by TChris

Ansar Mahmood took a break from his job delivering pizzas for Domino's to take some pictures of the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains to send to his family in Pakistan. He knocked on the door of a nearby water treatment center and asked an employee to take his picture in front of the scenic view. When he returned to Domino's in Greenport that evening, the police were waiting for him.

He was handcuffed and placed in a holding area at the police station, in Hudson. There he was questioned by a stream of federal agents who had converged on this quiet city in Columbia County, a popular antiques center 109 miles north of New York City.

They wanted to know why he was interested in the water-treatment facility, what connection he had to the World Trade Center attack. Mr. Mahmood recalled explaining that he did not even know that there was a water-treatment plant.

Racial profiling? Not much doubt of that. An illegal detention? Absolutely. It isn't a crime to photograph scenery (or even public buildings), and no terrorist is going to ask someone to take his picture in front of a potential target. Mahmood was one of thousands of people swept up and detained in the wake of 9/11. Whatever unreasonable suspicions law enforcement agents may have harbored could have been dispelled by questioning Mahmood without taking him into custody.

Mahmood was working legally with the benefit of a green card, but he's still detained. Investigators who searched his apartment learned that he helped out a Pakistani couple by co-signing their apartment lease and registering their car in his name. On the questionable advice of a court-appointed lawyer, he pled guilty to "harboring illegal aliens" (even though he didn't know their visas had expired) and now faces deportation.

Activists are fighting on his behalf, and they've attracted some impressive supporters, including Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Richard Durbin of Illinois, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin and Patrick Leahy of Vermont. This is a fight they -- and Mahmood -- deserve to win.

by TChris

Can we trust the Pentagon to investigate itself? In addition to criminal investigations of specific abuse allegations, the military has opened six broader investigations into the treatment of prisoners. But by charging each investigation with a narrow and specific task, the Pentagon assures itself that no investigation is likely to follow the evidence very far up the chain of command.

None of the investigations has been assigned to look specifically at higher-ups at the Pentagon, or at leadership in Central Command, which has responsibility for Iraq. Even the investigation most eagerly anticipated by Congress, Maj. Gen. George Fay's look at military interrogators, is expected to stop well short of determining if any responsibility lies with top generals or Pentagon policy-makers, because Fay's probe is designed to focus on the role of military intelligence at the prison.

Only an independent investigation can reach to the top of the Pentagon.

"No one who is a uniformed officer is going to have the authority to get into [questioning] Rumsfeld" or his top deputies, said Scott Silliman, a military justice expert and law professor at Duke University. "The only way you're going to crack that nut is to have either the statutorily independent [Pentagon] inspector general take a look at it, or Congress."

Donald Rumsfeld undoubtedly hoped to preempt an independent investigation by appointing a panel, headed by former defense secretary James Schlesinger, to review the military's detention operations and decide whether further inquiries are warranted. But the panel, hand-picked by Rumsfeld, is hardly independent, as evidenced by remarks made by one of its members, former Republican Congresswoman Tillie Fowler, who insists that Rumsfeld will not be a focus of the panel's investigation.

Sean Paul's The Agonist is the latest weblog to move to scoop. Fix your bookmarks, so you won't miss a day.

Our local Denver news just reported that John Kerry has canceled his trip to Colorado tomorrow and Monday. He is going to go back to Washington and suspend campaigning for a few days, obviously linked to former President Reagan's death.

ABC News Australia is reporting that the Taliban offered to give Osama bin Laden to the U.S. a year before the 9/11 attacks.

United States and Taliban officials met secretly in Frankfurt almost a year before the September 11 attacks to discuss terms for the Afghans to hand over Osama bin Laden, according to a German television documentary. No agreement was reached and no further negotiations took place before the suicide hijackings in 2001, which bin Laden subsequently hailed in a videotape as the work of his Al Qaeda network.

ZDF television quoted Kabir Mohabbat, an Afghan-American businessman, as saying he tried to broker a deal between the Americans and the purist Islamic Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, who were sheltering bin Laden. He quoted Taliban foreign minister Mullah Wakil Ahmed Mutawakil as saying: "You can have him whenever the Americans are ready. Name us a country and we will extradite him". [link via Buzzflash]

We've been asking this question for weeks....why did Attorney General John Ashcroft pick Lance McCotter to set up U.S. prisons in Iraq? The New York Times has been on top of the story as well. Sunday, the paper asks the question again. It was McCotter, whose chequered past in prison administration is startlingly abysmal, who picked Abu Ghraib to be the main prison and then directed its reconstruction. Neither the Justice Department nor McCotter will answer.

This is a gruesome article, but it's necessary reading. And, doesn't this sound familiar? In the case of one inmate in McCotter's jail who hung himself:

...when a guard noticed Mr. Johnson had hanged himself, the officer on duty first went looking for a camera to record the scene, rather than cut Mr. Johnson down. "The response of the jail was to protect themselves by taking pictures rather than to save his life," [Johnson's attorney] Mr. Haas said.

In the largest settlement in its history, the county of Sacramento has agreed to pay $15 million to more than 16,000 people who were illegally strip searched by the county Sheriff's Department at the jail, between 2000 and 2003. The county will have to pay $2 million, and its insurance company will pay the rest:

"This practice was ruled unconstitutional as early as 1984, yet there seemed to be no attempt to conform to the law," said attorney Mark Merin, who filed the suits. "People were stripped naked and dehumanized before arraignment. It was standard procedure."

The lawsuits also resulted in a change of policy:

Under the new policy, only prisoners being booked on charges involving violence, weapons or drugs may be subjected to visual body-cavity searches, and those searches must be conducted out of sight of other inmates and arrestees.

There's a graduated system of payment--here's who will get the most:

Are you a budding filmmaker? Are you against the war on drugs? Then check this out. The 3rd Annual Drug War Vigil Film Festival will be held in Vancouver, B.C. in September. There's prize money, and your film can be submitted on plain old VHS, or in high 8 or digital 8. It should be 30 minutes or less on any topic related to cannabis, drugs and the drug war, and/or Harm Reduction.

The festival is the project of the Drug War Vigil Memorial Group:

The Drug War Vigil Memorial Group is a social justice think tank that was founded in the fall of 2000, dedicated to ending the War on Drugs. We recognize that the militarization of this medical issue and the criminalization of the chronically sick, terminally ill and chemically dependent have resulted in the needless loss of human life, and that this is the true crime.

Former President Ronald Reagan died today. May he rest in peace. To endure Alzheimers' for a decade is a cruel fate. Here's an open thread to discuss his life, his Presidency and his legacy

Update: The Washington Post has a long obit up by his biographer. Here's a quote from John Kerry:

Mass. Sen. John Kerry: "Ronald Reagan's love of country was infectious. Even when he was breaking Democrats' hearts, he did so with a smile and in the spirit of honest and open debate."

Kerry's official statement is here.

by TChris

Andres Morales' family moved from Mexico to Hazlewood, Missouri when Andres was one year old. Andres never got around to acquiring citizenship, but Hazlewood is his home. When he returned from a recent visit to Mexico, he was detained at the border.

Immigration officials discovered he had pleaded guilty in 1998 of possessing marijuana with intent to distribute it, and served probation. He had the choice of remaining free to live in Mexico or accepting confinement in Texas while pressing his case to return here.

Andres chose to fight, and spent the next two months in detention. He had little choice; the alternative was to abandon his life. With the help of his attorney, Gene McNary, Morales was able to persuade a judge (over the prosecutor's inevitable objection) to let him withdraw his guilty plea.

The judge agreed that it was manifestly unjust for a guilty plea to lead to Morales' deportation when Morales hadn't been warned of that possibility. Andres isn't out of the woods (the prosecutor may insist on pursuing another conviction) but he is out of confinement, and back helping his mother at the family restaurant.

by TChris

Thanks to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for the next six weeks you can play Republican Survivor. In exchange for your email address, you have the weekly opportunity to watch the Republicans compete against each other before voting one off the island: George Bush, Dick Cheney, Katherine Harris, John Ashcroft, Tom Delay, or Ann Coulter.

by TChris

Vice President Cheney was reportedly interviewed by federal prosecutors investigating the disclosure of Valerie Plame's status as an undercover CIA officer. As anybody within sniffing distance of a federal investigation would be wise to do, Cheney is believed to have consulted with counsel prior to the interview. The possible involvement of Cheney's office in the illegal disclosure is suggested by (among others) Plame's husband, Joseph Wilson.

It is not clear when or where Mr. Cheney was interviewed, but he was not questioned under oath and he has not been asked to appear before the grand jury, people officially informed about the case said.

Cheney's office declined comment on the interview.