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Please spread the message where ever you will be during the next weeks!
Thank you so much,
Annette in Heidelberg - Germany
German Network Against the Death Penalty and to Free Mumia
Dear co-strugglers for Mumia,
this is our call for action - sign the online-petition to the Justices of the US Supreme Court.
We launched it at the beginning of March in Germany and Austria - and it is growing fast now.
It was already signed by Noam Chomsky, Frances Goldin, Robert Meeropol, Harold Wilson, Colin Firth, Anthony Arnove, Marc Taylor, Julia Wright, Pam Africa, Veronica Jones and so many others.
The updated letter with the 3500th signature was sent to the Justices this Easter Monday, April 13.
http://www.PetitionOnline.com/supreme/petition.html
Support Mumia in this most dangerous state of his life.
Please spread it as far as you can! Post it, send it around, use all your powerful means of creating news and attention.
German Network Against the Death Penalty and to Free Mumia Abu-Jamal
www.inprisonmywholelife.com
www.mumia-hoerbuch.de
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Celebrate the release of the new book by Mumia Abu-Jamal:
"Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners vs. the USA"
Friday, April 24th (Mumia's birthday!), 6:30 P.M.
Humanist Hall
411 - 28th Street, Oakland
$25.00 donation or what you can afford.
Featuring:
Angely Y. Davis
Mistah F.A.B.
Lynne Stewart
Tory Serra
Avotcja
Kiilu Nyasha
JR Minister of Information POCC
Ed Mead
Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia
Molotov Mouths
Prison Radio, 415-648-4505
www.prisonradio.org
www.mumia.org
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4/26/2009 SF Speak-out and Video With UE Chicago Republic Workers And Screening
Sunday April 26, 2006 2:00 PM
ILWU Local 34
2nd St and Embarcadero on the left side of AT&T Park
The UE Republic workers of Chicago who occupied their factory to demand their pay and compensation as a result of their factories closure will be speaking and screening a labor film of their occupation on Sunday April 26, 2009 at 2:00 PM in San Francisco at ILWU Local 34 next to AT&T at 2nd St & Embarcadero St. in San Francisco.
The meeting which is being hosted by ILWU Local 34 and also sponsored by Laborfest.net, UPWA.info, Transport Workers Solidarity Committee and other unions and organizations will be the first eye witness report of this important event which electrified the US labor movement. As a result of protests throughout the country including San Francisco at the Bank Of America, the workers won their demands. Bay area workers who are in struggle will also speak at this forum.
To endorse, support or to get more information about this labor solidarity event contact
(415)282-1908 or lvpsf@labornet.org
YouTube - Angry Laid-off Workers Occupy Factory in Chicago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNIQ1-ghsPs
http://www.ueunion.org/uerepublic.html
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ARTICLES IN FULL:
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1) You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
By Johann Hari
The Independent
January 5, 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html
2) Civilians Died in Airstrike by NATO, Afghan Says
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
April 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/world/asia/14afghan.html?ref=world
3) Cuba Will Continue to Resist
Not a Word About the Blockade
By Fidel Castro Ruz
April 14, 2009
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/castro04142009.html
4) Guantánamo Detainee Calls Al Jazeera
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:55 p.m. ET
April 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/04/14/us/AP-CB-Guantanamo-FirstI.html?ref=world
5) Study Sees More Young Citizens With Parents in the U.S. Illegally
By JULIA PRESTON
April 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/us/15immig.html?ref=us
6) California: Proposed Layoff of Some Teachers Is Halted
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 15, 2009
National Briefing | West
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/us/15brfs-PROPOSEDLAYO_BRF.html?ref=us
7) Study Says Police Misuse Immigration-Inquiry Rule
By NINA BERNSTEIN
April 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/nyregion/15immigration.html?ref=nyregion
8) California: A.C.L.U. Criticizes Jail
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
April 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16brfs-ACLUCRITICIZ_BRF.html?ref=us
9) Florida: Jurors Denounce Arrest
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
April 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16brfs-JURORSDENOUN_BRF.html?ref=us
10) Interpreter for F.B.I. Thinks Interrogators Beat Terror Suspect
By BENJAMIN WEISER
April 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/nyregion/16embassy.html?ref=us
11) At Summit Meeting, Cuba Will Be Absent, Not Forgotten
By SHARON OTTERMAN and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
April 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/world/americas/18prexy.html?_r=1&hp
14) Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by the C.I.A.
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE
April 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17detain.html?ref=world
15) French Strikers Hang On to Threads of a Worldview
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Échirolles Journal
April 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/world/europe/17strike.html?ref=world
16) Gates Takes His Case for Military Budget on the Road
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
April 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17gates.html?ref=us
17) Child Obesity Is Linked to Chemicals in Plastics
By Jennifer 8. Lee
April 17, 2009, 1:31 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/child-obesity-is-linked-to-chemicals-in-plastics/
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1) You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
By Johann Hari
The Independent
January 5, 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-you-are-being-lied-to-about-pirates-1225817.html
Who imagined that in 2009, the world's governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy-backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the U.S. to China-is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as "one of the great menace of our times" have an extraordinary story to tell-and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the "golden age of piracy"-from 1650 to 1730-the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can't? In his book Villains of All Nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then-plucked from the docks of London's East End, young and hungry-you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O' Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains-and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls "one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century." They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed "quite clearly-and subversively-that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy." This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age-a young British man called William Scott-should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: "What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live." In 1991, the government of Somalia-in the Horn of Africa-collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since-and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country's food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died. Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury-you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, which seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."
At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish-stocks by over-exploitation-and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300 million worth of tuna, shrimp, lobster and other sea-life is being stolen every year by vast trawlers illegally sailing into Somalia's unprotected seas. The local fishermen have suddenly lost their livelihoods, and they are starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100 kilometers south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."
This is the context in which the men we are calling "pirates" have emerged. Everyone agrees they were ordinary Somalian fishermen who at first took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least wage a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia-and it's not hard to see why. In a surreal telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali, said their motive was "to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters... We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas." William Scott would understand those words.
No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters-especially those who have held up World Food Program supplies. But the "pirates" have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking-and it found 70 percent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defense of the country's territorial waters." During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America's founding fathers paid pirates to protect America's territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn't act on those crimes-but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world's oil supply, we begin to shriek about "evil." If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause-our crimes-before we send in the gunboats to root out Somalia's criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarized by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know "what he meant by keeping possession of the sea." The pirate smiled, and responded: "What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor." Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today-but who is the robber?
POSTSCRIPT: Some commentators seem bemused by the fact that both toxic dumping and the theft of fish are happening in the same place-wouldn't this make the fish contaminated? In fact, Somalia's coastline is vast, stretching to 3300km. Imagine how easy it would be-without any coastguard or army-to steal fish from Florida and dump nuclear waste on California, and you get the idea. These events are happening in different places-but with the same horrible effect: death for the locals, and stirred-up piracy. There's no contradiction.
Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent newspaper
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2) Civilians Died in Airstrike by NATO, Afghan Says
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. and ABDUL WAHEED WAFA
April 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/world/asia/14afghan.html?ref=world
KABUL, Afghanistan - An airstrike by NATO forces early Monday in mountainous eastern Afghanistan killed six civilians, including two children, a local Afghan official said, the latest accusation of civilian casualties leveled against NATO and American forces.
NATO officials confirmed the raid but said that only insurgents suspected of planning attacks on the alliance's outposts had been killed.
The Afghan official, Zalmay Yousufzai, the governor of Watapor district in Kunar Province, said that NATO helicopters destroyed one house and damaged several others. In addition to the 6 civilians killed, he said, 14 were wounded. Four of the wounded were hospitalized, he said.
The airstrike followed an attack in Khost Province last week by American-led forces that left at least four civilians dead.
Afghan and American military officials agreed this year to better coordinate airstrikes and raids in hopes of reducing civilian casualties. Mr. Yousufzai said there had been "no coordination with us" before Monday's raid.
A reporter for Agence France-Presse said the wounded at a nearby hospital included two men, a woman and a 14-year-old boy who said he had been told that four members of his family had been killed.
"We were asleep, and all of a sudden the roof collapsed," the boy, who gave his name only as Zakirullah, told the news agency. "I don't remember anything. I got to know here that my father, my mother, my brother and my younger sister have all been killed, and I am wounded."
The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force said that "multiple intelligence sources" identified the dead as "four to eight enemy fighters" and that the attack came after "intelligence intercepts indicated the hostile intent of the enemy" to attack outposts.
A force spokesman said it would investigate whether there were civilian casualties. "We deeply regret any possible civilian injuries caused by our operations against the enemy," said the spokesman, Capt. Mark Durkin.
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3) Cuba Will Continue to Resist
Not a Word About the Blockade
By Fidel Castro Ruz
April 14, 2009
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.com/castro04142009.html
The U.S. administration announced through CNN that Obama would be visiting Mexico this week, in the first part of a trip that will take him to Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, where he will be within four days taking part in the Summit of the Americas. He has announced the relief of some hateful restrictions imposed by Bush to Cubans living in the United States regarding their visits to relatives in Cuba. When questions were raised on whether such prerogatives extended to other American citizens the response was that the latter were not authorized.
But not a word was said about the harshest of measures: the blockade. This is the way a truly genocidal measure is piously called, one whose damage cannot be calculated only on the basis of its economic effects, for it constantly takes human lives and brings painful suffering to our people.
Numerous diagnostic equipment and crucial medicines-made in Europe, Japan or any other country-are not available to our patients if they carry U.S. components or software.
The U.S. companies producing goods or offering services anywhere in the world should apply these restrictions to Cuba, since they are extraterritorial measures.
An influential Republican Senator, Richard Lugar, and some others from his same party in Congress, as well as a significant number of his Democratic peers, favor the removal of the blockade. The conditions exist for Obama to use his talents in a constructive policy that could put an end to the one that has failed for almost half a century.
On the other hand, our country, which has resisted and is willing to resist whatever it takes, neither blames Obama for the atrocities of other U.S. administrations nor doubts his sincerity and his wishes to change the United States policy and image. We understand that he waged a very difficult battle to be elected, despite centuries-old prejudices.
Taking note of this reality, the President of the State Council of Cuba has expressed his willingness to have a dialogue with Obama and to normalize relations with the United States, on the basis of the strictest respect for the sovereignty of our country.
At 2:30 p.m., the head of the Interests Section of Cuba in Washington, Jorge Bolaños, was summoned to the State Department by Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Shannon. He did not say anything different from what had been indicated by the CNN.
At 3:15 p.m. a lengthy press conference started. The substance of what was said there is reflected in the words of Dan Restrepo, Presidential Adviser for Latin America.
He said that today President Obama had instructed to take certain measures, certain steps, to reach out to the Cuban people in support of their wishes to live with respect for human rights and to determine their own destiny and that of the country.
He added that the President had instructed the secretaries of State, Commerce and Treasury to undertake the necessary actions to remove all restrictions preventing persons to visit their relatives in the Island and sending remittances. He also said that the President had issued instructions for steps to be taken allowing the free flow of information in Cuba, and between those living in Cuba and the rest of the world, and to facilitate delivering humanitarian resources directly to the Cuban people.
He also said that with these measures, aimed at closing the gap between divided Cuban families and promoting the free flow of information and humanitarian assistance to the Cuban people, President Obama was making an effort to fulfill the objectives he set out during his campaign and after taking on his position.
Finally, he indicated that all those who believe in the basic democratic values hope for a Cuba where the human, political, economic and basic rights of the entire people are respected. And he added that President Obama feels that these measures will help to make this objective a reality. The President, he said, encourages everyone who shares these wishes to continue to decidedly support the Cuban people.
At the end of the press conference, the adviser candidly confessed that "all of this is for Cuba's freedom."
Cuba does not applaud the ill-named Summits of the Americas, where our nations do not debate on equal footing. If they were of any use, it would be to make critical analyses of policies that divide our peoples, plunder our resources and hinder our development.
Now, the only thing left is for Obama to try to persuade all of the Latin American Presidents attending the conference that the blockade is harmless.
Cuba has resisted and it will continue to resist; it will never beg for alms. It will go on forward holding its head up high and cooperating with the fraternal peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean; with or without Summits of the Americas; whether or not the president of the United States is Obama, a man or a woman, a black or a white citizen.
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4) Guantánamo Detainee Calls Al Jazeera
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:55 p.m. ET
April 14, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/04/14/us/AP-CB-Guantanamo-FirstI.html?ref=world
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- A Guantanamo detainee phoned a Middle Eastern TV network to say he was severely beaten for refusing to leave his cell, giving the first media interview with someone held at the U.S. prison in Cuba.
Mohammed el Gharani, a 21-year-old from Chad, told Al-Jazeera that guards beat him with batons and sprayed him with tear gas, according to the network. The comments were published on its Web site Tuesday.
The U.S. has never allowed journalists to interview Guantanamo prisoners and Al-Jazeera did not say how it managed to speak with el Gharani.
A spokesman for the prison, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt, told The Miami Herald that el Gharani apparently used one of his weekly phone calls to his family to speak to the reporter. The spokesman also said there was no evidence to substantiate the abuse claims.
DeWalt and lawyers for el Gharani did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.
El Gharani did not give the date of the alleged abuse but said it occurred after the election of President Barack Obama, who has ordered Guantanamo closed by the end of the year.
The prisoner says he refused to leave his cell because he was not being permitted to interact with other detainees and was denied "normal food." He said a group of six soldiers in protective gear removed him from the cell and beat him, breaking one of his front teeth.
"I could hardly see or breathe," el Gharani said.
A U.S. judge ordered el Gharani released in January, dismissing as unreliable the military's allegations that he was part of al-Qaida and had worked for the Taliban in Afghanistan. He is held in a section of Guantanamo where prisoners are permitted more privileges while he awaits release.
El Gharani was arrested in Pakistan in 2001 at a mosque by local police and turned over to U.S. forces in 2002. He was one of the first Guantanamo Bay detainees and one of the youngest.
The U.S. holds about 240 men at the U.S. base in Cuba, most on suspicion of terrorism or links to al-Qaida and the Taliban.
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5) Study Sees More Young Citizens With Parents in the U.S. Illegally
By JULIA PRESTON
April 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/us/15immig.html?ref=us
The number of American citizen children who have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant has increased rapidly since 2003, according to a report published on Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.
About four million American children have at least one parent who lacks legal immigration status, the group found. And 73 percent of all children of illegal immigrants are American citizens. In 2003, 2.7 million American children had parents without legal status. The increase stems from the relatively young age of the immigrants, who have children soon after they settle in the United States, the report said.
Children of illegal immigrants are more than twice as likely to live with two parents than children of United States citizens, according to the report. In all, about 8.8 million people in the United States are in families that include parents who are illegal immigrants and children who are American citizens.
About three-quarters of the nation's illegal immigrants are Hispanic.
The findings are likely to be another point of contention between advocates for immigrants and groups that favor more aggressive immigration enforcement.
In the last two years of the Bush administration, immigration authorities stepped up raids in factories and immigrant communities, and a record 349,000 immigrants were deported in 2008.
Civil rights and advocacy groups protested that the raids were dividing families and leading to de facto deportations of children with American citizenship who went to live in their parents' home countries. Groups that advocate stricter enforcement say that illegal immigrants who have been deported have the choice of taking their American children with them or leaving them in the United States.
In the first months of the Obama administration, the raids have slowed to a near halt. After an operation by immigration agents in February at an engine plant in Bellingham, Wash., Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a review to produce a new enforcement strategy, which she said would focus primarily on abusive employers instead of immigrant workers.
The Pew report, by Jeffrey S. Passel and D'Vera Cohn, analyzed census data from March 2008. It is the first time in five years that Pew has closely examined family situations of illegal immigrants. It used a method for estimating the number of illegal immigrants that is widely accepted, including by government researchers and groups favoring reduced immigration.
In all, 5.5 million children living in the United States have parents who are illegal immigrants, an increase of 1.2 million children since 2003, the report found. Nearly 7 percent of students in public elementary and secondary schools are children of illegal immigrants, the report said.
About one-third of children of illegal immigrants live in poverty, nearly double the 18 percent poverty rate for children of United States citizens, the report found. In 2007, the median household income for illegal immigrants was $36,000, substantially below the $50,000 median for citizens.
The report found signs that the rapid upward mobility long associated with new immigrants had stalled for the current generation of illegal immigrants.
"In contrast to other immigrants," the report said, "undocumented immigrants do not attain markedly higher incomes the longer they live in the United States."
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6) California: Proposed Layoff of Some Teachers Is Halted
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 15, 2009
National Briefing | West
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/us/15brfs-PROPOSEDLAYO_BRF.html?ref=us
The Los Angeles Board of Education has rescinded a proposed layoff of nearly 2,000 elementary school teachers, but the jobs of almost 6,000 teachers and support personnel are still slated to be cut. The board voted to use federal stimulus money to save 1,996 elementary school jobs in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The district, the nation's second-largest school system, faces a $596 million budget shortfall for the 2009-10 school year. The teachers' union, United Teachers Los Angeles, is calling on the school board to use all the federal stimulus money and cut other costs to eliminate all layoffs.
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7) Study Says Police Misuse Immigration-Inquiry Rule
By NINA BERNSTEIN
April 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/nyregion/15immigration.html?ref=nyregion
Many police officers in New Jersey are misusing a 2007 directive by the state's attorney general by questioning the immigration status of Latino drivers, passengers, pedestrians and even crime victims, reporting them to federal immigration authorities and jailing some for days without criminal charges, according to a Seton Hall Law School study.
"The data suggests a disturbing trend towards racial profiling by the New Jersey police," said Bassina Farbenblum, a lawyer with the law school's Center for Social Justice, which gathered details of 68 cases over the past nine months in which people were questioned about their immigration status for no apparent reason, or after minor infractions, like rolling through a stop sign. None involved drunken driving or the use of false documents.
David Wald, a spokesman for the attorney general, Anne Milgram, said on Tuesday that she would look into the cases cited, after asking the center - which did not provide names in its report - to identify the individuals involved. "We welcome the center's input, but we question their conclusions," Mr. Wald said. "We don't believe that New Jersey police are arresting individuals just to enforce federal immigration laws."
As the Obama administration pushes for a legislative path to legal status for millions now vulnerable to deportation, the report underscores a disconnect between the changed tone on immigration in Washington and what is happening on the ground.
In one case it cited, police officers questioned a man at the Camden train station after asking to see his ticket. Unable to show one, he was arrested and held for seven days before being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (The Camden police did not return calls for comment.)
Elsewhere, another man was transferred to immigration agents after being held for four months, cited only for driving without a license. And a woman who showed her Argentine license at a "car checkpoint" was detained, then turned over to federal immigration agents even though a judge told her there were no charges against her.
The New Jersey directive ordered the police to inquire about immigration status when arresting someone for an indictable crime or for driving while intoxicated. The directive is silent on lesser offenses, but forbids the authorities from questioning the victims or witnesses of crime about their immigration status.
Issued in the aftermath of the murders of three young people in a Newark schoolyard in August 2007, it was spurred by TV and radio talk-show outrage that one of the suspects was an illegal immigrant who had been released on bail for an earlier offense. Critics, including some police chiefs and many immigrant advocates, called the directive a recipe for racial profiling - a public issue with an ugly history in the state, and one state law enforcers had worked for years to overcome with the help of a federal monitor.
Last year, as complaints accumulated about immigrants unfairly detained, advocates called for modification of the order. But the attorney general, saying that the directive helps keep dangerous criminals in custody, dismissed the criticism as speculation based on anecdote. She called for the advocates of modification to supply "real evidence that the directive is being abused."
The Seton Hall report was an effort to answer that challenge, Ms. Farbenblum said. Of the 68 cases, collected from immigration lawyers across the state, 65 involved Latinos; the others were from Spain, Haiti and Kazakhstan, according to the report.
It also listed seven incidents in which Latinos who sought police help were questioned about their immigration status, in direct violation of the directive.
One woman told the center that she had called the police to her Plainfield home to protect her from domestic violence, but that they threatened to call the federal enforcement agency.
A man told of going to the Mount Holly police station to report that his passport had been lost, only to be detained for 16 days after police found some unpaid parking tickets, and turned over to immigration agents. The police in Mount Holly did not respond to questions about cases involving the directive.
Ms. Farbenblum said the cases in the report are "the tip of the iceberg," since many noncitizens are reluctant to come forward or never see a lawyer, and the police are not required to report their questioning of immigrants in such cases. Police resources are being diverted from serious crime prevention, breaking down the trust necessary for effective policing in a state with the nation's third highest immigrant population, the report contends.
In the first six months after the directive was issued, the police referred 10,000 people to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but only 1,417 of them were charged with immigration violations, government data shows. Many others were legal residents or United States citizens.
A current case identified by Maria Juega, a board member of the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund, is the April 2 arrest of Eber Gonzalez Mazariegos, who made a U-turn in Mount Holly. Stopped by the police, he showed his Guatemalan license.
Though he has neither a deportation order nor any criminal record, and though his family paid a $300 fine, Ms. Juega said, Mr. Gonzalez was held over the weekend, then transferred to immigration custody in the Middlesex County Jail. He is still waiting to see an immigration judge.
A spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Harold A. Ort, said the agency had not yet seen the report. He noted that the agency prohibited racial profiling, and that Secretary Janet Napolitano had ordered a review of all recent immigration enforcement initiatives.
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8) California: A.C.L.U. Criticizes Jail
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | West
April 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16brfs-ACLUCRITICIZ_BRF.html?ref=us
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California is calling for the closing of the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail, saying it is so overcrowded and brutal that it threatens the mental health of inmates. The conditions are "medieval and drive men mad," Melinda Bird, a senior counsel for the group, said at a news conference on Tuesday. Mary Tiedeman, the group's jail project coordinator, said she routinely saw inmates with "black eyes and bruised bodies" who contend that other prisoners or guards beat them. Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for Sheriff Lee Baca, said that any accusations of violence by guards were reviewed by the county's Office of Independent Review.
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9) Florida: Jurors Denounce Arrest
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
National Briefing | South
April 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16brfs-JURORSDENOUN_BRF.html?ref=us
Four jurors who acquitted an Egyptian college student of federal explosives charges criticized immigration authorities for trying to deport him, saying it was a "blatant disregard" of their verdict. The jurors were among 12 who found the student, Youssef Samir Megahed, 23, not guilty on April 3. Three days after Mr. Megahed walked free, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested him. A document ordering Mr. Megahed to appear in immigration court said he was being deported based on the circumstances that resulted in the federal charges, said his lawyer, Adam Allen. "This sure looks and feels like some sort of 'double jeopardy' even if it doesn't precisely fit the legal definition of that prohibited practice," the jurors said in a statement. Mr. Megahed is a legal permanent resident who moved to the United States with his family when he was 11.
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10) Interpreter for F.B.I. Thinks Interrogators Beat Terror Suspect
By BENJAMIN WEISER
April 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/nyregion/16embassy.html?ref=us
An interpreter for the F.B.I. during an interrogation of a suspect in the terrorist bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya in 1998 now says that she heard sounds and pleading that led her to believe that the suspect was being beaten, and that she was so traumatized by the incident that she fled from the room, newly filed court documents show.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who wrote that the interpreter made the claim only recently, have provided a summary of her statement to a lawyer for the suspect, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali who was convicted in 2001 in the attack, which killed more than 200 people, and was sentenced to life in prison.
The interpreter's account is vivid and detailed, the summary showed. During the interrogation, in Kenya, she said, she was separated from Mr. al-'Owhali, a Saudi, by a partition, which prevented him from seeing her face. But she was able to hear him, she said, and "from sounds emanating from the interrogation room," she concluded that he was being beaten.
At one point, he shouted to her, "Sister, please make them stop beating me," the document said.
The summary said that American and Kenyan officials were present during the questioning, although it does not identify them further. The document also did not explain why she waited so long to report her observations, whom she finally told, and under what circumstances.
The document reported that she said that "this incident is the reason she does not wish to ever participate in another interrogation."
The interpreter's account is unusual in that it goes beyond what Mr. al-'Owhali and his lawyers have claimed about the conditions of his interrogation. Prosecutors have said that the questioning was carried out properly, and that Mr. al-'Owhali confessed to his role in the attack, which al Qaeda carried out simultaneously with a bombing of the American Embassy in Tanzania.
Mr. al-'Owhali's lawyers unsuccessfully sought to have his confession suppressed before his trial in 2001, partly on grounds that it had been coerced. In an affidavit at the time, Mr. al-'Owhali said that during many days of interrogation, American and Kenyan officials berated him with insults about his religion and threats of violence against him and his family.
He said that one F.B.I. agent told him: "You will be hanged from your neck like a dog." But Mr. al-'Owhali did not say that he had been beaten.
Mr. al-'Owhali's conviction was upheld by a federal appeals court last November. His lawyer, Frederick H. Cohn, said in court papers filed on Wednesday that he interviewed his client this week in the federal prison known as the supermax, in Florence, Colo., and that although Mr. al-'Owhali again said he had not been beaten, he said an agent squeezed his wrist, which had been injured earlier.
Mr. Cohn said the pain did not, in his client's view, "amount to torture," but "was what he was referring to when he cried out to the interpreter."
Mr. Cohn said that his client did not ask the interpreter to "make them stop beating me," but rather had "begged her to make them stop hurting him."
Mr. Cohn argued that the discrepancy was "a distinction without a difference." He said that beyond the issue of whether abuse had occurred was the matter of how the translator's version conflicted with the testimony of an F.B.I. agent who, in a pretrial suppression hearing, had "characterized the interrogation of al-'Owhali as civilized to the point that it resembled a Victorian tea," as Mr. Cohn put it.
A federal judge found that American agents made no threats, and allowed Mr. al-'Owhali's statement to be used at his trial. Had he been aware of the interpreter's account, he might have ruled differently, Mr. Cohn suggested.
The United States attorney's office and the F.B.I. in New York declined to comment. Mr. Cohn is seeking a hearing to investigate the incident.
The document does not identify the interpreter, but it says that she was "terrified and ran from the room." It added that an American official convinced her to return. A few days later, she was replaced by another interpreter, it says.
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11) At Summit Meeting, Cuba Will Be Absent, Not Forgotten
By SHARON OTTERMAN and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
April 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/world/americas/18prexy.html?_r=1&hp
President Obama will meet many of his counterparts from Latin and America and the Caribbean for the first time at a three-day summit meeting that starts on Friday in Trinidad, but much of the focus leading up to the event has been on a nation that is not invited: Cuba.
On Thursday, the interest heightened when Raúl Castro, the president of Cuba, responded in unusually conciliatory language to recent overtures from the Obama administration and said he had sent word of a new openness to the United States government in private and public.
"We are willing to discuss everything, human rights, freedom of press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about, but as equals, without the smallest shadow cast on our sovereignty, and without the slightest violation of the Cuban people's right to self-determination," Mr. Castro said in Venezuela during a meeting of leftist governments meant as a counterpoint to this weekend's Summit of the Americas in Trinidad.
In remarks over the past several days, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have signaled a new openness to discussions with Cuba, with President Obama saying in Mexico on Thursday that he would like to "recast" the American-Cuban relationship, which has been mired in Cold War hostility for half a century.
"I don't expect things to change overnight," Mr. Obama told reporters. "We are not trying to be heavy handed, we want to be open to engagement, but we're going to do so in a systematic way that keeps focus on the hardships and struggles that many Cubans are suffering."
Mr. Obama, who opened a crack in the American embargo against Cuba this week by scrapping restrictions on family travel to Cuba and letting American firms bid for telecommunications licenses there, said Thursday it was up to Cuba to take the next step. Mr. Castro made his remarks a few hours later.
Cuba experts said the language in Mr. Castro's response was some of the boldest that he or his brother Fidel, who handed him the presidency a year ago after falling ill, have used with any American administration since that of Dwight D. Eisenhower in early 1961, when the nations broke off relations.
The Obama administration has made clear that it expects greater political openness in the island, which severely limits freedom of expression, puts limits on foreign travel by its citizens and does not hold multi-party elections.
On Friday, Mrs. Clinton said she welcomed Mr. Castro's latest remarks, which were broadcast on Cuban television, but not published in the Cuba's Communist Party newspaper, Granma, The Associated Press reported.
"We have seen Raúl Castro's comments. We welcome this overture. We're taking a very serious look at it," Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference with Dominican President Leonel Fernandez.
In Trinidad, Mr. Obama was expected to receive encouragement toward greater rapprochement between the two nations from many of the 33 other leaders attending the summit. As the summit got underway, José Miguel Insulza, the head of the Organization of American States, which is sponsoring the event, said the organization should readmit Cuba, wire services reported.
Latin American leaders are seeking other shifts in United States policy as well.
"I'm going to ask the United States to take a different view of Latin America," Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil's president, said last month before meeting with Mr. Obama in Washington. "We're a democratic, peaceful continent, and the United States has to look at the region in a productive, developmental way, and not just think about drug trafficking or organized crime."
Leaders from the 34 countries with democratically elected governments that make up the Organization of American States are also expected to press Mr. Obama on issues including the global economy and the United States' policies on drugs.
The conference, which opens with a glittering Carnival-inspired ceremony Friday night, is formally to focus on "human prosperity," energy security and environmental sustainability. But the global economic crisis will be an overarching issue for Latin American leaders, including Mr. da Silva, who is still smarting over how the crisis threatens to derail one of Brazil's greatest periods of prosperity in a generation.
The Latin American leaders are hoping Mr. Obama will not shy away from subjects that have historically been taboo at such meetings. In the past, the United States has vetoed discussions about Cuba and shrugged off criticism of its drug policy.
But the Obama administration has signaled it agrees with some leaders in the region who want to rethink the approach to curbing drug violence. Several of the region's leaders have also said in recent months that lifting the Cuba embargo would go a long way toward repairing relations between Latin America and the United States.
American officials said this week that the president welcomed the discussion, but he is not expected to go beyond the steps announced on Monday: lifting restrictions on travel and money transfers to Cuba by Cuban-Americans.
"They may not lift the embargo or legalize drugs, but there will be more space to talk about those kinds of things," said Michael Shifter, vice president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy research center in Washington.
When President George W. Bush traveled to Argentina four years ago for the last Summit of the Americas, protesters smashed windows, looted stores and sang anti-Bush slogans. Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's president, drew 25,000 to a soccer stadium to rail against the United States' free trade policies.
Mr. Obama, however, currently has rock-star status in the hemisphere, a factor that could keep anti-Americanism in check, analysts said. Mr. Chávez, a fiery populist, is also less likely to try to use the event to take a stand against the United States. In Argentina his ire was directed at sinking a free trade agreement, a deal that ultimately died and has yet to be revived.
In an interview this week with Univision, Mr. Obama also signaled a more dialogue-oriented approach to Washington's relationship with Venezuela. Asked whether he would meet with President Hugo Chavez, who has characterized Mr. Obama as "ignorant" about Latin America, the president said he did not think a bilateral meeting had been arranged, but he was almost certain to have encounters with the Venezuelan leader during summit's multilateral sessions.
"Whether it's Chavez or any other leaders," Mr. Obama said, "my attitude is that I am there to listen."
Prior Beharry contributed reporting from Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Ginger Thompson contributed from Washington.
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12) Green Shoots and Glimmers
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Op-Ed Columnist
April 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17krugman.html
Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, sees "green shoots." President Obama sees "glimmers of hope." And the stock market has been on a tear.
So is it time to sound the all clear? Here are four reasons to be cautious about the economic outlook.
1. Things are still getting worse. Industrial production just hit a 10-year low. Housing starts remain incredibly weak. Foreclosures, which dipped as mortgage companies waited for details of the Obama administration's housing plans, are surging again.
The most you can say is that there are scattered signs that things are getting worse more slowly - that the economy isn't plunging quite as fast as it was. And I do mean scattered: the latest edition of the Beige Book, the Fed's periodic survey of business conditions, reports that "five of the twelve Districts noted a moderation in the pace of decline." Whoopee.
2. Some of the good news isn't convincing. The biggest positive news in recent days has come from banks, which have been announcing surprisingly good earnings. But some of those earnings reports look a little ... funny.
Wells Fargo, for example, announced its best quarterly earnings ever. But a bank's reported earnings aren't a hard number, like sales; for example, they depend a lot on the amount the bank sets aside to cover expected future losses on its loans. And some analysts expressed considerable doubt about Wells Fargo's assumptions, as well as other accounting issues.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs announced a huge jump in profits from fourth-quarter 2008 to first-quarter 2009. But as analysts quickly noticed, Goldman changed its definition of "quarter" (in response to a change in its legal status), so that - I kid you not - the month of December, which happened to be a bad one for the bank, disappeared from this comparison.
I don't want to go overboard here. Maybe the banks really have swung from deep losses to hefty profits in record time. But skepticism comes naturally in this age of Madoff.
Oh, and for those expecting the Treasury Department's "stress tests" to make everything clear: the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, says that "you will see in a systematic and coordinated way the transparency of determining and showing to all involved some of the results of these stress tests." No, I don't know what that means, either.
3. There may be other shoes yet to drop. Even in the Great Depression, things didn't head straight down. There was, in particular, a pause in the plunge about a year and a half in - roughly where we are now. But then came a series of bank failures on both sides of the Atlantic, combined with some disastrous policy moves as countries tried to defend the dying gold standard, and the world economy fell off another cliff.
Can this happen again? Well, commercial real estate is coming apart at the seams, credit card losses are surging and nobody knows yet just how bad things will get in Japan or Eastern Europe. We probably won't repeat the disaster of 1931, but it's far from certain that the worst is over.
4. Even when it's over, it won't be over. The 2001 recession officially lasted only eight months, ending in November of that year. But unemployment kept rising for another year and a half. The same thing happened after the 1990-91 recession. And there's every reason to believe that it will happen this time too. Don't be surprised if unemployment keeps rising right through 2010.
Why? "V-shaped" recoveries, in which employment comes roaring back, take place only when there's a lot of pent-up demand. In 1982, for example, housing was crushed by high interest rates, so when the Fed eased up, home sales surged. That's not what's going on this time: today, the economy is depressed, loosely speaking, because we ran up too much debt and built too many shopping malls, and nobody is in the mood for a new burst of spending.
Employment will eventually recover - it always does. But it probably won't happen fast.
So now that I've got everyone depressed, what's the answer? Persistence.
History shows that one of the great policy dangers, in the face of a severe economic slump, is premature optimism. F.D.R. responded to signs of recovery by cutting the Works Progress Administration in half and raising taxes; the Great Depression promptly returned in full force. Japan slackened its efforts halfway through its lost decade, ensuring another five years of stagnation.
The Obama administration's economists understand this. They say all the right things about staying the course. But there's a real risk that all the talk of green shoots and glimmers will breed a dangerous complacency.
So here's my advice, to the public and policy makers alike: Don't count your recoveries before they're hatched.
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13) Taliban Exploit Class Rifts in Pakistan
By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH
April 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/world/asia/17pstan.html?ref=world
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - The Taliban have advanced deeper into Pakistan by engineering a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants, according to government officials and analysts here.
The strategy cleared a path to power for the Taliban in the Swat Valley, where the government allowed Islamic law to be imposed this week, and it carries broad dangers for the rest of Pakistan, particularly the militants' main goal, the populous heartland of Punjab Province.
In Swat, accounts from those who have fled now make clear that the Taliban seized control by pushing out about four dozen landlords who held the most power.
To do so, the militants organized peasants into armed gangs that became their shock troops, the residents, government officials and analysts said.
The approach allowed the Taliban to offer economic spoils to people frustrated with lax and corrupt government even as the militants imposed a strict form of Islam through terror and intimidation.
"This was a bloody revolution in Swat," said a senior Pakistani official who oversees Swat, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Taliban. "I wouldn't be surprised if it sweeps the established order of Pakistan."
The Taliban's ability to exploit class divisions adds a new dimension to the insurgency and is raising alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal.
Unlike India after independence in 1947, Pakistan maintained a narrow landed upper class that kept its vast holdings while its workers remained subservient, the officials and analysts said. Successive Pakistani governments have since failed to provide land reform and even the most basic forms of education and health care. Avenues to advancement for the vast majority of rural poor do not exist.
Analysts and other government officials warn that the strategy executed in Swat is easily transferable to Punjab, saying that the province, where militant groups are already showing strength, is ripe for the same social upheavals that have convulsed Swat and the tribal areas.
Mahboob Mahmood, a Pakistani-American lawyer and former classmate of President Obama's, said, "The people of Pakistan are psychologically ready for a revolution."
Sunni militancy is taking advantage of deep class divisions that have long festered in Pakistan, he said. "The militants, for their part, are promising more than just proscriptions on music and schooling," he said. "They are also promising Islamic justice, effective government and economic redistribution."
The Taliban strategy in Swat, an area of 1.3 million people with fertile orchards, vast plots of timber and valuable emerald mines, unfolded in stages over five years, analysts said.
The momentum of the insurgency built in the past two years, when the Taliban, reinforced by seasoned fighters from the tribal areas with links to Al Qaeda, fought the Pakistani Army to a standstill, said a Pakistani intelligence agent who works in the Swat region.
The insurgents struck at any competing point of power: landlords and elected leaders - who were usually the same people - and an underpaid and unmotivated police force, said Khadim Hussain, a linguistics and communications professor at Bahria University in Islamabad, the capital.
At the same time, the Taliban exploited the resentments of the landless tenants, particularly the fact that they had many unresolved cases against their bosses in a slow-moving and corrupt justice system, Mr. Hussain and residents who fled the area said.
Their grievances were stoked by a young militant, Maulana Fazlullah, who set up an FM radio station in 2004 to appeal to the disenfranchised. The broadcasts featured easy-to-understand examples using goats, cows, milk and grass. By 2006, Mr. Fazlullah had formed a ragtag force of landless peasants armed by the Taliban, said Mr. Hussain and former residents of Swat.
At first, the pressure on the landlords was subtle. One landowner was pressed to take his son out of an English-speaking school offensive to the Taliban. Others were forced to make donations to the Taliban.
Then, in late 2007, Shujaat Ali Khan, the richest of the landowners, his brothers and his son, Jamal Nasir, the mayor of Swat, became targets.
After Shujaat Ali Khan, a senior politician in the Pakistan Muslim League-Q, narrowly missed being killed by a roadside bomb, he fled to London. A brother, Fateh Ali Mohammed, a former senator, left, too, and now lives in Islamabad. Mr. Nasir also fled.
Later, the Taliban published a "most wanted" list of 43 prominent names, said Muhammad Sher Khan, a landlord who is a politician with the Pakistan Peoples Party, and whose name was on the list. All those named were ordered to present themselves to the Taliban courts or risk being killed, he said. "When you know that they will hang and kill you, how will you dare go back there?" Mr. Khan, hiding in Punjab, said in a telephone interview. "Being on the list meant 'Don't come back to Swat.' "
One of the main enforcers of the new order was Ibn-e-Amin, a Taliban commander from the same area as the landowners, called Matta. The fact that Mr. Amin came from Matta, and knew who was who there, put even more pressure on the landowners, Mr. Hussain said.
According to Pakistani news reports, Mr. Amin was arrested in August 2004 on suspicion of having links to Al Qaeda and was released in November 2006. Another Pakistani intelligence agent said Mr. Amin often visited a madrasa in North Waziristan, the stronghold of Al Qaeda in the tribal areas, where he apparently received guidance.
Each time the landlords fled, their tenants were rewarded. They were encouraged to cut down the orchard trees and sell the wood for their own profit, the former residents said. Or they were told to pay the rent to the Taliban instead of their now absentee bosses.
Two dormant emerald mines have reopened under Taliban control. The militants have announced that they will receive one-third of the revenues.
Since the Taliban fought the military to a truce in Swat in February, the militants have deepened their approach and made clear who is in charge.
When provincial bureaucrats visit Mingora, Swat's capital, they must now follow the Taliban's orders and sit on the floor, surrounded by Taliban bearing weapons, and in some cases wearing suicide bomber vests, the senior provincial official said.
In many areas of Swat the Taliban have demanded that each family give up one son for training as a Taliban fighter, said Mohammad Amad, executive director of a nongovernmental group, the Initiative for Development and Empowerment Axis.
A landlord who fled with his family last year said he received a chilling message last week. His tenants called him in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat, to tell him his huge house was being demolished, he said in an interview here.
The most crushing news was about his finances. He had sold his fruit crop in advance, though at a quarter of last year's price. But even that smaller yield would not be his, his tenants said, relaying the Taliban message. The buyer had been ordered to give the money to the Taliban instead.
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14) Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by the C.I.A.
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE
April 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17detain.html?ref=world
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department on Thursday made public detailed memos describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency, as President Obama sought to reassure the agency that the C.I.A. operatives involved would not be prosecuted.
In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior operatives of Al Qaeda are spelled out in careful detail - like keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark, cramped box or putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.
The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the C.I.A.'s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration's most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon were the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.
Some senior Obama administration officials, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., have labeled one of the 14 approved techniques, waterboarding, illegal torture. The United States prosecuted some Japanese interrogators at war crimes trials after World War II for waterboarding and other methods detailed in the memos.
The release of the documents came after a bitter debate that divided the Obama administration, with the C.I.A. opposing the Justice Department's proposal to air the details of the agency's long-secret program. Fueling the urgency of the discussion was Thursday's court deadline in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the government for the release of the Justice Department memos.
Together, the four memos give an extraordinarily detailed account of the C.I.A.'s methods and the Justice Department's long struggle, in the face of graphic descriptions of brutal tactics, to square them with international and domestic law. Passages describing forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Convention Against Torture.
The documents were released with minimal redactions, indicating that President Obama sided against current and former C.I.A. officials who for weeks had pressed the White House to withhold details about specific interrogation techniques. Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, had argued that revealing such information set a dangerous precedent for future disclosures of intelligence sources and methods.
A more pressing concern for the C.I.A. is that the revelations may give new momentum to proposals for a full-blown investigation into Bush administration counterterrorism programs and possible torture prosecutions.
Within minutes of the release of the memos, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that the memos illustrated the need for his proposed independent commission of inquiry, which would offer immunity in return for candid testimony.
Mr. Obama condemned what he called a "dark and painful chapter in our history" and said that the interrogation techniques would never be used again. But he also repeated his opposition to a lengthy inquiry into the program, saying that "nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past."
Mr. Obama said that C.I.A. officers who were acting on the Justice Department's legal advice would not be prosecuted, but he left open the possibility that anyone who acted without legal authorization could still face criminal penalties. He did not address whether lawyers who authorized the use of the interrogation techniques should face some kind of penalty.
The four legal opinions, released in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the A.C.L.U., were written in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the highest authority in interpreting the law in the executive branch.
The first of the memos, from August 2002, was signed by Jay S. Bybee, who oversaw the Office of Legal Counsel, and gave the C.I.A. its first detailed legal approval for waterboarding and other harsh treatment. Three others, signed by Steven G. Bradbury, sought to reassure the agency in May 2005 that its methods were still legal, even when multiple methods were used in combination, and despite the prohibition in international law against "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment.
All legal opinions on interrogation were revoked by Mr. Obama on his second day in office, when he also outlawed harsh interrogations and ordered the C.I.A.'s secret prisons closed.
In the memos, the Justice Department authors emphasized precautions the C.I.A. proposed to take, including monitoring by medical personnel, and the urgency of getting information to stop terrorist attacks. They recounted the C.I.A.'s assertions of the effectiveness of the techniques but noted that interrogators could not always tell a prisoner who was withholding information from one who had no more information to offer.
The memos include what in effect are lengthy excerpts from the agency's interrogation manual, laying out with precision how each method was to be used. Waterboarding, for example, involved strapping a prisoner to a gurney inclined at an angle of "10 to 15 degrees" and pouring water over a cloth covering his nose and mouth "from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches" for no more than 40 seconds at a time.
But a footnote to a 2005 memo made it clear that the rules were not always followed. Waterboarding was used "with far greater frequency than initially indicated" and with "large volumes of water" rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.'s inspector general.
Most of the methods have been previously described in news accounts and in a 2006 report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which interviewed 14 detainees. But one previously unknown tactic the C.I.A. proposed - but never used - against Abu Zubaydah, a terrorist operative, involved exploiting what was thought to be his fear of insects.
"As we understand it, you plan to inform Zubaydah that you are going to place a stinging insect into the box, but you will actually place a harmless insect in the box, such as a caterpillar," one memo says.
Mr. Bybee, Mr. Bradbury and John Yoo, who was the leading author of the 2002 interrogation memos, are the subjects of an investigation by the Justice Department's ethics office about their legal analysis on interrogation. Officials have described the draft ethics report, by the Office of Professional Responsibility, as highly critical, but its completion has been delayed to allow the subjects a chance to respond.
The A.C.L.U. said the memos clearly describe criminal conduct and underscore the need to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate who authorized and carried out torture.
But Dennis C. Blair, the director of national intelligence, cautioned that the memos were written at a time when C.I.A. officers were frantically working to prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"Those methods, read on a bright, sunny, safe day in April 2009, appear graphic and disturbing," said Mr. Blair in a written statement. "But we will absolutely defend those who relied on these memos."
Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
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15) French Strikers Hang On to Threads of a Worldview
By STEVEN ERLANGER
Échirolles Journal
April 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/world/europe/17strike.html?ref=world
ÉCHIROLLES, France - The workers here at Caterpillar have been on strike for more than a month, and they see themselves in a battle for all the workers of France.
They have "boss-napped" management officials, blocked intercity trains, stopped and interrogated the local police prefect, set up picket lines and organized assemblies to seek more solidarity with workers at other companies whose jobs are also at risk. Asked if France will experience a hot summer of protest, Pierre Piccarreta, a factory representative with the main union here, the General Confederation of Labor, or C.G.T., said, "It's already a hot spring."
A sign on a factory fence reads "Les Cater en lutte" - the Caterpillars at battle - and many workers spent a rainy Wednesday night on the site in tents, in what has become the most prominent labor conflict in France.
The workers are fighting for their own jobs, of course, and the jobs of their children here in the Isère region, around Grenoble, where the icy peaks of the Alps rise impassively above the clouds. But in a way these workers are also fighting for a traditional kind of French management-worker relationship that is quickly fraying in this global economic crisis.
"Today, politicians don't put people at the center of life," said Michel Palomera, 64, who retired in 2005 after 40 years at Caterpillar but came here out of solidarity with the strikers. "Today, the only value is money."
Even 20 years ago, he said, "the bosses came from the bottom of the scale, with another attitude, and a good knowledge of the company and its values." Today, he said, with globalization and the intensity of the crisis, "it's all changed."
Caterpillar, an American company that makes sophisticated agricultural and construction equipment, reported a profit last year of $3.5 billion. But in January, presuming a continued drop in orders, the company announced immediate cuts of 5,000 jobs worldwide and the gradual elimination of 22,000.
Here, where Caterpillar started operations in the early 1960s and now employs about 3,000 people in two plants, the immediate issue has been 733 jobs that management said must go.
But Mr. Piccarreta, 53, said that in addition to full-time jobs, management wanted to get rid of an additional 300 or so contract workers.
"That means that one-third of the work force may disappear in six months," Mr. Piccarreta said. "We insist that they have the financial capacity to do otherwise." He complains that management refuses to sit down with the union and discuss alternatives, including a shared reduction of working hours and a reorganization of what has been a seven-days-a-week workplace.
While the conflict is about a global company with a distant management, there is affection for Caterpillar and the tenor is not anti-American.
Last week, management offered to fire only 600 people in return for major changes in working times and a rollback in benefits like the 35-hour week, free transportation and cafeteria privileges. The union refused. "They want to profit by the global crisis to take back social advantages won at Caterpillar," said José Muñoz, 64, who worked here for 37 years.
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who aides said was anxious about a possible season of escalating protests in France, tried to intervene early. He would not let the workers down, he said, and vowed to save the plant.
But the workers here consider this just another empty Sarkozy promise. Mr. Muñoz cited a Sarkozy vow last year to save 575 steelmaking jobs at the Arcelor Mittal foundry at Gandrange - jobs that have since disappeared.
Unemployment in France is now about 8.3 percent and is expected to reach nearly 10 percent this year. In this region, unemployment has hit 12 percent.
The unions, traditionally strong in France, are struggling to find an effective response to the crisis and the threat to jobs. Many analysts say that the power of the unions has long passed its peak and that while they are able to disrupt everyday life - and let off steam - through one-day general strikes, they are no longer powerful enough to force substantive changes.
Asked if the workers regret holding four of their bosses overnight in their offices, which created a furor, Mr. Piccarreta said: "We didn't mean to end up there. But it was exasperation, anger, and the bosses were making us go in circles." The management representatives either do not show up to meetings or arrive late, he said. "We weren't able to negotiate."
Mr. Muñoz said, "The tradition of social dialogue is disappearing." He said he considered it a question of manners and attitude, but also of strategy in a globalized company. "The bosses here are young," he said. "They don't know how to listen and manage people. They don't have the power to decide."
The press office at Caterpillar here said only that the situation was "sensitive" and that the company would have no comment.
Dominique Quercia, 36, has been a welder for 15 years, and has a 9-year-old daughter. "I'm fighting for the people here, because it makes me heartsick to see people leave the company," he said. "They have kids to feed." New jobs are scarce, he said. "These people," he added, "are going to be in deep trouble," despite French social protections.
Michel Laboisseret, the C.G.T.'s main delegate to both Caterpillar plants, said the hope was that politicians, both national and local, would bring pressure to bear on the company to reopen negotiations in earnest with the unions.
"We're realistic," Mr. Laboisseret said. "We know we won't be able to avoid layoffs. The point is to save the maximum number of jobs."
Management has agreed to a fund of 50 million euros (about $66 million) to pay and help retrain those laid off. The unions want the number of jobs to be lost reduced to 600, but they also want the same special fund and a promise that Caterpillar will keep the plants open for at least five years.
Mr. Piccarreta has four children. "I'm 53 and I still have years to work," he said. "I'm fighting against this economic system that makes men, women and entire families suffer. Everyone realizes this now. This system is starting to explode; it should no longer exist. It makes the entire world suffer, it enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor."
Mr. Palomera was more practical. "We don't want to break this company," he said. "We just want to work."
Maïa de la Baume contributed reporting.
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16) Gates Takes His Case for Military Budget on the Road
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
April 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/us/politics/17gates.html?ref=us
CARLISLE, Pa. - Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates took his campaign for the Pentagon's budget to one of the nation's premier military institutions on Thursday as he pressed his argument for shifting billions of dollars from future Army weapons programs to the more immediate needs of the country's two wars.
"For too long, there was a belief, or a hope, that Iraq and Afghanistan were exotic distractions that would be wrapped up relatively soon," Mr. Gates told a sometimes skeptical audience of officers and civilians at the Army War College here in south-central Pennsylvania.
As a result, Mr. Gates said, weapons and equipment most urgently needed for Iraq and Afghanistan were "fielded ad hoc and on the fly" and with temporary financing by Congress "that would go away when the wars did, if not sooner."
Mr. Gates, a former director of central intelligence, was on the fourth day of a weeklong political swing to sell the Pentagon's half-trillion-dollar 2010 budget, an exercise that has left his adversaries - many in the military contracting industry and Congress - taken aback by what they say is both his deftness and his aggressiveness.
Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who presided over six years of robust wartime budgets, never had to make difficult choices about killing weapons programs and so never undertook a similar campaign. Mr. Gates, who replaced Mr. Rumsfeld in 2006, spent the last two years of the Bush administration focused on problems in Iraq rather than on the bottom line.
But now that Mr. Gates is settling in as President Obama's defense chief for what seems likely to be longer than a single year - his expected tenure when Mr. Obama offered him the job - he has opened an offensive to overhaul Pentagon spending and the way the military does business. His proposals include cutting back on the Air Force's most advanced fighter jet, the F-22, but adding programs in other areas, so that the Pentagon budget is projected to grow by 4 percent in 2010, to $534 billion.
The changes were all announced, executives in the military industry noted, when Congress was out of town on a spring break and less able to mount loud objections.
"Gates didn't spend his career at the C.I.A. for nothing," said George Behan, the chief of staff to Representative Norm Dicks, a Washington Democrat who is a member of the defense appropriations subcommittee. "He waited until Jack Murtha was in the hospital and my boss was in Mexico, Brazil, Panama and Colombia."
Mr. Behan was referring to Representative John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and defense appropriations subcommittee chairman who had knee-replacement surgery during the break.
Mr. Gates encountered some resistance to his budget at the war college, where an Army officer told him in a question-and-answer session that the proposal to cut back on an expensive Army weapons system "appeared like a unilateral decision on your part."
Mr. Gates responded that trimming the Future Combat Systems, a mix of robotic sensors and combat vehicles designed to provide soldiers better intelligence on the battlefield, "was the hardest decision I had to make." He said he had conferred with the Army leadership, including the Army chief of staff, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., "and I made a decision I think it's fair to say they disagree with."
Mr. Gates, who had proposed keeping the sensors but canceling the combat vehicles, said he believed that the vehicles were too light and not well suited to the roadside bombs and other threats in Iraq and Afghanistan. The premise behind the old combat vehicles, he said, "was belied by the close-quarters combat, urban warfare and increasingly lethal forms of ambush that we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan."
He pledged to put $87 billion budgeted for the vehicles toward a program to develop new ones.
Mr. Gates, who spoke to the Air War College in Montgomery, Ala., on Wednesday and is to speak at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., on Friday, said he was taking his budget on the road "not to talk about dollars but ideas."
Loren Thompson, a consultant for Lockheed Martin, maker of the F-22, had another view. "His message is that a lot of thought went into this and this reflects emerging military needs," Mr. Thompson said. "But this is a budget-cutting exercise masquerading as a strategic shift."
Representatives of other contractors said that for now they were holding their fire, in part because Mr. Gates had successfully promoted himself as a reformer. They said they did not want to take him on in a public relations battle that would cast them as part of the lavish, over-budget old order.
But that could change when Capitol Hill is in business next week, they said.
"He's done a very good job publicly in controlling his message, but it will be interesting to see what happens when Congress comes back," said Douglas A. Birkey, the director of government relations for the Air Force Association, which has opposed the cuts in the F-22.
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17) Child Obesity Is Linked to Chemicals in Plastics
By Jennifer 8. Lee
April 17, 2009, 1:31 pm
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/child-obesity-is-linked-to-chemicals-in-plastics/
Exposure to chemicals used in plastics may be linked with childhood obesity, according to results from a long-term health study on girls who live in East Harlem and surrounding communities that were presented to community leaders on Thursday by researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center.
The chemicals in question are called phthalates, which are used to to make plastics pliable and in personal care products. Phthalates, which are absorbed into the body, are a type of endocrine disruptor - chemicals that affect glands and hormones that regulate many bodily functions. They have raised concerns as possible carcinogens for more than a decade, but attention over their role in obesity is relatively recent.
The research linking endocrine disruptors with obsesity has been growing recently. A number of animals studies have shown that exposing mice to some endocrine disruptors causes them be more obese. Chemicals that have raised concern include Bisphenol A (which is used in plastics) and perfluorooctanoic acid, which is often used to create nonstick surfaces.
However, the East Harlem study, which includes data published in the journal Epidemiology, presents some of the first evidence linking obesity and endocrine disruptors in humans.
The researchers measured exposure to phthalates by looking at the children's urine. "The heaviest girls have the highest levels of phthalates metabolites in their urine," said Dr. Philip J. Landrigan, a professor of pediatrics at Mount Sinai, one of the lead researchers on the study. "It goes up as the children get heavier, but it's most evident in the heaviest kids."
This builds upon a larger Mount Sinai research effort called "Growing Up Healthy in East Harlem," which has looked at various health factors in East Harlem children over the last 10 years, including pesticides, diet and even proximity to bodegas.
About 40 percent of the children in East Harlem are considered either overweight or obese. "When we say children, I'm talking about kindergarten children, we are talking about little kids," Dr. Landrigan said. "This is a problem that begins early in life."
The Growing Up Healthy study involves more than 300 children in East Harlem, and an additional 200 or so children in surrounding community.
The phthalate study follows a separate group of about 400 girls in the same communities, who range in age from 9 to 11.
One thing researchers have found is that the levels of phthalates measured in children in both studies are significantly higher than the average levels that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have measured for children across the entire United States.
The findings may presage a new approach to thinking about obesity - drawing environmental factors into a central part of the equation. "Most people think childhood obesity is an imbalance between how much they eat and how much they play," Dr. Landrigan said.
But he thinks the impact of endocrine disruptors on obesity could be more significant than many people believe. "Most people think it's marginal," he said, paling in comparison with diet and exercise.
But he likened it with the impact of lead on a child's I.Q. "Lead never makes more than 3 or 4 percent difference in margin, but 3 to 5 I.Q. points is a big deal," he said.
Of course, at this stage, researchers cannot say if the exposure actually causes obesity, simply that it seems to be linked. "Right now it's a correlation; we don't know if it's cause and effect or an accidental finding," Dr. Landrigan said. "The $64,000 question is, what is causal pathway? Does it go through the thyroid gland? Does it change fat metabolism?"
The National Children's Study, which will follow 100,000 children from across the country from birth to age 21, will look more broadly at endocrine disruptors and other issues.
"Some of the clues that come out of East Harlem will actually be pursued in the larger one," Dr. Landrigan said.
Meanwhile, Dr. Landrigan advised people to reduce their exposure to phthalates as a precautionary measure. "You can't avoid them completely, but you can certainly reduce their exposure," he said.
It's somewhat difficult to do, since many things do not contain labels identifying phthalates, and in the case of perfumes they can simply be labeled as "fragrance."
Phthalates are found in certain personal care products (like nail polish and cosmetics), though recent regulation has encouraged companies to reduce or eliminate them.
They are also found in common everyday objects, including vinyl siding, toys and pacifiers. A number of environmental Web sites, including The Daily Green, have advised certain strategies, including learning to recognize the abbreviations for certain common phthalates and to prefer certain kinds of recyclable plastics over others.
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