Monthly Archives: March 2012

Tibetan self-immolations rise as China tightens grip

The New York Times reports: Like many children of Tibetan nomads, Tsering Kyi started school relatively late, at age 10, but by all accounts she made up for lost time by studying with zeal.

“Even when she was out at pasture with her parents’ flock, there was always a book in her hand,” a cousin said.

That passion for learning apparently turned to despair this month when the Maqu County Tibetan Middle School, in Gansu Province near Tibet, switched to Chinese from Tibetan as the language of instruction. The policy shift has incited protests across the high-altitude steppe that is home to five million Tibetans and a far greater number of ethnic Han Chinese.

On March 3, a few days before the start of the spring semester, Tsering Kyi, 20, emerged from a public toilet at the town’s produce market, her wispy frame bound in gasoline-soaked blankets that had been encircled with wire, relatives and local residents said.

In a flash she was a heap of flames, her fist raised defiantly, before falling to the ground, residents said. She died at the scene.

Over the past year 29 Tibetans, seven of them in the last three weeks, have chosen a similarly agonizing, self-annihilating protest against Chinese policies. Of those, 22 have died.

Beijing, alarmed about the threat to stability in a region seething with discontent over religious and cultural controls, has responded with an assortment of heavy-handed measures. Officials have described the self-immolators as outcasts and terrorists, blamed the pernicious influence of Tibetan exiles and flooded the region with checkpoints and paramilitary police officers in flak jackets.

Communist Party leaders have also introduced a “monastic management” plan to more directly control religious life. As part of the plan, 21,000 party officials have been sent to Tibetan communities with the goal of “befriending” monks — and creating dossiers on each of them. Compliant clergy members are rewarded with health care benefits, pensions and television sets; the recalcitrant are sometimes expelled from their monasteries.

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The GOP’s woman problem

Frank Rich writes: At the time, back in January in New Hampshire, it didn’t seem like that big a deal, certainly nothing to rival previous debate flash points like “9-9-9” and “Oops!” But in retrospect it may have been one of the more fateful twists of the Republican presidential campaign. The exchange was prompted by George Stephanopoulos, who seemingly out of nowhere asked Mitt Romney if he shared Rick Santorum’s view that “states have the right to ban contraception.” Romney stiffened, as he is wont to do, and took the tone of a men’s club factotum tut-tutting a member for violating the dress code. “George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising,” he said. “I know of no reason to talk about contraception in this regard.” The partisan audience would soon jeer the moderator for his effrontery.

Afterward, Romney’s spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom accused Stephanopoulos of asking “the oddest question in a debate this year” and of having “a strange obsession with contraception.” It was actually Santorum who had the strange obsession. He had first turned the subject into a cause in October by talking about “the dangers of contraception in this country.” Birth control is “not okay,” he said then. “It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

As we know now, Santorum, flaky though he may sound, is not some outlier in his party or in its presidential field. He was an advance man for a rancorous national brawl about to ambush an unsuspecting America that thought women’s access to birth control had been resolved by the ­Supreme Court almost a half century ago.

The hostilities would break out just weeks after the New Hampshire debate, with the back-to-back controversies of the White House health-care rule on contraceptives and the Komen Foundation’s dumping of Planned Parenthood. Though those two conflicts ended with speedy cease-fires, an emboldened GOP kept fighting. It had women’s sex lives on the brain and would not stop rolling out jaw-dropping sideshows: an all-male panel at a hearing on birth control in the House. A fat-cat Santorum bankroller joking that “gals” could stay out of trouble by putting Bayer aspirin “between their knees.” A Virginia governor endorsing a state bill requiring that an ultrasound “wand” be inserted into the vagina of any woman seeking an abortion.

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The rich get even richer

Steven Rattner writes: New statistics show an ever-more-startling divergence between the fortunes of the wealthy and everybody else — and the desperate need to address this wrenching problem. Even in a country that sometimes seems inured to income inequality, these takeaways are truly stunning.

In 2010, as the nation continued to recover from the recession, a dizzying 93 percent of the additional income created in the country that year, compared to 2009 — $288 billion — went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers, those with at least $352,000 in income. That delivered an average single-year pay increase of 11.6 percent to each of these households.

Still more astonishing was the extent to which the super rich got rich faster than the merely rich. In 2010, 37 percent of these additional earnings went to just the top 0.01 percent, a teaspoon-size collection of about 15,000 households with average incomes of $23.8 million. These fortunate few saw their incomes rise by 21.5 percent.

The bottom 99 percent received a microscopic $80 increase in pay per person in 2010, after adjusting for inflation. The top 1 percent, whose average income is $1,019,089, had an 11.6 percent increase in income.

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Lobbyists, guns and money

Paul Krugman writes: Florida’s now-infamous Stand Your Ground law, which lets you shoot someone you consider threatening without facing arrest, let alone prosecution, sounds crazy — and it is. And it’s tempting to dismiss this law as the work of ignorant yahoos. But similar laws have been pushed across the nation, not by ignorant yahoos but by big corporations.

Specifically, language virtually identical to Florida’s law is featured in a template supplied to legislators in other states by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a corporate-backed organization that has managed to keep a low profile even as it exerts vast influence (only recently, thanks to yeoman work by the Center for Media and Democracy, has a clear picture of ALEC’s activities emerged). And if there is any silver lining to Trayvon Martin’s killing, it is that it might finally place a spotlight on what ALEC is doing to our society — and our democracy.

What is ALEC? Despite claims that it’s nonpartisan, it’s very much a movement-conservative organization, funded by the usual suspects: the Kochs, Exxon Mobil, and so on. Unlike other such groups, however, it doesn’t just influence laws, it literally writes them, supplying fully drafted bills to state legislators. In Virginia, for example, more than 50 ALEC-written bills have been introduced, many almost word for word. And these bills often become law.

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Is Netanyahu dreaming in Cuban on Iran?

Tony Karon writes: President Barack Obama, speaking Saturday in Turkey on the Iran nuclear standoff, reiterated his belief that “there is a window of time to solve this diplomatically, but that window is closing.” That may be a rhetorical device aimed at turning up the heat on the Iranians and on other interlocutors who might persuade them to be more forthcoming at next month’s nuclear talks with the major powers, but it also reflects the pressure created by Israel’s pounding of the war drum. It’s not Obama’s own hand, after all, that’s “closing” the diplomatic window of opportunity: The President himself made clear just three weeks ago that his own red line for taking military action would be if that became necessary to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But he made clear, at the same time, that Iran is not currently building nuclear weapons, nor has it taken a decision to do so. The “closing window” to which he refers may be a reflection of the fact that the Israelis insist they take a darker view, and work off a shorter timetable.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei recently reiterated that the regime in Tehran regards the construction and use of nuclear weapons as a “sin against Islam” — in what appeared to be a public signal that Iran has no intention of crossing Obama’s red line. Iran analyst Vali Nasr also read that as a rebuke to those within the corridors of power in Tehran who argue that Iran should build nuclear weapons in the face of a mounting threat of foreign intervention. Khamenei also welcomed Obama’s emphasis on dialogue.

But Netanyahu sets little store by Iran’s declared intentions, seeing the steady progress of its nuclear program as a burgeoning threat, and drawing its own red line at Iran having the capacity to build a nuclear weapon (arguably it already has that capacity). Netanyahu insisted during his recent Washington visit that if diplomacy and sanctions don’t produce the results Israel demands, it will take matters into its own hands by launching military strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, acting on its own timetable. President Obama, trying to tamp down the war talk, has questioned the value of military strikes in stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons, noting in his speech to the Israel lobbying organization AIPAC three weeks ago that “the only way to truly solve this problem is for the Iranian government to make a decision to forsake nuclear weapons. That’s what history tells us.”

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Bomb Iran and it will surely decide to pursue nuclear arms

Mehdi Hasan writes: On 7 June 1981 a phalanx of Israeli F-16 fighter-bombers entered Iraqi airspace on the orders of the then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Their mission, codenamed Operation Babylon, was to destroy Saddam Hussein’s nascent nuclear programme. In less than two minutes the eight F-16s dropped 16 1,000-kg bombs on the unfinished Osirak nuclear reactor, situated 10 miles south of Baghdad. It was an audacious attack: the world’s first air strike on a nuclear facility.

Begin claimed to have averted “another Holocaust” by denying Saddam “three, four, five” nuclear bombs. American politicians – from Dick Cheney to Bill Clinton – would later agree with him.

Fast forward to 2012, and the Osirak attack is constantly invoked as a template for military action against Iran. Last month Amos Yadlin, director of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies and one of the pilots who bombed Osirak, said Iraq’s nuclear programme was “never fully resumed” after that attack. “This could be the outcome in Iran,” he declared in the New York Times. Earlier this month the current Israeli prime minister and sabre-rattler-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu used a speech on Iran to again praise the Osirak operation, reminding his audience of how Begin ordered the attack despite being “well aware of the international criticism that would come”.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, however, Operation Babylon was a dismal failure – and did the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do. For a start, Saddam wasn’t building a bomb at Osirak. Richard Wilson, a nuclear physicist at Harvard University who inspected the wreckage of the reactor on a visit to Iraq in 1982, noted how it had been “explicitly designed” by French engineers “to be unsuitable for making bombs” and had been subject to regular inspections by both on-site French technicians and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“The Iraqis couldn’t have been developing a nuclear weapon at Osirak,” Wilson tells me, three decades on. “I challenge any scientist in the world to show me how they could have done so.”

For Wilson, the Israeli raid marked not the end of Saddam’s nuclear weapons programme but the beginning of it. Three months later, in September 1981, Saddam – smarting from the Osirak incident and reminded of Iraq’s vulnerability to foreign attack – established a fast-paced, well-funded and clandestine nuclear weapons programme outside of the IAEA’s purview. Nine years after Osirak, Iraq was on the verge of producing a nuclear bomb.

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Iran sanctions bring unintended, unwanted results

Reuters reports: Western sanctions have so far failed to deter Iran from pursuing its nuclear program and their unexpected and unintended side-effects are producing a new collection of challenges.

The expected loss of Iranian crude production has helped push oil prices to levels seen threatening the global economy.

Already Iran’s oil exports appear to have fallen this month by some 300,000 barrels per day (bpd), or 14 percent, the first sizeable drop in shipments this year, according to estimates from industry consultant Petrologistics and an oil company.

Oil rose sharply on the news, with Brent jumping to over $127 a barrel, up almost $4 from the day’s low.

Meanwhile, many Iran-watchers, including some Western officials, worry that far from producing compliance, ratcheting up the economic pressure is making the Islamic Republic more volatile, unpredictable and perhaps dangerous.

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Women: The Libyan rebellion’s secret weapon

Joshua Hammer writes: Inas Fathy’s transformation into a secret agent for the rebels began weeks before the first shots were fired in the Libyan uprising that erupted in February 2011. Inspired by the revolution in neighboring Tunisia, she clandestinely distributed anti-Qaddafi leaflets in Souq al-Juma, a working-class neighborhood of Tripoli. Then her resistance to the regime escalated. “I wanted to see that dog, Qaddafi, go down in defeat.”

A 26-year-old freelance computer engineer, Fathy took heart from the missiles that fell almost daily on Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s strongholds in Tripoli beginning March 19. Army barracks, TV stations, communications towers and Qaddafi’s residential compound were pulverized by NATO bombs. Her house soon became a collection point for the Libyan version of meals-ready-to-eat, cooked by neighborhood women for fighters in both the western mountains and the city of Misrata. Kitchens across the neighborhood were requisitioned to prepare a nutritious provision, made from barley flour and vegetables, that could withstand high temperatures without spoiling. “You just add water and oil and eat it,” Fathy told me. “We made about 6,000 pounds of it.”

Fathy’s house, located atop a hill, was surrounded by public buildings that Qaddafi’s forces often used. She took photographs from her roof and persuaded a friend who worked for an information-technology company to provide detailed maps of the area; on those maps, Fathy indicated buildings where she had observed concentrations of military vehicles, weapons depots and troops. She dispatched the maps by courier to rebels based in Tunisia.

On a sultry July evening, the first night of Ramadan, Qaddafi’s security forces came for her. They had been watching her, it turned out, for months. “This is the one who was on the roof,” one of them said, before dragging her into a car. The abductors shoved her into a dingy basement at the home of a military intelligence officer, where they scrolled through the numbers and messages on her cellphone. Her tormentors slapped and punched her, and threatened to rape her. “How many rats are working with you?” demanded the boss, who, like Fathy, was a member of the Warfalla tribe, Libya’s largest. He seemed to regard the fact that she was working against Qaddafi as a personal affront.

The men then pulled out a tape recorder and played back her voice. “They had recorded one of my calls, when I was telling a friend that Seif al-Islam [one of Qaddafi’s sons] was in the neighborhood,” recalls Fathy. “They had eavesdropped, and now they made me listen to it.” One of them handed her a bowl of gruel. “This,” he informed her, “will be your last meal.” [Continue reading…]

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A new generation of Syrians adapt to life in exile

McClatchy reports: Rima Flihan, a 36-year-old screenwriter and mother of two, is finally adjusting to life outside Syria.

“We used to have a normal life,” she said. “I never dreamed we’d be refugees.”

A Syrian television channel is presently airing a series she wrote last year, and another was filmed last month, she said, making the fact she is no longer in the country even more surreal.

“We are learning what depression is,” she said. “At first, when I would go to sleep, I would wake up and wonder where I was. For four months I refused to remember my (Jordanian) cellphone number.”

Flihan left Syria in September, after the government issued a second arrest warrant for her because she had participated in anti-government protests. She already had been arrested and beaten once.

Flihan is just one of the tens of thousands who have fled Syria to Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq since demonstrations against Syrian President Bashar Assad began a little more than a year ago. The peaceful demonstrations now have been supplanted by an armed insurgency; some groups put the number that have fled the country at more than 100,000. The United Nations has said that more than 200,000 Syrians have been displaced inside the country by the fighting.

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U.S. and Turkey to step up ‘nonlethal’ aid to rebels in Syria

The New York Times reports: Turkey and the United States plan to provide “nonlethal” assistance, like communications equipment and medical supplies, directly to opposition groups inside Syria, and will urge other allies to do so as well, the White House deputy national security adviser said on Sunday, after President Obama met with the prime minister of Turkey at a nuclear security conference in Seoul, South Korea.

The United States had already announced that it had been providing humanitarian aid to opposition groups. And on Sunday an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the United States had already begun to supply some aid, including communications gear, to the rebel Free Syrian Army. The agreement with Turkey would formalize and increase that aid, though officials insist that no weaponry would be sent.

The two countries also agreed to set up a framework for further humanitarian and technical aid at the “Friends of Syria” meeting to be held Sunday in Istanbul, according to the deputy security adviser, Benjamin J. Rhodes.

The news that the United States was already assisting the Syrian opposition and would expand that aid was expected to annoy Russia, the most important of Syria’s few remaining friends. Russia has wielded its veto in the United Nations Security Council to head off a resolution condemning the government of President Bashar al-Assad for its violent crackdown on the opposition. On Sunday, the Russian government denounced what it called one-sided political support for the opposition from the United States and others.

The diplomatic developments came on the same day that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood outlined a vision of a post-Assad Syria, calling for “a democratic, civil state” with religious freedoms.

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Israeli court rejects hunger striker’s appeal

Al Jazeera reports: An Israeli military court has rejected the appeal of a Palestinian woman on hunger strike for 39 days.

“The Israeli military court rejected the appeal and now we will go to the High Court,” lawyer Jawad Bulus said, adding that his client Hana Shalabi “will continue her hunger strike”.

Shalabi was detained on February 16, and a military court initially ordered her held for six months. That was later reduced to four months – the decision she unsuccessfully appealed.

The Israeli army has said the 30-year-old is “a global jihad-affiliated operative” and was re-arrested on suspicion that she “posed a threat to the area”. But no charges have been filed against her and no specific allegations have been made public.

Inspired by Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan, who pressured Israel with a 66-day hunger strike, a growing number of his fellow detainees are launching similar protests.

The tactic appears to be spreading among the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons, who see themselves battling for their rights with the only weapon they have: “empty stomachs”.

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French authorities file charges against brother of gunman in Toulouse killings

The New York Times reports: Investigating judges on Sunday filed preliminary murder and terrorism charges against the older brother of the man who confessed to killing seven people in southwest France, saying that the killer acted with the guidance of his brother, an Islamic radical who reportedly had ties to at least one jihadist network. The brother denies involvement in the fatal shootings, his lawyer said.

The police detained the gunman’s brother, Abdelkader Merah, 29, at his home outside Toulouse early on Wednesday, saying that they suspected Mr. Merah and his brother, Mohammed, 23, in the killings. Simultaneously, the police tried to detain Mohammed Merah, who repeatedly fired on officers and claimed responsibility for the attacks before being killed in a shootout with police commandos on Thursday, after a standoff that lasted more than 30 hours.

Although Mohammed Merah told the police that he had acted alone, investigators believe that he operated “under the influence of his brother,” said Élisabeth Allannic, a spokeswoman for the office of the prosecutor in Paris, which handles terrorism cases. The preliminary charges of “complicity in murder” and conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism allow a panel of judges more time to investigate whether there is enough evidence to move forward with a case against Abdelkader Merah. He has been jailed pending further investigation.

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Afghan father tries to cope with rampage that took his family

The Associated Press reports: Mohammad Wazir can barely take a sip of water because it reminds him of his 7-year-old daughter, who brought him a glass three days before she was killed with 10 other loved ones in a shooting spree allegedly carried out by a U.S. soldier in southern Afghanistan.

Wazir said he had asked his wife for a drink but his daughter Masooma brought it instead.

“She said: ‘Ask me, daddy. I can bring you water, too,’ ” Wazir recalled. “She was the beauty of my house. She had black magical eyes.”

Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales was charged Friday with 17 counts of premeditated murder and could face a possible death penalty if convicted. But that has done little to ease the pain of those left behind, who are demanding justice as they struggle to rebuild their shattered lives.
[…]
Wazir — who also lost his wife, five other children ages 2 to 15, his mother, his brother, his sister-in-law and his nephew — said he would travel to the U.S. for the trial if given the opportunity but the death penalty for just one man would not be enough.

The only child he has left is his 4-year-old son Habib, who was with him in another town when the shootings occurred.

“They took everything from me,” he said.

Wazir, who is in his mid-30s and splits his time tending his grape fields and helping with a family electronics store, was not home in Balandi that night because he had taken his youngest son to the nearby border town of Spin Boldak to have dinner with his cousins. The area is dangerous so Wazir and his son spent the night. As they were getting ready to return home in the morning, Wazir got a phone call.

The caller said Wazir’s house had been the target of a U.S. attack and some relatives had been injured, but didn’t mention any dead. He rushed home to find hundreds of people gathered outside around some bodies that they were preparing to take to Kandahar city for a funeral.

“I didn’t know that all of them were members of my family,” Wazir recounted as he sat in a friend’s courtyard in the nearby market town of Harmara, where he is staying to avoid the ghosts waiting for him at home. As he spoke, he stared down at his hands, focusing on the knife tattoo on his right knuckles.

People tried to pull him into the crowd but he said he needed to check on his family first.

“Then one of my relatives hugged me and said, ‘Nobody is there for you to talk to.’ ”

Still disbelieving, Wazir ran to his house and found the kitchen still filled with smoke, ashes and blood.

“I was crying and I said to my uncle, ‘Tell me, is anyone in my family alive?’ And my uncle said, ‘It is God’s will. Pull yourself together and come out.’ “

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U.S. plans no charges over deadly strike in Pakistan

The New York Times reports: The United States military has decided that no service members will face disciplinary charges for their involvement in a NATO airstrike in November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, an accident that plunged relations between the two countries to new depths and has greatly complicated the allied mission in Afghanistan.

An American investigation in December found fault with both American and Pakistani troops for the deadly exchange of fire, but noted that the Pakistanis fired first from two border posts that were not on coalition maps, and that they kept firing even after the Americans tried to warn them that they were shooting at allied troops. Pakistan has rejected these conclusions and ascribed most of the blame to the American forces.

The American findings set up a second inquiry to determine whether any American military personnel should be punished. That recently completed review said no, three senior military officials said, explaining that the Americans fired in self-defense. Other mistakes that contributed to the fatal cross-border strike were the regrettable result of battlefield confusion, they said.

“We found nothing criminally negligent on the part of any individual in our investigations of the incident,” said one senior American military official involved in the process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the results of the review had not been made public.

The military’s decision is expected to anger Pakistani officials at a time when the two countries are gingerly trying to patch up a security relationship left in tatters over the past year from a series of episodes, including the shooting of two Pakistanis in Lahore by a C.I.A. contractor, the Navy SEALs raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden and the deadly airstrike in November.

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Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood push for Palestinian unity

The New York Times reports: As it prepares to take power in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is overhauling its relations with the two main Palestinian factions in an effort to put new pressure on Israel for an independent Palestinian state.

Officials of the Brotherhood, Egypt’s dominant Islamist movement, are pressing its militant Palestinian offshoot, Hamas, which controls Gaza, to make new compromises with Fatah, the Western-backed Palestinian leadership that has committed to peace with Israel and runs the West Bank.

The intervention in the Palestinian issue is the clearest indication yet that as it moves into a position of authority, the Brotherhood, the largest vote getter in Egypt’s parliamentary elections, intends to both moderate its positions on foreign policy and reconfigure Egypt’s.

Brotherhood officials say that they are pulling back from their previous embrace of Hamas and its commitment to armed struggle against Israel in order to open new channels of communications with Fatah, which the Brotherhood had previously denounced for collaborating with Israel and accused of selling out the Palestinian cause. Brotherhood leaders argue that if they persuade the Palestinians to work together with a newly assertive Egypt, they will have far more success forcing Israel to bargain in earnest over the terms of statehood.

“Now we have to deal with the Palestinian parties as an umbrella for both of them, and we have to stand at an equal distance from each,” said Reda Fahmy, a Brotherhood leader who oversees its Palestinian relations and is now chairman of the Arab affairs committee in Egypt’s upper house of Parliament. “Any movement of the size of the Muslim Brotherhood, when it is in the opposition it is one thing and then when it comes to power it is something completely different.”

The shift in the Brotherhood’s stance toward neutrality between Hamas and Fatah — acknowledged by officials of both groups — may relieve United States policy makers, who have long worried about the Brotherhood’s relationship with the more militant Hamas. The United States considers the Palestinian group to be a terrorist organization. But the shift in Egypt’s policies may unnerve Israel, because it is a move away from former President Hosni Mubarak’s exclusive support for the Western-backed Fatah movement and its commitment to the peace process. Israeli officials have said they will not negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas.

But Mr. Fahmy said the Brotherhood believed that Palestinian unity could break the deadlock in talks with Israel. “A Palestinian negotiator will go the table and know that all the Palestinian people are supporting his project,” Mr. Fahmy said. “This will be a huge change and very important to both sides.” Jailed at times by the Mubarak government for his role in the Brotherhood, Mr. Fahmy spoke this month from an ornate hall of Parliament.

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Will Democrats strip civil liberties from their 2012 platform?

Conor Friedersdorf writes: Four years ago, the last time the Democrats adopted a platform, their presidential candidate championed civil liberties, insisted that closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay would make us safer from terrorists, and righteously denounced the expansive Bush-Cheney understanding of executive power. Said the official 2008 platform contemporaneously adopted by Democratic delegates (links added):

We will restore our constitutional traditions, and recover our nation’s founding commitment to liberty under law. We support constitutional protections and judicial oversight on any surveillance program involving Americans. We will review the current Administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. We reject illegal wiretapping of American citizens, wherever they live. We reject the use of national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime … We reject sweeping claims of “inherent” presidential power. We will revisit the Patriot Act and overturn unconstitutional executive decisions issued during the past eight years. We will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine duly enacted law. And we will ensure that law-abiding Americans of any origin, including Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans, do not become the scapegoats of national security fears.

Another section is also pertinent:

We will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools to hunt down and take out terrorists without undermining our Constitution, our freedom, and our privacy … we will lead in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people. We will not ship away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, or detain without trial or charge prisoners who can and should be brought to justice for their crimes, or maintain a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of the law. We will respect the time-honored principle of habeas corpus, the seven century-old right of individuals to challenge the terms of their own detention that was recently reaffirmed by our Supreme Court.

We will close the detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, the location of so many of the worst constitutional abuses in recent years. With these necessary changes, the attention of the world will be directed where it belongs: on what terrorists have done to us, not on how we treat suspects.

If you click through to the links I’ve embedded above you’ll quickly get a sense of how thoroughly President Obama has betrayed the words and spirit of his candidacy and his party’s platform.

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