constitution.” Since the existing 13th Amendment bans slavery, while the “original” one was about something else entirely, the wording might give the impression that Iowa Republicans wish to reverse emancipation, which is not at all the case, according to state GOP Communications Director Danielle Plogmann. Like many aspects of Republican politics this year, it’s actually about embarrassing President Obama. But you have to wonder whether the delegates knew what they were getting into. In making common cause with “Thirteenthers,” as those who seek to restore the long-lost amendment are known, the party has ventured beyond the far fringes of conspiracy theory, into a mysterious lost land without lawyers or taxes. Maybe they knew what they were doing after all.
Return with us now to the tumultuous years leading up to the War of 1812, when fear of “foreign influence”—by England or France, depending on whether you were a Republican or Federalist—was a dominating issue in American politics. Jerome Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleon, had recently spent several years in the United States, where he married Elizabeth Patterson, the beautiful, ambitious daughter of a wealthy Baltimore merchant. In 1810, Jerome was on the throne of Westphalia, while Elizabeth was in America with their son, Jerome Napoleon. (The couple would never see each other again.) According to historian Michael Vorenberg of Brown University, having a nephew of the emperor of France growing up on American soil might have made the pro-British Federalists uneasy, or, just as likely, suggested to them a way to tie the Republicans to the French Legion of Honor, the Trilateral Commission of its day. Desiring to get out in front of the issue—or possibly seeking to score points against the Federalists, who had their own embarrassing ties to the British aristocracy—Republican Sen. Philip Reed of Maryland introduced an amendment meant to strengthen the existing “emoluments clause” in Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution.
This clause reads:
“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Reed’s proposed amendment extended the ban from office-holders to “any citizen of the United States” and made the penalty loss of citizenship:
“If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them.”
Reed’s bill passed both houses easily, and as of Dec. 9, 1812, had been ratified by 12 states and seemed headed for adoption, at which point war intervened. Here, histories diverge. The mainstream view is that the “Titles of Nobility Amendment” (TONA) never achieved the necessary 13 ratifications—three quarters of the 17 states as of 1810—and fell further behind as more states joined the union. That ought to have been the end of it, says Jol A. Silversmith, a lawyer in private practice who has written the definitive account of the “missing amendment.” And so it was until the 1980s, when a conspiracy-minded researcher named David Dodge came across an 1825 copy of the Constitution including this provision. Further research led Dodge to conclude that TONA had been ratified by Virginia no later than 1819 and was an accepted, if largely unnoted, part of the Constitution from then until its mysterious disappearance around the time of the Civil War.
If you find it hard to believe that an amendment to the Constitution could have been in effect for four decades and then mysteriously excised and forgotten, well, the times were different. There was no single reference copy of the Constitution to which scribes with quill pens ceremoniously added amendments as they were ratified. Dodge claims to have turned up numerous pre–Civil War copies of the Constitution containing the missing amendment, but that doesn’t add up to proof. Even Congress was confused about the status of TONA and requested clarification from President James Monroe, who turned the question over to Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, who reported that it had not been ratified. The evidence that Virginia ever did approve TONA is circumstantial, but, as Silversmith points out, it’s also irrelevant, because already by April 30, 1812, with the admission of Louisiana, ratification required 14 states (of 18). To hang the argument on what Virginia may have done in 1819 assumes that adoption required ratification only by three quarters of the states in the union at the time the amendment was submitted in 1810, i.e., 13 of 17. That view has had its adherents over the centuries, but apart from its inherent illogic—surely the high hurdle the Founding Fathers erected to Constitutional amendments wasn’t meant to shrink as the country grew—we now have a clear precedent that establishes the opposite. That’s the 27th Amendment (on Congressional pay), which was proposed in 1789 but was deemed ratified only in 1992 when it was passed by 38 states—three quarters of 50, not of 13.
In the world of the Thirteenthers, though, it’s all a conspiracy, and the leading suspects are those shady characters who put “esquire” after their names. To quote the Web site Constitutional Concepts, “This Amendment was for the specific purpose of banning participation in government operations by attorneys and bankers who claimed the Title of Nobility of ‘Esquire.’ These people had joined the International Bar Association or the International Bankers Association and owed their allegiance to the King of England.” In other words—well, we’re not sure how to explain it any better, but Constitutional Concepts CEO Jim Barrus says in an e-mail that enforcement of the 13th Amendment would strike a blow against “the elected politicians who have grand plans of ruling every facet of America,” and would essentially delegitimize virtually every act of the federal government since 1819. Who wouldn’t want that?
Naturally, most lawyers see it differently. “The esquire thing is ridiculous,” says R. B. Bernstein, a professor at New York Law School and author of Amending America. “‘Esquire’ is not a title of nobility. Back then, they were worried about people accepting literal titles of aristocracy that convey land or privileges, things you can leave to your kids.” Lawyers obviously command certain privileges, but they are not inherited.
There are, of course, other implications of Thirteenthism, such as ensuring that the United States never again suffers the humiliation of having a president win the Nobel Peace Prize. That was just what the Iowa Republicans had in mind, according to Plogmann, who wrote in an e-mail that the plank “was meant to make a statement about the delegates’ opinion about Mr. Obama receiving the prize.” (Presumably they didn’t mind if, in the process, they were also making a statement about any American scientist or writer unlucky enough to win a Nobel.) Unfortunately for them, the Department of Justice looked into whether Obama needed Congressional approval to accept the Nobel under the existing emoluments clause, and based on the meaning of “foreign state” (which would not cover the Nobel Prize Committee) concluded that he did not.
But they could be playing with fire. “We’re in a constitutional silly season,” says Bernstein, “and whether you are of the left or the right, if you take the Constitution seriously, it’s very troubling.” The threat posed by the 13th Amendment is remote; as far as can be determined, no other state has followed the Iowa GOP in calling for ratification, and no bill of ratification has been introduced into the Iowa legislature. As far as their platform goes, we should all be willing to defer to Iowa Republicans on the definition of manure as natural fertilizer. So long as they keep it on the fields, where it belongs.
Newsweek
Insurers Said to Hurt Troops’ Families
Giant life-insurance companies have figured out a way to hold onto death benefits owed to bereaved families, including parents and spouses of U.S. soldiers killed in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a six-month investigation appearing in the September issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine.
“MetLife and Prudential lead the way in making hundreds of millions of dollars in secret profits every year on money that belongs to relatives of those who die,” a Bloomberg news release says.
“Survivors of service men and women are told they’ll get a $400,000 life insurance payout. They don’t. Instead, Prudential keeps their money. Families are surprised when they receive what looks like a checkbook. Prudential promises to hold the money in safekeeping for as long as families would like, saying it will pay them 0.5 percent interest.”
Bloomberg continues: “What Prudential doesn’t say is that it’s keeping survivors’ money in Prudential’s corporate investment account. … Nor are families told that they could earn more than twice as much interest by opening FDIC-insured money market accounts at banks across the country.”
In a response to Bloomberg, Prudential spokesman Bob DeFillippo said: “For some families, the account is the difference between earning interest on a large amount of money and letting it sit idle.”
MetLife spokesman Joseph Madden told magazine: “The feedback from customers has been overwhelmingly positive. … We afford beneficiaries security, peace of mind and time to make an informed decision — while earning interest in the interim.”
Most Back Arizona Law shows CNN Poll
Most Americans support Arizona’s new law on illegal immigration, but according to a national poll, a majority think the controversial measure will increase discrimination against Hispanics while not necessarily making a dent in the problem.
A new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey also indicates that Hispanic and whites don’t see eye to eye over the law.
Fifty-five percent of people questioned in the poll say they favor the measure, with four in 10 saying they oppose the law. Thirty-four percent of white respondents oppose the measure, but among Hispanics, that number jumps to 71 percent.
“Support for the Arizona law also varies by gender and age,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director. “Nearly six in 10 older Americans and six in 10 men favor the measure. But only a bare majority of women and Americans under 50 years old think the law is a good idea.”
The survey’s Tuesday release comes two days before the scheduled implementation of a tough and controversial immigration law in Arizona. The measure, which Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law in April, requires police to question people about their status if they have been detained for another reason and if there is reason to suspect they’re in the United States illegally. It also targets those who hire illegal immigrant laborers or knowingly transport them.
Critics have said the law will promote racial profiling. Supporters of the bill say its aim is to enforce federal law.
The survey indicates a majority of Democrats oppose the new law, while most Republicans and independents support the measure.
Will the measure reduce the flow of illegal immigration?
According to the poll, the public is divided, with 48 percent saying the law will help reduce illegal immigration and 50 percent saying no. Thirty-five percent of Hispanics say the law will be effective, 15 percentage points lower than how whites responded.
The survey indicates a majority, 54 percent, say the measure will lead to discrimination against Hispanics, with 44 percent disagreeing. Forty-nine percent of whites say the law will lead to discrimination, with that number jumping to 74 percent when asked of Hispanics.
“Seven in 10 Hispanics say that racism against Hispanics is common among police officers, although only a quarter say that racism is ‘very common,’ ” Holland adds. “By contrast, roughly twice as many blacks say that racism against blacks among police officers is very common.”
According to the poll, whites and Hispanics disagree on other immigration measures as well, particularly a fence along the Mexican border and sanctions against businesses that employ illegal immigrants.
“There is widespread support among all races for a program that would allow illegal immigrants to stay in the U.S. legally if they had a job and paid back taxes. But keep in mind CNN poll results released on Monday, which show that most Americans want to see the government concentrate on halting the flow of illegal immigrants and deporting those already here before taking any steps toward permanent residency,” Holland says.
So how does this play into the midterm elections, where Hispanic voters could play a crucial role in determining which political party controls the next Congress?
The survey indicates Hispanics remain in the Democratic camp, but there are some indications that the GOP may make headway among them.
Hispanics favor the Democratic candidate for Congress in their district over the GOP candidate by a margin of 54 percent to 39 percent.
“That’s an indication that Democrats will again capture the Hispanic vote in November. But they probably won’t win this key demographic group with the kind of margin they got in 2006, when the Democrats racked up a 69 to 30 percent advantage that helped the party regain control of Congress,” Holland adds.
According to the survey, 57 percent of Hispanics approve of how President Obama is handling his job overall. Obama gets low marks from Hispanics on the economy and illegal immigration, but they heartily approve of his track record on health care.
The CNN/Opinion Research poll was conducted July 16-21, with 1,018 adult Americans questioned by telephone, including a special sample of 308 black and 303 Hispanic respondents. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
CNN
Leaked Files Indicate U.S. Pays Afghan Media to Run Friendly Stories
Buried among the 92,000 classified documents released Sunday by WikiLeaks is some intriguing evidence that the U.S. military in Afghanistan has adopted a PR strategy that got it into trouble in Iraq: paying local media outlets to run friendly stories.
Several reports from Army psychological operations units and provincial reconstruction teams (also known as PRTs, civilian-military hybrids tasked with rebuilding Afghanistan) show that local Afghan radio stations were under contract to air content produced by the United States. Other reports show U.S. military personnel apparently referring to Afghan reporters as “our journalists” and directing them in how to do their jobs.
Such close collaboration between local media and U.S. forces has been a headache for the Pentagon in the past: In 2005, Pentagon contractor the Lincoln Group was caught paying Iraqi newspapers to run stories written by American soldiers, causing the United States considerable embarrassment.
In one of the WikiLeaks documents, a PRT member reports delivering “12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming” to two radio stations in the province of Ghazni in 2008, and paying one of them “$3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October”:
“The PRT provided 12 hours of PSYOP Radio Content Programming to Radio Ghaznwyan FM Station and Radio Ghazni AM/FM Station for week of 6-12 Nov. Topics included Afghanistan History, Law, and Human Rights in both Dari and Pashto, and a spreadsheet with the specific radio content programming for the week of 6-12 Nov will be forward sepcor to SPARTAN. Additionally, PRT paid Radio Ghaznwyan $3,900 for Radio Content Programming air time for the month of October.”
Radio Ghaznawiyaan was established and funded by the Agency for International Development, but USAID has described it in the past as a success story for local independent journalism launched with American help. So its listeners may be surprised to learn that it is an outlet for paid U.S. “PSYOP radio content.”
Another message, from 2008, records a meeting that members of the Bagram PRT held with Rahimullah Samander, the news director of the Wakht News Agency and president of the Afghan Independent Journalists Association. Samander, the memo says, “proposed a partnership with the PRT” and “offered to include PRT news articles and photos on his news service”:
“Kapisa team met with a Kabul radio representative at the Kapisa TV and Radio Station. Met with Rahimullah Samander, news director for Wakht News Agency and president of the Afghan Independent Journalists Association. He provided information about his organizations and proposed a partnership with the PRT. He offered to include PRT news articles and photos on his news service. The PRT IO recommended a conference including Afghan and US military journalists to collaborate and share ideas. Samander hopes to increase the presence of his agency in Kapisa province.”
Another 2008 memo records a similar meeting among psychological operations soldiers, Jalalabad PRT members, and representatives of Radio Television Afghanistan and the Shaiq Network. Both of these news organizations were directly contracted by psychological operations units to air friendly content:
“The TF has a new PSYOP contract with RTA and a continuing PSYOP contract with Shaiq Network; additionally, these are key IO mediums. The purpose of the meetings were to introduce new HQ PSYOP members to the RTA and Shaiq managers, provide initial payment for the RTA contract, receive a PRT Advertising Campaign contract bid proposal from Shaiq (for the pending garbage removal initiative in Jalalabad), and tour both facilities.”
The report, written by an Army information operations officer, describes the Afghan journalists as “very pro-CF [coalition forces]” and surmises that “there is a lot they are willing to do for the CF.”
Two other messages seem to show U.S. soldiers referring to local Afghan media as extensions of their own units rather than independent reporters. In 2007, after insurgents attacked an Afghan National Police convoy, a member of Task Force Rock wrote that “we … had our journalist conduct an interview with the Afghan National Police District Chief who condemned the attacks on their fellow countrymen.” In another 2007 message, a Task Force Diablo soldier reported that after Taliban gunmen assassinated a local businessman, leading village elders to question the Afghan police’s ability to keep the peace, “we were able to send the journalist in with our cultural advisor to speak to the elders.”
An inquiry after the Lincoln Group revelations found that paying foreign news outlets to run friendly stories did not violate Department of Defense policy or U.S. law, though the practice seems to have been discontinued in Iraq.
Yahoo News
SEC Says New Financial Regulation Law Exempts it From Public Disclosure
So much for transparency.
Under a little-noticed provision of the recently passed financial-reform legislation, the Securities and Exchange Commission no longer has to comply with virtually all requests for information releases from the public, including those filed under the Freedom of Information Act.
The law, signed last week by President Obama, exempts the SEC from disclosing records or information derived from “surveillance, risk assessments, or other regulatory and oversight activities.” Given that the SEC is a regulatory body, the provision covers almost every action by the agency, lawyers say. Congress and federal agencies can request information, but the public cannot.
That argument comes despite the President saying that one of the cornerstones of the sweeping new legislation was more transparent financial markets. Indeed, in touting the new law, Obama specifically said it would “increase transparency in financial dealings.”
The SEC cited the new law Tuesday in a FOIA action brought by FOX Business Network. Steven Mintz, founding partner of law firm Mintz & Gold LLC in New York, lamented what he described as “the backroom deal that was cut between Congress and the SEC to keep the SEC’s failures secret. The only losers here are the American public.”
If the SEC’s interpretation stands, Mintz, who represents FOX Business Network, predicted “the next time there is a Bernie Madoff failure the American public will not be able to obtain the SEC documents that describe the failure,” referring to the shamed broker whose Ponzi scheme cost investors billions.
“The new provision applies to information obtained through examinations or derived from that information,” said SEC spokesman John Nester. “We are expanding our examination program’s surveillance and risk assessment efforts in order to provide more sophisticated and effective Wall Street oversight. The success of these efforts depends on our ability to obtain documents and other information from brokers, investment advisers and other registrants. The new legislation makes certain that we can obtain documents from registrants for risk assessment and surveillance under similar conditions that already exist by law for our examinations. Because registrants insist on confidential treatment of their documents, this new provision also removes an opportunity for brokers, investment advisers and other registrants to refuse to cooperate with our examination document requests.”
Criticism of the provision has been swift. “It allows the SEC to block the public’s access to virtually all SEC records,” said Gary Aguirre, a former SEC staff attorney-turned-whistleblower who had accused the agency of thwarting an investigation into hedge fund Pequot Asset Management in 2005. “It permits the SEC to promulgate its own rules and regulations regarding the disclosure of records without getting the approval of the Office of Management and Budget, which typically applies to all federal agencies.”
Aguirre used FOIA requests in his own lawsuit against the SEC, which the SEC settled this year by paying him $755,000. Aguirre, who was fired in September 2005, argued that supervisors at the SEC stymied an investigation of Pequot – a charge that prompted an investigation by the Senate Judiciary and Finance committees.
The SEC closed the case in 2006, but would re-open it three years later. This year, Pequot and its founder, Arthur Samberg, were forced to pay $28 million to settle insider-trading charges related to shares of Microsoft (MSFT: 26.04 ,-0.12 ,-0.46%). The settlement with Aguirre came shortly later.
“From November 2008 through January 2009, I relied heavily on records obtained from the SEC through FOIA in communications to the FBI, Senate investigators, and the SEC in arguing the SEC had botched its initial investigation of Pequot’s trading in Microsoft securities and thus the SEC should reopen it, which it did,” Aguirre said. “The new legislation closes access to such records, even when the investigation is closed.
“It is hard to imagine how the bill could be more counterproductive,” Aguirre added.
FOX Business Network sued the SEC in March 2009 over its failure to produce documents related to its failed investigations into alleged investment frauds being perpetrated by Madoff and R. Allen Stanford. Following the Madoff and Stanford arrests it, was revealed that the SEC conducted investigations into both men prior to their arrests but failed to uncover their alleged frauds.
FOX Business made its initial request to the SEC in February 2009 seeking any information related to the agency’s response to complaints, tips and inquiries or any potential violations of the securities law or wrongdoing by Stanford.
FOX Business has also filed lawsuits against the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve over their failure to respond to FOIA requests regarding use of the bailout funds and the Fed’s extended loan facilities. In February, the Federal Court in New York sided with FOX Business and ordered the Treasury to comply with its requests.
Last year, the network won a legal victory to force the release of documents related to New York University’s lawsuit against Madoff feeder Ezra Merkin.
FOX Business’ FOIA requests have so far led the SEC to release several important and damaging documents:
•FOX Business used the FOIA to obtain a 2005 survey that the SEC in Fort Worth was sending to Stanford investors. The survey showed that the SEC had suspicions about Stanford several years prior to the collapse of his $7 billion empire.
•FOX Business used the FOIA to obtain copies of emails between Federal Reserve lawyers, AIG and staff at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in which it was revealed the Fed staffers knew that bailing out AIG would result in bonuses being paid.
Recently, TARP Congressional Oversight Panel chair Elizabeth Warren told FOX Business that the network’s Freedom of Information Act efforts played a “very important part” of the panel’s investigation into AIG.
Warren told the network the government “crossed a line” with the AIG bailout.
“FOX News and the congressional oversight panel has pushed, pushed, pushed, for transparency, give us the documents, let us look at everything. Your Freedom of Information Act suit, which ultimately produced 250,000 pages of documentation, was a very important part of our report. We were able to rely on the documents that you pried out for a significant part of our being able to put this report together,” Warren said.
The SEC first made its intention to block further FOIA requests known on Tuesday. FOX Business was preparing for another round of “skirmishes” with the SEC, according to Mintz, when the agency called and said it intended to use Section 929I of the 2000-page legislation to refuse FBN’s ongoing requests for information.
Mintz said the network will challenge the SEC’s interpretation of the law.
“I believe this is subject to challenge,” he said. “The contours will have to be figured out by a court.”
FOX Business
FBI Defends Guidelines for Domestic Surveillance
WASHINGTON (AP) – Under fire from civil liberties groups, the FBI is defending domestic surveillance guidelines that critics fear could unfairly target innocent Muslims in terrorism and other criminal investigations.
“It’s quite an invasive data collection system,” said Farhana Khera, executive director of the nonprofit group Muslim Advocates. “It’s based on generalized suspicion and fear on the part of law enforcement, not on individualized evidence of criminal activity.”
Khera spoke in an interview on the eve of a Capitol Hill appearance by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who was scheduled to testify Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In a statement, the bureau said its procedures are designed to ensure that FBI probes don’t zero in on anyone on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion or the exercise of any other constitutional right.
The FBI said its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide equips agents with lawful and appropriate tools so the agency can transform itself into an intelligence-driven organization that investigates genuine criminal and national security threats.
Last September, the FBI disclosed an edited version of the guide as a result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The manual was approved in December 2008, during the final days of the George W. Bush administration, and establishes policy that guides all the FBI’s domestic operations, including counterterrorism, counterintelligence, crime and cyber crime.
On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union also weighed in against the guide. The group asked FBI field offices in 29 states and Washington, D.C., to turn over records related to the bureau’s collection of data on race and ethnicity.
According to the ACLU, the FBI’s operations guide gives agents the authority to create maps of ethnic-oriented businesses, behaviors, lifestyle characteristics and cultural traditions in communities with concentrated ethnic populations.
While some racial and ethnic data collection by some agencies might be helpful in lessening discrimination, the FBI’s attempt to collect and map demographic data using race-based criteria invites unconstitutional racial profiling by law enforcement, according to the ACLU.
Khera said the FBI has lowered the bar for sending undercover agents or informants into mosques and has enabled the gathering of data about Muslims’ charitable giving practices, financial transactions and jobs.
The FBI is still refusing to make public portions of the guide that deal with sending agents or informants into houses of worship and political gatherings.
The bureau has previously stated it would only go into a mosque if it had some reason to believe there was criminal activity, said Khera. If that is the standard, the FBI should have no problem actually disclosing that section of the document, she said.
AP
Massachusetts Legislature Approves Plan to Bypass Electoral College
The Massachusetts Legislature has approved a new law intended to bypass the Electoral College system and ensure that the winner of the presidential election is determined by the national popular vote.
“What we are submitting is the idea that the president should be selected by the majority of people in the United States of America,” Senator James B. Eldridge, an Acton Democrat, said before the Senate voted to enact the bill.
Under the new bill, he said, “Every vote will be of the same weight across the country.”
But Senate minority leader Richard Tisei said the state was meddling with a system that was “tried and true” since the founding of the country.
“We’ve had a lot of bad ideas come through this chamber over the years, but this is going to be one of the worst ideas that has surfaced and actually garnered some support,” said Tisei, who is also the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor.
The bill, which passed on a 28-to-9 vote, now heads to Democratic Governor Deval Patrick’s desk. The governor has said in the past that he supports the bill, said his spokeswoman Kim Haberlin.
Under the law, which was enacted by the House last week, all 12 of the state’s electoral votes would be awarded to the candidate who receives the most votes nationally.
Supporters are campaigning, state by state, to get such bills enacted. Once states accounting for a majority of the electoral votes (or 270 of 538) have enacted the laws, the candidate winning the most votes nationally would be assured a majority of Electoral College votes. That would hold true no matter how the other states vote and how their electoral votes are distributed.
Illinois, New Jersey, Hawaii, Maryland, and Washington have already approved the legislation, according to the National Popular Vote campaign’s website. The new system would only go into effect once a sufficient number of states have passed laws that would make it work.
The current Electoral College system is confusing and causes presidential candidates to focus unduly on a handful of battleground states, supporters say. They also say that the popular vote winner has lost in four of the nation’s 56 elections.
Presidential candidates now “ignore wide swaths of the country” they consider strong blue or red states and focus their campaigning on contested states, Eldridge said. If the president were picked by national popular vote, he argued, candidates would spread their attention out more evenly.
“That’s really what we’re talking about is making sure that every voter, no matter where they live, that they’re being reached out to,” he said.
Opponents say the current system works. They are concerned about a possible scenario where Candidate X wins nationally, but Candidate Y has won in Massachusetts. In that case, all of the state’s 12 electoral votes would go to Candidate X, the candidate who was not supported by Massachusetts voters.
Tisei also criticized the proponents for not following the normal procedures to seek a constitutional amendment.
“The thing about this that bothers me the most is it’s so sneaky. This is the way that liberals do things a lot of times, very sneaky,” he said. “This is sort of an end run around the Constitution.”
The measure passed both branches of the Legislature in 2008 but did not make it all the way through the process.
Boston Globe
