On the one hand -- my, how surprising of the government. On the other hand ... my, how puzzling of the government.
The United States has agreed to let the International Criminal Court try people accused of committing war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region, a news report says. Washington had strongly opposed holding the trials at the UN court in The Hague, but agreed to a compromise on Wednesday, the Associated Press reported, citing officials from the administration of President George W. Bush.
The United States doesn't support the court because it says it fears political enemies might launch frivolous or politically motivated prosecutions against U.S. citizens. [...] [ The UN Security Council] unanimously approved a resolution to send 10,000 peacekeepers to southern Sudan – but the troops won't be going to Darfur.
It's surprising that the administration would allow the ICC jurisdiction over anything anywhere. (It's even more surprising that anyone is listening to the US on that issue, but unfortunately, the UN Security Council doesn't have a choice about that.) But ...the US doesn't have troops deployed in Sudan, and the administration has no right to try to insulate aid workers against such trials. (And in any event, given this administration's demonstrated antipathy to the politics of most aid organizations, you'd think they'd be perfectly content to have such aid workers tried and convicted.) So what on earth was the point?
And what, pray, is the point of sending thousands of peacekeepers to Sudan if they're not going to one of the major centers of all the problems?
Posted by iain at 02:58 PM
Given the severe underfunding and wretched infrastructure in Iraq, this, too, could easily have been predicted.
Malnutrition among the youngest Iraqis has almost doubled since the U.S.-led invasion toppled President Saddam Hussein, a hunger specialist told the United Nations' human rights body Wednesday in a summary of previously reported studies on health in Iraq.
By last fall, 7.7 percent of Iraqi children under age 5 suffered acute malnutrition, compared to 4 percent after Hussein's ouster in April 2003, said Jean Ziegler, the UN Human Rights Commission's special expert on the right to food. [...] The situation facing Iraqi youngsters is "a result of the war led by coalition forces," said Ziegler, an outspoken Swiss sociology professor and former lawmaker.
Overall, more than a quarter of Iraqi children don't get enough to eat, Ziegler told the 53-nation commission, which is halfway through its annual six-week session. The U.S. delegation and other coalition countries declined to respond to his presentation. [...] Ziegler did not mention the role of Iraq's insurgency in the nutrition problem, something often cited by aid groups.
The lack of mention of the insurgency isn't surprising; after all, from that point of view, without the invasion, there would be no insurgency, and thus the aid groups wouldn't have any problems. (Of course, they wouldn't be there, either, and Iraqi children weren't particularly well nourished before the invasion; the entire thing is just a tangled mess.)
Apparently after the Freep went to press (it has, or had, a notoriously early deadline), the US did respond ... but in a most peculiar way.
The U.S. State Department says a U.N. report claiming malnutrition among Iraqi children had doubled is "open to doubts." [...] "These kinds of assessments are open to questions, open to doubts," State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli told a briefing in Washington. "Many of these assessments are based on pre-war statistics."
The United States, he said, was aware of the nutritional needs of the Iraqi people and, since May 2003, had vaccinated more than 3 million children under five along with 700,000 pregnant women.
He said the United States has provided supplementary doses of Vitamin A for more than 600,000 children under two and 1.5 million lactating mothers. Iron folate supplements were provided to more than 1.6 million women of childbearing age.
"We have screened more than 1.3 million children under five for malnutrition. We have distributed high-protein biscuits to more than 450,000 children and 200,000 pregnant and nursing mothers," Ereli added.
All of that is well and good, but it doesn't answer, even indirectly, the main thrust of the report which is that the Iraqi children are demostrably worse off relative to pre-war Iraq. It's perfectly silly and disingenuous to complain that the survey uses pre-war statistics when that's was, and was meant to be, the benchmark for comparison. And supplementary doses of specific vitamins and supplements will not suffice to deal with a comprehensive malnutrition issue.
I'm mildly surprised that someone in the government hasn't said, "Yo! According to recent stats, we've got one hell of a lot of hungry kids here, too. You don't see anyone complaining about that, do you? So just quit yer bitchin'." (Because that is the sort of ham-handed diplomacy at which this administration seems to excel, from time to time.)
Posted by iain at 02:46 PM
How sincerely, utterly, and perfectly vile.
Videotape of Terri Schiavo blinking at her parents has inspired donations from people around the country to the foundation set up to help pay for the family's legal battle. But many other groups are soliciting donations in her name as well, some for a much broader agenda.
"Help Save Terri Schiavo's Life!" says the Web site of the Traditional Values Coalition, a Christian conservative group best known for its campaigns against gay rights. Next to a link to the Web site of her parents' foundation is a pitch to "become an active supporter of the Traditional Values Coalition by pledging a monthly gift."
"What this issue has done is it has galvanized people the way nothing could have done in an off-election year," said Rev. Lou Sheldon, the founder of the group, acknowledging that the case of Ms. Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida woman, had moved many to open up their checkbooks. "That is what I see as the blessing that dear Terri's life is offering to the conservative Christian movement in America." [...] Voice for Terri, a coalition of anti-abortion and Christian conservative groups, is one of several organizations that has sent e-mail messages and set up Web sites pointedly criticizing Ms. Schiavo's husband, Michael, who has fought for years to have his wife's feeding tube removed over the objections of her parents. Troy Newman, the president of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue and a spokesman for Voice for Terri, said the coalition was spending the money it raised to cover the costs of rallies, of hotel rooms and of rental cars for organizers of protests in Florida, and of e-mail and letter-writing campaigns. [...] Ms. Schiavo's parents invited Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, who is estranged from the group, to help organize rallies and protests for their cause. Mr. Terry, in turn, asked his friends and fellow conservative activists, William Greene and Philip Sheldon - the son of Lou Sheldon of Traditional Values - to help raise money through their organization RightMarch.com...
This despite the fact that, as far as can be determined in various admittedly quite flawed polls, the conservative Christians of this country don't particularly approve of the various interventions into this case. (Mind, they're not especially fond of her husband, either.)
For some reason, this case is being seen by many as both a proxy for and an inderect way to legislate against abortion. If laws can be passed preventing the euthanasia (for such this is) of people in persistent vegetative states, then perhaps the definition of such a person can be left loose enough that someone could bring a suit saying, "Look, this definition of a person could apply equally well to a fetus." Mind, in most cases, the record of legislative intent would be enough to doom that approach, but somewhere, there would be a judge who would be willing to agree with them. And we'd be off to the legal races once more.
Posted by iain at 11:16 AM
And in probably the only comment I will ever make on this case: is there no end to the extent to which Florida's state officials, joined by those craven cowards in US government of course, will attempt to drag this painful drama out for their tawdry political gain?
Apparently not.
Rebuffed by the courts and unsuccessful in the legislature, state officials may attempt to place Terri Schiavo under protective custody so her feeding tube can be reinserted, The Herald learned this afternoon. No timetable for a decision was clear, but events were moving at a rapid pace in the courts and in state offices today. The brain-damaged woman has been without food and water since her feeding tube was removed Friday.
A federal appeals panel early this morning refused to order the tube reinserted, ruling in favor of Schiavo's husband, Michael Schiavo, who says she should be allowed to die. [...] Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings and the director of the state social services agency said they were considering an intervention in the controversial and increasingly tangled case -- based on calls alleging that Schiavo is being abused in her hospice. The abuse allegations are based primarily on the removal of her feeding tube last Friday.
"We're looking at the response to the abuse calls," Jennings said. "You'll probably be hearing more." She and other state officials said the governor's office is considering using a state law that allows the state to take a vulnerable adult into immediate custody if there is a demonstrated need for protection. Lucy Hadi, secretary of the Department of Children and Families, said the state investigation into potential abuse is ongoing and the state is required by law to file a petition to bring Schiavo into state care if an emergency exists. The state does not have to wait for a court to act, she said....
Florida's Department of Children and Families has demonstrated a remarkable inability to keep alive those vulnerable children under its care. They also fail to do timely investigation of those children's deaths. The state itself notes that the DCF could and should have prevented at least some of those children's deaths. Moreover, Florida's DCF fails to investigate and protect people in reported cases of elder abuse, again another vulnerable population. Maybe they think they can do better with this vulnerable adult; after all, she's neither very young nor very old and not at all mobile so maybe they'll have better luck. More likely, they hope this case can distract Florida's citizenry from those signal failures.
Posted by iain at 02:35 PM
Lorenzo Robertson, a 42-year-old black man with AIDS, hoped his one-man show, me, myself & i, would spark more open dialogue among black Americans and help stop the disease's spread.
But when Robinson performed in a Tampa church this month, only 14 people showed up. And most of them knew a pastor there.
"AIDS is a word that causes fear," Robertson said during the show. "AIDS is a word that is not used a lot in the black community."
But AIDS is exacting a devastating toll upon it. The disease many still associate with gay men is rising at epidemic rates among black men and women - and Florida blacks are among those most at risk.
HIV infection rates among blacks doubled nationwide over a decade, scientists announced last month at a national meeting on AIDS, while rates among whites held steady. The result: With 2 percent of black Americans now infected, they are 10 times as likely to be HIV positive as whites.
In Florida, that stark disparity is already clear. More than half the HIV/AIDS patients in Florida - which has the third-highest number of AIDS patients in the country - are black, even though blacks make up only 15 percent of the population.
That means 1 in 346 Florida whites are HIV positive, as are 1 in 176 Hispanics.
The HIV infection rate for Florida blacks: 1 in 46....
HIV hitting blacks the hardest (MLive.com/Ann Arbor News)
Saturday, March 12, 2005
BY JO COLLINS MATHIS
News Staff Reporter
[...] "HIV is affecting African Americans disproportionately, and we need to do everything we can to provide access to prevention and care services for those at risk of getting HIV, and those who are already infected with HIV," said Nicole Adelman, director of prevention programs at the HIV/AIDS Resource Center, or HARC, in Ypsilanti Township.
[...] Incidents of both HIV infection and full-blown AIDS are increasing slightly, with an increasing proportion of younger and younger blacks becoming infected, said Dr. Stan Reedy, Washtenaw County medical director. "HIV is not something that has gone away. It's still with us, and it's still devastating," Reedy said. "And there is no cure, even after all the years of research and medication to slow it down."
[...] According to the Michigan Department of Community Health, black males have the highest HIV rate and second highest estimated number of HIV/AIDS cases in Michigan, making them the population most impacted by HIV in the state. Black females have the second highest HIV rate and the third highest estimated number of HIV/AIDS cases in Michigan. In Washtenaw County alone, it is estimated that 530 people are currently living with HIV or AIDS, about one third of whom are unknowingly infected with the human immunodeficiency virus.
While about 12 percent of Washtenaw County residents are black, 35-50 percent of the newly diagnosed HIV cases in Washtenaw County the last six years have been in blacks, said Laura Bauman, epidemiologist for Washtenaw County Public Health.
Silence on sex cited in blacks’ AIDS rates
By Sarah A. Meisch
The Journal Gazette
Of the 315 people in Allen County who are known to be HIV-positive, 92 are black.
That means blacks account for 29.2 percent of the cases, although they make up only about 11 percent of the county’s population.
“It’s not just a bunch of numbers and statistics,” said Kathy Thornson, director of HIV/STD prevention for the Allen County Health Department. “It’s people, people in our community.”
Of those people, blacks are disproportionately affected, said Kandace Kelly, director of outreach services for Fort Wayne’s AIDS Task Force.
The number of new AIDS cases statewide reflects that disparity to a greater degree. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, blacks made up 38.9 percent of Indiana’s new cases in 2003. U.S. Census 2000 data lists the state’s black population as 8.4 percent. Nationally, the figure for new AIDS cases among blacks is 48.2 percent; 12.3 percent of the U.S. population is black.
A number of reasons account for higher rate of infection, in the black community and others, Kelly said.
“There’s a lot of stigma,” she said. “A lot of people think it can’t happen to them; they think it’s a gay white male disease or an IV drug user disease. There’s a lack of education.”
Thornson said: “A lot of it is perception, who’s at risk. The community has to embrace knowledge.”
Texas will, no doubt, be jumping up and down and celebrating.
The Bush administration has decided to pull out of an international agreement that opponents of the death penalty have used to fight the sentences of foreigners on death row in the United States, officials said yesterday.
In a two-paragraph letter dated March 7, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice informed U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan that the United States "hereby withdraws" from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The United States proposed the protocol in 1963 and ratified it -- along with the rest of the Vienna Convention -- in 1969. The protocol requires signatories to let the International Court of Justice (ICJ) make the final decision when their citizens say they have been illegally denied the right to see a home-country diplomat when jailed abroad. [...] Some said the decision would weaken both protections for U.S. citizens abroad and the idea of reciprocal obligation that the protocol embodied.
"It's encouraging that the president wants to comply with the ICJ judgment" in the Mexicans' case, said Frederic L. Kirgis, a professor of international law at Washington and Lee University. "But it's discouraging that it's now saying we're taking our marbles and going home."
The State Department, however, notes that fewer than 30 percent of the signatories to the Vienna Convention had agreed to the protocol. Among those that had not done so are Spain, Brazil and Canada, officials said....
Of course, most of those who declined to agree to the protocol also don't have death penalties, so people will likely be alive a bit longer in those countries to protest their sentences.
One wonders what this administration thinks it's doing. It's clear that they don't care that this is going to hurt US citizens who get arrested abroad -- after all, if the US doesn't think it's all that important, why should its citizens be allowed to seek consular help? The isolationist streak in this administration is truly remarkable to see; they seem to think that, despite the fact that we're a net importer of ... well, everything, including money itself (so to speak) that we can somehow go it alone in the world at large. You'd think they'd have ample evidence that this isn't true, but apparently not.
Meanwhile, the president's decision has thrown the Supreme Court case regarding the Mexicans into limbo. Some legal analysts suggest the case may now be moot.
Attorneys for Jose Ernesto Medellin, a convicted murderer on death row in Texas who is seeking review of his assertion that a lack of consular access harmed his case at trial, have asked the justices to put the case on hold until after Medellin has had his hearing in Texas state court.
The Texas attorney general's office, meanwhile, issued a statement Tuesday saying, "We respectfully believe" that the president's decision "exceeds constitutional bounds for federal authority."
Given Texas' stated response to the president's directive, Medellin's attorneys are ... unwise, to put it mildly, to seek to have the case put on hold until after a hearing in Texas state court. There is no guarantee that there will be a hearing; Texas has in fact a very good case for stating that the president's directive exceeds his statutory authority. For that matter, even if the Supreme Court directs Texas to hold a hearing, there's no guarantee that it will be meaningful; Texas has a long history of taking Supreme Court directives, twisting the plain meaning, and then doing over what they did in the first place.
Posted by iain at 01:04 PM
Well, that was fast.
Heeding international criticism over the death penalty and hoping to safeguard Americans abroad, the Bush administration has ordered state courts to review claims by 51 Mexicans on U.S. Death Rows that their right to seek legal assistance from their own country was violated. The order, part of a brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of a convicted killer in Texas, is in response to an International Court of Justice ruling last year that found that state courts had violated the Mexicans' international rights to have access to consular officials.
Though challenged by officials in Bush's home state of Texas, the move was celebrated by the Mexican government and death-penalty opponents, who hope it will help the 51 Mexicans escape Death Row in seven U.S. states. [...] The government of Mexico, where the constitution prohibits the death penalty, sued the U.S. before the international court last year. It argued that the trials of the Mexicans could have had different outcomes if consular officials had been able to translate for them, help them understand their rights and bring in character witnesses from their hometowns.
Texas begs to differ
In the wake of the Hague court ruling in March 2004, two Mexicans--one in Oklahoma, one in Arkansas--were taken off Death Row last year. But other state officials, especially in Texas, have frequently dismissed the Hague ruling. As far back as 1997, when Bush was governor of Texas, his top legal counsel, Alberto Gonzales, now the U.S. attorney general, wrote a memo suggesting the Vienna Convention did not apply to Texas because the state was not a "signatory" to the treaty.
On Tuesday, a spokesman for the Texas attorney general's office indicated that the state would likely contest efforts by defense attorneys to schedule new hearings in the death penalty cases. "We respectfully believe the executive determination exceeds the constitutional bounds for federal authority," spokesman Jerry Strickland said in a statement. "The State of Texas believes no international court supersedes the laws of Texas or the laws of the United States."
It will be interesting to see how the Court disposes of this case. They could accept the executive order, and direct the courts of Texas to apply with a per curiam decision. They could argue the merits of the case. They could get snitty with the executive branch -- I will admit that I kind of hope that they do, since it needs to be smacked down a bit.
Posted by iain at 05:21 PM
The Bush administration has announced that it will attempt to defuse a long-simmering international dispute over the death penalty by instructing Texas state courts to give 51 Mexicans facing the death penalty new hearings on their claims that they were denied meetings with diplomats from their nation, in violation of international law.
In a Feb. 28 brief filed with the Supreme Court, the administration said the United States would bow to a 2004 ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague, also known as the World Court, which found that Texas officials violated the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by not providing the Mexicans with consular access. That treaty, ratified by the United States in 1969, provides that "consular officers shall have the right to visit a national of the sending State who is in prison, custody or detention, to converse and correspond with him and to arrange for his legal representation." [...] Ana Maria Salazar, a political analyst in Mexico City, said that "if President Bush doesn't commute [the sentences], there could be a big backlash" for Mexican President Vicente Fox. She said that by raising the death penalty issue ahead of this month's meeting with Fox, Bush has taken what had been a dormant issue in Mexico and raised expectations of U.S. action. [...] Bush's nod to international opinion involves a sweeping assertion of executive authority within the United States, in that, without any legislative action by Congress, he is issuing instructions to the courts of a sovereign state as to how to treat defendants. Texas courts, the president says, should review the Mexicans' cases to see if the lack of consular access affected their trials or sentencing.
His approach would also greatly reduce the role of the Supreme Court, which has been asked by attorneys for one of the Mexicans, Jose E. Medellin, to rule that the decision of the World Court is all the authority individual foreigners need to get a new hearing in U.S. state courts. "It is for the President, not the courts, to determine whether the United States should comply with the decision, and, if so, how," the administration's brief says.
It will be interesting to see how this falls out. The path lays open for the president to get a fairly comprehensive rebuff not only from the Supreme Court, which is likely to take a dim view of executive poaching on both the legislative and judicial powers, but from Texas itself; historically, states have been very prickly about presidents issuing directives at them, and Texas more so than most.
As per usual, there also seems to be a profound misunderstanding abroad about the structure of the US judicial systems. Ms Salazar states that there will be consequences to Fox if Bush doesn't commute the sentences of those who were sentenced in violation of US treaty obligations, but Bush has absolutely no authority to commute those sentences. The only one who could do so would be the governor of Texas.
I do wonder why the administration chose this time to raise the issue. Raising Mexico's expectations on this issue would seem to be thoroughly unwise; even if Texas decides to abide by the administration directive, any hearings are quite likely to assume that consular representation would have made no difference whatsoever. (Given Texas' courts, that's also quite likely to be true.) Of course, that's all going to be somewhere down the line; it won't have any direct bearing on the upcoming meeting between Bush and Fox.
Still, very odd.
Posted by iain at 12:10 PM
Iran admits keeping nuclear program secret Miami Herald/AP (registration may be required for miami.com articles) ALI AKBAR DAREINI Posted on Sun, Mar. 06, 2005
Iran confirmed Sunday that it initially developed its nuclear program in secret, going to the black market for material, and blaming its discretion on the U.S. sanctions and European restrictions that denied Iran access to advanced civilian nuclear technology.
Iran now openly admits that it has already achieved proficiency in the full range of activities involved in enriching uranium - a technology that can be used to produce fuel for nuclear reactors or an atomic bomb.
Washington has accused Tehran of using its civilian nuclear program as a cover to build a nuclear bomb. Iran denies this, saying its nuclear program is merely geared towards generating electricity.
"True. There was secrecy," former president Hashemi Rafsanjani said Sunday. "But secrecy was necessary to buy equipment for a peaceful nuclear program. If sanctions had not been imposed on us, we would have declared everything publicly, but we had problems buying metal. Nobody sold us anything in the market," he said. [...] He said Iran would never agree to a permanent halt on enriching uranium, a technology he says Tehran is entitled to under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Iran suspended its uranium enrichment activities last year to create confidence and avoid U.N. Security Council sanctions. But Tehran says maintaining the voluntary freeze depends on progress in ongoing talks with Britain, Germany and France, who are negotiating on behalf of the European Union. "Definitely we can't stop our nuclear program and won't stop it. You can't take technology away from a country already possessing it," Rafsanjani said....
Iran: Nuclear sanctions to cause unrest
By Ali Akbar Darein
Portsmouth Herald/AP
Sun. March 6, 2005
Iran said Saturday it will never agree to permanently stop making nuclear fuel and warned that a more unstable Middle East would result from trying to haul Tehran before the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions. Any effort by Washington to bring Tehran’s suspended uranium enrichment program under the Security Council scrutiny is a dangerous path, warned Hasan Rowhani, Iran’s top nuclear negotiator.
Rowhani, speaking during a two-day international conference on nuclear technology, also confirmed that Iran was building a tunnel next to a nuclear facility in Isfahan without first informing the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency. "Constructing a tunnel is not a nuclear activity," Rowhani said. "It’s not clear for us if we had to inform the IAEA of the tunnel construction at all." Rowhani said the tunnel, which is under a mountain, will be used to store unspecified equipment. Asked if the tunnel was meant to protect nuclear equipment against airstrikes, he added: "Airstrikes won’t be able to do anything against it."
Last month, President Bush said fears that Washington was preparing an attack were "ridiculous," but he nonetheless said "all options are on the table."....
NEWS: Scott Ritter says US attack on Iran planned for June
Written by Mark Jensen
Saturday, 19 February 2005
Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia’s Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq. [...]
Will the U.S. attack Iran this June?
-- Julia Scott
[14:01 EST, Feb. 24, 2005]
In the midst of ongoing speculation about the possibility of a U.S. bombardment of Iranian nuclear targets, the blogosphere has been buzzing over comments made by former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter at an antiwar event in Olympia, WA, on Feb. 18. Ritter, an outspoken opponent of the war on Iraq, surprised the crowd with details about a conversation he said he'd had with a source connected to the Bush administration back in October 2004. He claimed that he had been told, in confidence, that President Bush had signed off on military plans calling for the aerial bombardment of Iran in June 2005.
Reached by Salon for comment, Ritter confirmed his earlier statement. He would not identify his source other than to say that he or she was affiliated with the Bush administration, and had sought him out for his "expert advice on Iraq." [...] Hersh also went on "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart and suggested that the administration may be planning an attack sooner than it will admit. "The plan is to get three or four dozen targets, hit them by air this summer, maybe, or whenever, and the thinking is, if they can show that the theocracy isn't that powerful, the people will rise up," Hersh told Stewart.
According to Ritter, the June date is based on Israel's eagerness to launch a preemptive attack on Iran before the country can make large strides in its nuclear development....
The instant pretext for an attack is that Iran has been decidedly unresponsive to IAEA (which it has, to some extent, but that would seem to be primarily because they think the US is going to attack anyway, so why should they go along with IAEA demands?); the longterm pretext, as noted in the Salon piece, is that the administration thinks it will produce/facilitate "regime change." Which has famously worked so very well in Iraq.
I keep trying to figure out on what planet an unsupported and unjustified aerial bombardment of a civilian population will produce regime change. Not this one, certainly. It wouldn't have worked in Iraq without the follow-up ground invasion, which we certainly can't do now. (I can just imagine us trying to occupy not one, not two, but three middle-eastern countries with our thoroughly overstressed military. Supply lines a nightmare, guerillas in an essentially unbroken line through the region ... that would just be ever so much fun!)
The really fun part, of course, will be watching our own economy do a fast crash and burn. Given unstable supplies from Iraq, what would almost certainly become unstable supplies from Iran, and other fun in the Middle East, the price of oil would soar ever upward once again. Given almost no reason to hold it down, that would produce near-instant recession here, and possibly a full-blown depression, depending on government's response.
(Purely a side note: the post-processing editing of AP wire service articles is truly fascinating to watch. How on earth you get articles as different as those first two cited out of the same initial AP feed, I have no idea.)
Posted by iain at 02:12 PM
A high-level commission yesterday began a year-long examination of violence, sexual abuse, overcrowding and inhumane treatment in U.S. prisons, in an investigation provoked in part by reports of misconduct by U.S. corrections officers assigned to serve in military detention centers overseas.
The privately organized commission, which has attracted interest in its work from the Justice Department and key lawmakers, is headed by former attorney general Nicholas deB. Katzenbach and John J. Gibbons, a former federal appeals court judge. Its aim is to recommend prison reforms from local to federal levels after holding at least four public hearings around the country.
Statistics cited by the commission chart growing problems in U.S. prisons, where the inmate population has quadrupled in the past two decades to more than 2 million: More than 34,000 assaults were committed by prisoners against other inmates in a 12-month period covering parts of 1999 and 2000; the number of prisoner assaults against staff in that period was 27 percent higher than the previous 12 months.
More than a million people were sexually assaulted in prisons over the past two decades, the commission said. Eleven inmates died in restraint chairs in the 1990s. The commission also said corrections officers have reduced life expectancies and higher rates of alcoholism than other law enforcement officers.
Only three states -- New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois -- have independent commissions charged with reporting on prison conditions, and they lack authority to impose reforms, the commission said. No mandatory national standards exist for prisons, many of which are now run by private contractors.
"We seem to have a gap between our cherished ideals about justice and the realities of the prison environment," said Katzenbach, who served under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson....
That would probably be something of an understatement, yes?
So let me get this straight-ish: a commission with no authority whatsoever over any prison system anywhere is going to study the problem for a year and then make recommendations to ... essentially nobody. The states will then say, "Well, thanks really quite a lot," and serenely ignore them.
Thing is, it's not as though people don't know and understand the problems in US prisons today. It's just that there's absolutely no will -- and, frankly, no money -- to do anything about them. Prisoners are foremost among this country's many disposable people. If you're brutalized in prison, or commit brutality, nobody outside of your friends and relatives actually cares. For various reasons, prison offenses are among the least likely to be reported; the numbers cited above are probably a vast understatement.
It's not that this survey is a waste of time. It would just be nice if they had some sort of concrete plan about what to do with the inevitably depressing results they're going to get.
Posted by iain at 02:35 AM
Seriously. That's what it said during a UN conference on women's rights. It seems to have thoroughly derailed actual discussion of women's rights at that conference. It also tells you what the next four years will be like in this country.
UNITED NATIONS -- Ten years after a landmark U.N. women's conference in Beijing, thousands of delegates convened here Monday to review the world's progress toward equality for women. But the meeting was plunged into controversy when the U.S. insisted that delegates declare that women have no right to abortion.
This week's session, attended by 80 government ministers and thousands of other delegates from nearly 100 countries, aims to reinvigorate efforts to improve women's lives as outlined at the 1995 Beijing conference. The U.N. Commission on the Status of Women had hoped to avoid controversy and focus on issues such as preventing HIV/AIDS, improving girls' education and halting sexual trafficking. [...] At the 1995 conference, negotiators agreed to treat abortion as a public health issue, and the platform said that it should be safe where it is legal and that women should not be punished for having one. It left legal decisions up to each country....
Mind, this position is in direct conflict with current US law, so it certainly tells you where they're hoping to go. The US injected the issue into a conference where it simply has no place whatsoever; the abortion issue had been quite deliberately laid to the side in the previous version of this conference, clearly to sidestep the debate the administration is wilfully forcing.
The US has also proposed reforming inheritance laws so that women may inherit in countries where they currently may not. More conservative countries are now deeply offended at that. Thus, the US has offended conservative countries by proposing that they change traditional law, and more liberal countries by injecting abortion into the debate.
Clearly, the aim of the US delegation was to undermine the conference and make it utterly pointless. At this, they would seem to have succeeded. You wonder why they didn't just refuse to attend. At least they've signalled their intentions, to anyone paying attention. (Of course, it's a UN conference, so inside this country, there will be very few paying attention. More's the pity.)
One might suspect, somehow, that they're likely to be launching a broad based attack on all rights of women in this country. Abortion first, anything else they can think of to follow. Women's health issues will be the easiest, of course; it's where they've concentrated their fire to date.
The next four years, at least, will be an utterly miserable time to be a woman in this country.
Posted by iain at 03:03 AM
A federal judge in South Carolina ruled yesterday that the Bush administration lacks statutory and constitutional authority to indefinitely imprison without criminal charges a U.S. citizen who was designated an "enemy combatant."
Rejecting a series of arguments put forward by the government, District Court Judge Henry F. Floyd said the indefinite detention of Jose Padilla -- who the administration has said is a terrorist supporter of al Qaeda -- is illegal and that Padilla must be released from a naval brig in Charleston, S.C., within 45 days or charged with a crime [...] Using a phrase often levied by conservatives to denigrate liberal judges, Floyd -- who was appointed by President Bush to the federal bench in 2003 -- accused the administration of engaging in "judicial activism" when it asserted in court pleadings that Bush has blanket authority under the Constitution to detain Americans on U.S. soil who are suspected of taking or planning actions against the country.
Floyd said the government presented no law supporting this contention and that just because Bush and his appointees say Padilla's detention was consistent with U.S. laws and the president's war powers, that did not make it so. "Moreover, such a statement is deeply troubling. If such a position were ever adopted by the courts, it would totally eviscerate the limits placed on Presidential authority to protect the citizenry's individual liberties." [...]
So let's see -- going back to 2003, according to the Findlaw case history, the government now has an essentially unbroken string of losses in this case. "Essentially" only because the Supreme Court case the first time through was something of a draw; the government didn't win the point it was arguing, but Padilla didn't get his way either. The Court turfed the issue for jurisdictional reasons, although the minority dissent thought that they should hear the case on its merits, and I'm sure that all nine of the justices realized that they were going to get this case again. They were likely hoping that the government would come to its senses and make this case moot. However, to date, not only have they not done so, but now they have agreement across districts that they're in the wrong.
The truly fascinating thing to see -- assuming that this case wends its way through the Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court for the (hopefully) inevitable administration smackdown before the end of the reign of King George -- will be to see whether the government abides by the various court decisions, once its appeals are exhausted. Judging by what's happening in other cases, what will likely happen is that the government will finally charge Padilla ... but then, due to "security reasons," it will decline to tell Padilla with what, precisely, he's being charged, what the evidence against him is, or what the legal arguments regarding his case actually are. This has been pattern and practice to date; despite being smacked down repeatedly by the courts on those issues, they don't seem to feel the need to change.
Posted by iain at 02:46 AM
