The new German government held a two-day cabinet conference Tuesday and Wednesday at Schloss Merseburg in Brandenburg. According to Chancellor Angela Merkel of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the meeting was meant to create “a comradely atmosphere in which we can resolve problems in a spirit of mutual trust.”

The meeting was prompted by the open emergence of differences within the governing coalition during the new regime’s first two weeks in office—over tax policy, public health policy and other issues. The disputes arose between the coalition partners—the CDU, the Christian Social Union (CSU) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP).

The direction in which the government is now heading is much clearer after the meeting at Schloss Merseburg. Financial policy decisions were taken that will lead to an unparalleled level of social devastation, beginning at the latest two years from now.

The government is still keeping most of its intentions under wraps, giving out no information about forthcoming budget cuts and delegating the issue of health “reforms” to an inter-ministerial working group, which is to present its proposals next year. The controversial issue of extending the life of Germany’s atomic power plants was also postponed to next year, primarily for tactical reasons.

On the one hand, the government fears the public reaction if it puts all its cards on the table. Above all, it does not want to place in jeopardy next year’s state elections in North Rhine Westphalia. If the CDU/CSU-FDP coalition loses power in the country’s most densely populated state, it will lose its present majority in the Bundesrat (the upper house of parliament).

On the other hand, the chancellor wants to secure support for the impending social attacks from the trade unions and the opposition parties. In order to gain “the consent of all social forces for more employment,” she invited the union leaders, together with the employers’ associations and banks, to a crisis summit in Berlin in early December.

In pro-business circles, “more employment” is a codeword for the dismantling of workers’ rights and the slashing of wages. Since the election, union leaders have demonstrated their readiness to cooperate closely with the new government on these questions.

Among the nominal opposition parties, the Greens are the pioneers when it comes to cutting public expenditure, and Merkel can count on their support. Since they have already joined CDU-led state governments in Hamburg and Saarland, discussions have begun in North Rhine Westphalia as to whether the Greens will help ensure that the CDU remains in power in that state legislature.

As for the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Left Party, they recently signed a coalition agreement in Brandenburg, at the centre of which is the dismantling of 20 percent of public service jobs. State Premier Matthias Platzeck (SPD) justified this by saying that by 2019 Brandenburg’s budget will decline by 25 percent from its current level. In this respect, he is to a certain extent anticipating the policies of the federal government. His finance minister, responsible for proposing the cuts, is a member of the Left Party.

It is in this context that the central message emanating from Schloss Merseburg should be seen. Federal Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) and Economics Minister Rainer Brüderle (FDP) made a demonstrative show of unity before the press, announcing that taxes would be lowered, the European Union deficit criteria would be upheld, and the brake applied to federal debt, as enshrined last summer in the federal constitution. In 2011, taxes are to be reduced by around 20 billion euros and new graduated rates will replace the present progressive taxation system. In the same year, the budget deficit will be substantially reduced in order to reduce the federal debt.

It is clear what this means. Pointing to the exploding deficit, the government will cut public expenditure to an extent that has never before been witnessed, hitting government subsidies to both the pension fund and education spending. New and even greater gaps will arise in the coffers of the state legislatures and municipalities, which are already strapped for cash, leading to higher charges for services.

Economist Peter Bofinger commented in the Passaue Neue Presse: “I fear that a narrow gauge federal government is intentionally being brought about here. The first step was to agree to put the brake on the federal debt. Now taxes are to be massively lowered. The result will be to force a brutal cut in expenditure starting from 2011. Then the crowbar will be taken to all government spending.”

Bofinger is member of the German Council of Economic Experts. According to his calculations, the annual budgetary deficit will rise to 100 billion euros if the announced tax reductions come into force. However, the federal deficit must be lowered to 10 billion euros by 2016 in order to meet the legal requirement for reining in the federal debt. “Nobody in the federal government is saying how cuts of 30, 40, 50 billion euros can be implemented. But this is what is threatened in the coming years,” Bofinger concluded.

One item will surely remain exempt from cuts—the defence budget. The cabinet conference broke off its deliberations for one hour in order to agree to the extension of Armed Forces missions in Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa and off the Lebanese coast. The upper limit for Germany’s troop deployment in Afghanistan remains 4,500, but this may be raised following the international conference on Afghanistan at the beginning of next year.

The meeting in Schloss Merseburg has set the stage for a sweeping redistribution of income and wealth from those at the bottom of society to those at the top. The social divisions that have been growing for years will be widened. While the government is striving might and main to conceal this from the public, those occupying the executive suites at banks and corporations have long since gotten the message.

According to a report in the business daily Handelsblatt, the thirty largest German companies listed on the DAX exchange plan to disburse 20.3 billion euros in dividends to their shareholders this year, despite falling profits. This amounts to approximately 71 percent of their net profits. In the previous record year of 2007, they paid out 45 percent of their profits.

While the government is lowering taxes, saying business needs more capital to invest, the large corporations are doling out these funds to their shareholders. The planned dividend payout by the DAX-registered corporations corresponds almost exactly to the planned tax reduction of 20 billion euros.

Last year, the Pentagon’s premiere research arm gave IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) nearly $5 million to make electronics that mimic the “function, size and power consumption” of a cat’s brain. Last week, IBM’s lead researcher on the project, Dharmendra S. Modha, announced that he had made major progress toward that goal, simulating on a supercomputer the number of neurons and synapses inside a feline mind. Now, a leading neuroscientist is blasting the whole project as a “scam” and a “hoax.”

Modha told a supercomputing conference that his cortical simulator had generated the digital equivalent of a billion neurons connected by 10 trillion individual synapses. It was, apparently, the first baby step toward Pentagon mad science division DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) goal of re-creating a brain that’s as compact, as efficient and as power-smart as the one inside a house pet. Some colleagues went so far as to compare it to the Large Hadron Collider.

But neuroscientist Henry Markram is considerably less impressed. “What IBM reported is a scam — no where near a cat-scale brain simulation,” he writes in an open letter to Bernard S. Myerson, IBM’s Chief Technology Officer. “I am absolutely shocked at this announcement. Not because it is any kind of technical feat, but because of the mass deception of the public.”

Markram isn’t exactly a disinterested observer, as IEEE Spectrum’s Sally Adee notes. He’s got his own ersatz mind project, called Blue Brain, that’s also affiliated with IBM. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Markram claims Modha has simply put together a “PR stunt here to ride on Blue Brain.”

Still, such public criticism is unusual — especially when you consider that it’s also an indirect indictment of DARPA, one of the leading funders of artificial intelligence research.

All these kinds of simulations are trivial and have been around for decades — simply called artificial neural network (ANN) simulations. We even stooped to doing these kinds of simulations as benchmark tests four years ago with 10’s of millions of such points…. If we (or anyone else) wanted to we could easily do this for a billion “points,” but we would certainly not call it a cat-scale simulation. It is really no big deal to simulate a billion points interacting if you have a big enough computer. The only step here is that they have at their disposal a big computer. For a grown-up “researcher” to get excited because one can simulate billions of points interacting is ludicrous.

…This is light years away from a cat brain, not even close to an ant’s brain in complexity. It is highly unethical of Mohda to mislead the public in making people believe they have actually simulated a cat’s brain…. That IBM and DARPA would support such deceptive announcements is even more shocking.

I think the proper response here is: mee-yow! I can’t wait for round three of this cat-brain cat fight.

Items that were purportedly the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s blood and parts of his brain were briefly offered for online sale on the Ebay auction site for 22,000 US dollars.

The neo-fascist granddaughter of Il Duce, Alessandra Mussolini, said the remains were stolen from Milan’s Policlinico hospital and she immediately informed the police when she found out.

“This is very serious, these are the kinds of things we have to guard against,” added Ms. Mussolini, who was attending a seminar on internet crime when the listing was discovered,” BBC quoted her as saying.

After he was killed, the body of Mussolini was taken to Policlinico hospital for an autopsy.

However, the hospital has denied the claims that it possessed the Mussolini remains in recent times, saying that they were destroyed years ago.

Ebay spokesperson Irina Pavlova said that the listing violated its own regulations and was removed within hours

“It was removed before 11 a.m., a few hours after it was put online and before anyone had made any bids,” she said.

Benito Mussolini was killed by communist partisans in 1945 and his body was put on public display in a Milan square. He was then buried in an unmarked grave in Musocco, the municipal cemetery to the north of the city.

Lebanon’s new cabinet has agreed to acknowledge the Islamic Hezbollah movement’s right to use armed resistance against the Israeli acts of hostility.

A cabinet committee commissioned with drafting a policy statement for the country’s new government met for the ninth time on Wednesday, when it reached an agreement on the issue, said Information Minister Tarek Mitri.

He added that the new statement would retain the same clause approved by the previous cabinet.

The clause states the right of “Lebanon, its government, its people, its army and its resistance [a common reference to Hezbollah in Lebanon]” to liberate all the Lebanese territory.

The decision came in the face of opposition from some members of the ruling majority against the arms possessed by Hezbollah, which parried an Israeli offensive against southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

Mitri said that reservations concerning the clause by members of the Western-backed majority would be addressed in the government program.

Hezbollah, which has two ministers in the 30-member unity cabinet, maintains its arms are necessary to protect the country against any future aggression by Israel, which left southern Lebanon in 2000 after more than two decades of occupation.

The German army’s chief of staff has stepped down after reports of Afghan civilian deaths in a September air strike involving German troops.

Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg told parliament on Thursday Wolfgang Schneiderhan had submitted his resignation.

Schneiderhan “has released himself from his duties at his own request,” zu Guttenberg said, thanking the former chief for his services.

The Afghan government has said that the September 4 operation, in which 69 militants and more than 30 civilians were killed, was the deadliest involving German troops since World War II.

Following the strike, Franz Josef Jung, who was defense minister at the time, denied there were any civilian victims.

However, Germany’s Bild newspaper reported on Thursday that videos and a secret military report had clearly pointed to civilian casualties at the time the government and the military were denying such reports.

As inspector general, Schneiderhan holds the highest-ranking military post in the German armed forces. He defended the operation at the time, but offered his resignation after the reports.

Germany, with about 4,500 troops in Afghanistan, is the third largest contributor to the NATO-led mission in the war-torn country.

Most Germans oppose the involvement of their forces in Afghanistan, according to opinion polls, but the German government has agreed to extend the army’s mandate there by a year.

I was an average high school student. I had to attend summer school between my junior and senior years just to graduate with my class and even then, on graduation night, I wasn’t sure there’d be a diploma waiting for me. I was always more interested in playing ball and chasing girls. I was more successful at the former than the latter.

After graduation I did manage to earn an athletic scholarship to play baseball at a small Florida college but after two years of playing ball, and earning less than one year’s worth of college credit, I realized I was wasting my time as well as the college’s resources and decided I needed to do something else until I figured out what I wanted to do.

So, being the son of a 20-year retired Air Force Tech Sergeant, I joined the military. I spoke to all the branches and in the end it was the Navy that won me over for a six-year enlistment. They enticed me with visions of advanced electronics training, fantastic marketability in the civilian world and a chance to see the world. Remember the old Navy slogan: “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.” Oh boy!

From the moment I arrived in Orlando, Florida for my basic training I realized what a joke it was. If you want to know what military basic training is like just watch any episode of Gomer Pyle, it’s exactly like that. Just as ridiculous.

The military always advertises that it wants the best and the brightest, but the first thing they do is try to break you down and then reprogram you. They want to reprogram you into a person that will follow orders without question; something tantamount to a frontal lobotomy that leaves subjects unable to think for themselves. Well then why do they need the best and the brightest if they are not meant to think for themselves? Given the chaos of battle, to strive to have a force that is not expected to think for themselves is not only ridiculous but dangerous as well yet the military, under the guise of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), regularly prosecutes soldiers who had the courage, intellect and wisdom to do what needed to be done in the field to preserve lives even though they weren’t told to do it. That’s called “disobeying a direct order” from some arrogant, bonehead hundreds or thousands of miles away.

One is taught that there is a right way and a wrong way to do things and the military will teach you the right way. Anyone not doing things the right way then is to be looked upon with contempt and suspicion. The military teaches you how to micromanage life, as if they know how to do this, to the point that you find yourself counting brush strokes when you brush your teeth. Every move is to have purpose and be approved or else you will be prosecuted by the UCMJ.

The military, see, is a complete subculture within America. All soldiers are considered to be government property, no kidding, and there exist regulations in the UCMJ that can mean loss of pay, confinement, and even jail time if that government property is damaged somehow or if it doesn’t do what it is told to do. Again, even though the government says it wants the best and the brightest, if the sidewalks outside are icy during the winter soldiers are not allowed out for fear of them falling and injuring themselves. As ridiculous and asinine as that sounds it is fact; I lived it. So the broken logic is that we want the best to go fight in foreign lands and kill people and operate multi-million dollar equipment but we don’t trust them to walk down an icy sidewalk without hurting themselves like thousands of civilians do daily in the wintertime.

It’s an abusive subculture that demands abject subjectivity and a complete lack of reason, logic and intellect. The military trains people to be killers; puts those people in a war zone where at any moment, at any second their lives could be over and then prosecutes them if they don’t kill someone in accordance with the “rules of engagement.” That is to say: even though you are in a war zone there are rules to killing people and it doesn’t matter that a month earlier you were teaching 8th-grade history and your national guard unit got called to battle in Iraq. You need to pull that trigger and end another human life but only after that person clearly tries to kill you or else you can be prosecuted under the UCMJ for murder. I’ll let you marinate on that thought for a second.

I’ve never killed anyone but I don’t think you have to in order to imagine what that could do to a rational person’s psyche. I would imagine you would have to put yourself into a mental state that disassociates what you’ve always known to be reality and convince yourself that somehow what you are doing is right; that if you don’t kill that other guy, he will kill you, so you pull the trigger.

Then these poor souls come home and are expected to re-associate their minds with the reality of a civilized society because if they don’t then they will be prosecuted under the UCMJ for insubordination or worse: they might kill someone. The whole thing is a study in mind control conducted by the least-educated people in our society.

It still amazes me how parents brag about their children serving in the military in Afghanistan or Iraq. They talk about how some Arabs dropped planes on their heads on 9/11/01 so they are all for going over there and killing as many of those sons-a-bitches as possible and damn proud that their children are helping make the world a safer place. Who’s going to help the make the world a safer place from America?

What is going on? Lynch and Haney explain the findings by arguing that white male jurors tend to exhibit less empathy toward black defendants. This echoes the argument by Costelloe et al, according to which economic anxiety and lack of empathy are related.

What are we to do, though? Exclude white males from voting on initiatives and serving on juries? Of course, not all white males lack empathy and are punitive. But the next time the propositions come around, or the next time we serve on a jury, we should ask ourselves how our demographics, experiences, and biases, impact our opinions about crime.

The Hispanic College Fund has opened up its student applications for the 2010-11 scholarship season.

More than $2 million will be awarded in scholarships to about 500 Latino students from the United States and Puerto Rico.

Entries will be open until Feb. 16.

This is the 17th year the Hispanic College Fund has supported Latino students through its scholarship program. The organization has awarded more than $15 million in scholarships to about 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

Last year, the fund received 38,000 applications for about 600 available scholarships.

To qualify for the scholarships, undergraduate and graduate students must:

Maintain a 3.0 out of 4.0 grade-point average.

Be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident residing in the United States or Puerto Rico.

Be enrolled full time at an accredited university for the 2010-2011 school year.

Must demonstrate financial needs.

Certain scholarships are restricted by major.

Scholarships range in amount from $500 to $10,000. The money can be used to cover tuition and academic fees and expenses.

For more information, visit www.hispanicfund.org.

After the sickening murder of a 9-year-old boy in Washington, our friend Spencer Ackerman made an impassioned plea: U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus for D.C. metro police chief. The idea of America’s leading counterinsurgent taking on one of its most crime-ridden towns definitely has a certain visceral appeal. But militarizing our approach to policing is an idea that could backfire in a hurry.

Spencer’s done an outstanding job of explaining counterinsurgency as a progressive military doctrine: The whole point is to not uphold the social status quo, it’s an attempt to get at the “root causes” of violence through political reform and public works. These days, that’s a job for both the armed forces and the police. “The ’soldiers aren’t cops’ argument isn’t going to fly here,” he wrote. After all, talented military officers are now telling their fellow soldiers to “view neighborhood security as if they were running Kansas City police patrols.”

Ackerman’s not the first to pick up on the idea that smart counterinsurgents could teach the police a thing or two. Last week, Karl Vick of the Washington Post reported on how the police in Salinas, Calif., enlisted the help of the Naval Postgraduate School to help them combat a homicide wave. And earlier this year, Andrew “Abu Muqawama” Exum hosted an interesting discussion thread about using counterinsurgency tactics in Oakland.

At first glance, counterinsurgency (at least the “soft,” population-centric American version) bears a fair amount of resemblance to community policing: It’s all about changing the dynamic in the communities where insurgents operate, encouraging troops to “walk the beat” and bringing in social services. And many of the tools of the modern counterinsurgent — forensic exploitation, pattern analysis and social-network diagramming — would be familiar to any detective. (The Law Enforcement Professionals program for combating roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan even called on retired agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to help take down insurgent networks.) And if you look at the geographic reach and organizational sophistication of some gangs — think Mara Salvatrucha or 18 — and it’s tempting to draw comparisons with, say, a Hezbollah or a Hamas.

But to the COINdinistas I would say: Be careful what you wish for. Counterinsurgency is still a tool for dealing with political emergencies, and it involves a heavy degree of population control. And at home, it’s a bridge too far.

“Policing can be informed by counterinsurgency – and they are in fact similar at some points,” said John P. Sullivan, a lieutenant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and an expert on transnational gangs. “But at others they really diverge. So you need to be very, very careful.”

Sullivan, the co-founder of the Los Angeles Terrorism Early Warning Group, told Danger Room the parallels with community policing — patrolling contested areas, identifying centers of gravity — make it tempting to view counterinsurgency as a tool for containing gang violence. But domestic policing and military operations, he added, are inherently different. “It [counterinsurgency theory] is attractive, and I think that people looking at gangs should look at the literature,” he said. “But to wholesale take it in and do it is probably not a good idea.”

Take, for instance, checkpoint operations — a regular feature of any counterinsurgency. No harm, right?  Well, the police in Washington tried that; the whole idea was to “protect” the endangered population of the Trinidad neighborhood by cordoning it off and restricting the movement of vehicles. A federal appeals court struck down the operation as unconstitutional. Same for “cordon and knock” — going house to house, politely searching for contraband. The police tried that in D.C., too, under something called the “Safe Homes Initiative.” It didn’t go down well, either.

That’s not to mention the more potent intelligence tools of control that are essential to fighting insurgents: Human intelligence (i.e. informants); intrusive surveillance; biometric collection. Those methods are available to domestic law enforcement, but the point is counterinsurgency is to establish sweeping civil control. Anacostia ain’t Anbar province (Al Anbar Governorate).  As Sullivan described it, the bar for collecting intelligence on your own population has to be much higher.

“The liberty issues are vital,” Sullivan said. “What gives you legitimacy in the long haul is preserving liberty while providing security. If you don’t end up doing it right, it ends up enhancing the legitimacy of the gang.”

Want to see what a place looks like when counterinsurgency starts to seep into policing? For a softer example, take a look at the United Kingdom. I’m not going to wade into Second Amendment territory here, but suffice to say that the United Kingdom has a pretty expansive surveillance system that in part was developed in response to IRA terror. (It also has a more robust Official Secrets Act.)  For a more dismal example of what happens when the police take enthusiastically to checkpoint operations, take a look at Russia. We’ve been spared much of this, because we tend to intervene in other countries’ counterinsurgencies. Let’s not start looking for one at home.

There is still plenty of overlap between good policing and counterinsurgency “best practices.” Collecting unbelievably fine-grained statistics and holding local commanders responsible for their patrol areas are essential tasks. But we are dealing with two different things. Insurgency, at its heart, is a political struggle. I don’t see drug dealers or street gangs expressing a political grievance, or trying to control of some part of the government. We have an unhappy tendency to declare “war” on problems (drugs, crime, poverty, terrorism) that defy easy solution; do we need to treat a D.C. crime wave like a mini-Malaya Emergency?

Cleared of murder charges after serving 18 years, Fernando Bermudez was freed on Friday. See NYT story here and my previous post.

Four witnesses recanted their testimony, stating that they had been pressured by the government into identifying Mr. Bermudez as the shooter.

The main witness, Efraim Lopez, testified falsely under a cooperation agreement guaranteeing that he would not be charged with any crimes, even though he was centrally involved in the shooting. Judge John Cataldo concluded that the government either knew or should have known Lopez was lying. Judge Cataldo’s opinion is available here. Although the government concedes that its main witness Lopez perjured himself at trial, it has announced that it intends to appeal.

PENSACOLA, Fla. — A military police officer has been charged in the death of a pregnant Florida Panhandle woman whose body washed ashore in a bag earlier this month.

Master-at-Arms 3rd Class (SW) Zachary Littleton, 25, was arrested at Naval Air Station Pensacola on Monday. He is being held without bond on a homicide charge at the Escambia County Jail.

Investigators think Littleton, who is married, fathered Samira Watkins’s fetus and wanted her to have an abortion. She was two months pregnant at the time.

The 25-year-old woman was last seen leaving her grandmother’s home in late October.

Jail records did not list an attorney for Littleton.

Littleton enlisted in August 2004. He has been stationed at the Pensacola Naval Air Station since September 2008, according to Navy records.

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A sometime prostitute who alleges she was sexually assaulted by an on-duty Riverside Police Department officer testified today he never threatened her, but she felt she had no choice but to comply with his request for sex.

“I was like, ‘This is so unreal. This isn’t happening,’” said the witness, identified only as Nadia. She is one of three women alleging former Riverside police Officer Robert A. Forman demanded sexual favors.

The 39-year-old defendant, who was terminated from the police force shortly after his arrest in October 2008, is charged with two counts of forced oral copulation and one count of sexual battery. He is free on a $50,000 bond.

Nadia testified that she knew Forman from several prior encounters, and he had never hassled or busted her for openly using drugs, typically crack cocaine.

The witness, a convicted felon currently serving time for robbery, prostituted herself to earn money to buy drugs, according to trial testimony.

She said that sometime in March 2008, Forman ran into her while on patrol in downtown Riverside. The witness said she was using crack at the time, but was not fearful of being arrested by the 12-year law enforcement veteran, even after he told her to get into the back of his patrol unit.

According to Nadia, Forman appeared to be “high” and handed her a bag of methamphetamine. The woman said the officer drove her into a dimly lit, tree-lined area — possibly a park — where he stopped the patrol car.

Nadia said Forman walked around to the rear of the vehicle, opened the door, unzipped his pants and indicated he wanted to be copulated.

According to the woman, she performed oral sex on the defendant and immediately became frightened of what might happen next.

“Why didn’t you leave? Why didn’t you refuse this officer?” asked Riverside County Deputy District Attorney Elan Ben Zektser.

“It didn’t seem acceptable to do that at that time,” she replied.

“Did the fact that he was a cop … have anything to do with your complying with his request to put his penis in your mouth?” asked Zekster.

“Of course it did,” she said.

Nadia testified the officer drove her back to the downtown area, then went to an ATM and withdrew $50, which he gave to her after instructing her not to discuss what had taken place.

On cross-examination, defense attorney Mark Johnson spotlighted apparent inconsistencies between the woman’s testimony and what she told investigators.

The attorney questioned why Nadia remembered Forman saying, “How about some head?” while telling detectives in earlier interviews that the officer just stuck “it in my face” without saying a word.

Johnson also questioned the woman about her contact with Forman later that same night and what she did with the money Forman allegedly gave her.

Nadia said she likely used the cash to purchase crack, but didn’t exclude the possibility that Forman actually gave her the $50 to set up a drug deal so the defendant and a fellow officer could make an arrest. She acknowledged talking with Forman later that night on University Avenue.

“If you’re giving us different versions of what happened, how do we know which version to believe?” asked Johnson.

“The more I talk about it, the more I remember,” she responded.

Johnson suggested the woman was trying to “help the state make its case,” but she denied tailoring her testimony.

A woman named Kathryn testified last week that Forman sexually assaulted her at her Mission Inn Avenue apartment.

According to the woman, the alleged April 18, 2008, encounter occurred a few hours after Forman and other officers searched her residence following a domestic disturbance complaint.

The commander of the Chinese Air Force has described dominating the space as an imperative for the country’s security.

The commander of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), Xu Qiliang, said on Monday superiority in space could give a nation control over war zones both on land and at sea, AFP reported.

Speaking to the army newspaper, he said, “As far as the revolution in military affairs is concerned, the competition between military forces is moving towards outer space… this is a historical inevitability and a development that cannot be turned back.”

China, however, has joined forces with Russia proposing a treaty which banned the use of weapons in space.

The two states came up with the idea after the US Navy gunned down an ‘out-of-control’ satellite in February 2008 amid reports that the orbiter harbored nuclear material.

Beijing and Moscow interpreted the move as an attempt at testing ‘anti-missile defense system’s capability to destroy orbiting satellites’.

“The PLA air force must establish in a timely manner the concepts of space security, space interests and space development,” Qiliang said. “Only power can protect peace.”

A state-commissioned research panel in Japan finds evidence of Tokyo’s 1960 secret pacts with Washington which allow the US to ship nuclear weaponry via the Japanese territory.

On Friday, Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada was notified of the discovery by the 15-member team, which found the files while examining ministry documents.

“The probe is now in the final stage, and we will announce the outcome in January,” Okada said, Kyodo News reported on Saturday.

Nuke-laden American Navy warships and Air Force aircraft were sanctioned by the 1960 deals to enter the Japanese waters. The clandestine understanding has already been pointed to in US documents and confirmed by those involved in the negotiations.

A former Japanese official who served in key ministry posts in the 1980s and 1990s has also confirmed the existence of the document.

”I saw them. I have memories that we looked into them after something happened,” the former official told Kyodo on condition of anonymity.

The two sides are already at odds over Japan’s threats of removing a US air base from its southern island of Okinawa.

Some of the secret deals are reportedly related to the 1972 handover of the control of Okinawa from the US to Japan.

Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama says he will devise a plan to relocate the US military airfield based in Okinawa as soon as possible.

Hatoyama made the remarks after a meeting with his foreign and defense ministers.

His government has called for the US to move its troops off the island, and even Japan altogether.

The new administration in Tokyo has also ordered an investigation into secret US-Japan deals ratified by previous governments.

Washington has about 47,000 troops based in Japan, more than half of which are on Okinawa.

US troops have been continuously stationed on the island since 1945.

Local residents have been angered by crimes committed by US service personnel.

In 1995 the rape of a schoolgirl by three US servicemen infuriated residents of Okinawa.

Japan’s Defense ministry proposes the transfer of some F-15 fighter jet drills out of Okinawa as a condition for implementing the 2006 accord with the US.

Meanwhile, a junior partner in Japan’s coalition government says the airbase should be moved off southern Okinawa to a more remote islet or to US territory in Guam.

The base is also unpopular because of aircraft noise and the risk of accidents and is due to be moved from an urban to a coastal area by 2014.

Demands to close the base on safety grounds grew when, in 2004, a US helicopter crashed in the grounds of a local university.

Tokyo and Washington have been at loggerheads with each other over the presence of US military forces in the country since the new Japanese government took the reigns of power in September.

Thousands of people held rallies against the American military presence during US President Barack Obama’s recent visit to Tokyo.

Microsoft is holding talks with News Corporation and other media-companies to convince them to remove their news content from the Google search engine while continuing to feature their material on the Microsoft search engine. One source told the Financial Times that this initiative had originated with Keith Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and that talks are in their initial stages. News Corp and Microsoft representatives refused to comment.

Excerpt:

When I reached her by phone, Goodnight said, “Our research has shown that child trafficking increases when you have military bases and a strong agricultural presence in the area.” That’s why, this year, before Shaniya Davis’s disappearance and the discovery of her body made “human trafficking” a hot topic, Stop Child Trafficking Now had led marches to raise money and call attention to what Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Scott Cheney said is “an extremely common situation” in our state.

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Of all the factors on the table in the current Afghan strategic review, the War on Drugs and its unintended consequences should be front and center. Our 95-year effort to create a Drug Free America by enforcing world-wide prohibition has twisted our foreign policy out of shape all over the globe and the nightmare in Afghanistan is just the latest manifestation.

It seems to be an open secret that President Hamid Karzai’s brother is a player in the heroin trade, and the whole administration in Kabul is said to be riddled with corruption. Unfortunately, the replacement of Karzai, even if that proved possible, would not change the fundamental dynamic. Nearly a tenth of the population relies on the illegal opium industry for their daily bread. Corruption will be the norm as long as the American people are willing to invest limitless resources manning an arbitrary barricade between the sellers and buyers.

Unfortunately narco-corruption, like narcotics themselves, can penetrate any border and there is growing evidence that this cancer has metastasized into every nook and cranny of the known world. Consider, for example, this headline from London: “Corrupt officers exist throughout the UK police service.”

This jarring assessment of the once-pristine Royal Constabulary comes from Britain’s National Criminal Intelligence Service. According to a document leaked to the Daily Telegraph, the head of the agency warns that “corruption may have reached ‘Level 2′, the situation which occurs in some third world countries.”

The “situation” in the colonies, current and former, is undoubtedly worse. Here’s a two-week random pick from recent U.S. headlines: August 14, a Baton Rouge deputy sheriff is sentenced to 10 years for cocaine distribution. Six days later a Georgia cop goes down on the same charges. The following week a Memphis officer is busted for distributing crack and the next day a U.S. Customs agent in Newark is cuffed for running off with a hundred pounds of cocaine. The day after that a prison guard in Arkansas is nailed for delivering meth to the Pine Bluff maximum security wing, and the head of a Michigan narcotics unit pleads guilty to diverting drugs and cash.

This is a tiny sample of lawmen who were sloppy enough to get caught. But according to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition [LEAP], the virus is everywhere. LEAP co-founder Peter Christ, a retired Police Captain from suburban Buffalo, puts it this way: “You’ve been a police officer four or five years, you’ve seen the wasted energy spent on this drug war, and now you’re standing in a motel room and lying on the bed is a hundred thousand in cash that hasn’t been counted yet. And in your back pocket is a bill from the plumber you can’t pay. And it doesn’t make any difference anyway. So you take your first taste. And then you’re gone.”

In this war as in all wars it’s the foot soldiers who bite the dust. But focus for a second on the staggering amount of cash in play — more than $300 billion a year according to the United Nations — and we would have to be brain dead not to suspect that this corrosion reaches the upper echelons of all governments including our own. As presidents Hamid Karzai, Felipe Calderón, Álvaro Uribe, Michelle Bachelet, Rafael Correa, and others have discovered, with that kind of loot lying around you can’t trust anyone. What’s worse, the exposure to people who are getting fabulously wealthy by ignoring the law inspires a corrosive tolerance for criminality. In Ohio we just uncovered two juvenile court judges who were raking in thousands of dollars a head for every kid they sent to a private for-profit prison. This is a fire alarm sounding for the court system itself.

Even more ominous, the illegal drug trade turns out to be the ultimate crime university and a godsend for terrorists. It provides weapons, training and untraceable cash for operations, and essential technologies like border penetration and money laundering have become an art form in the hands of the drug lords. We have, in effect, created a global mechanism that is in the process of eating our civilization alive.

The drug warriors tell us we have to stay the course or drugs will destroy us but they don’t like to talk about the incalculable damage being done by blind adherence to a failed policy. While abuse of narcotics can be devastating, the tragedy of addiction actually affects only about one person in a hundred. There are humane answers to this problem that don’t require putting the future of the nation at stake. We cut tobacco addiction in half through education and never fired a shot.

International drug prohibition was begun by the United States and we can end it with a simple majority vote in Congress. As for the rest of the world, several of our allies are already ahead of us. Portugal, Holland and Switzerland are successfully experimenting with legalization and three former Latin American presidents are calling for an end to the drug war because the corruption and violence in their countries is spinning out of control.

The prohibitionists insist that legalization would only increase lawlessness, but all the evidence is on the other side of the scale. When we ended alcohol prohibition the U.S. murder rate was cut in half. Then we regulated booze, taxed it heavily, and the state got the money instead of the mob. The prison population shrank and the criminal justice system was freed from the daily grind of processing drunks and their enablers and the huge burden of enforcement was lifted from the taxpayers.

We could repeat that success with the stroke of a pen. And we could cut the funding for terrorists and simultaneously pull the rug out from under the drug lords. And in Afghanistan we would no longer have to explain to the family of the poppy farmer whose livelihood we just torched that we really meant well.

Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joseph M. “Joe” Arpaio outrages are a dime a dozen. But if reported accurately, here’s one for his greatest hits file:

The most recent atrocity committed by the self-proclaimed “America’s Toughest Sheriff” involves a woman who was detained while 9-months pregnant. Alma Minerva Chacon’s case has been receiving media attention due to the brutality with which she was treated. The very same night of her arrest, Chacon went into labor and found herself afraid and alone, being rushed to a local hospital with her hands and legs chained in shackles.

Once she reached the hospital, nurses repeatedly begged the Sheriff’s staff to allow them to unchain the mother, but they refused and Chacon was forced to give birth while still shackled to the bed. At one point, the nurse asked for them to release her so that she could be escorted to the bathroom for a urinalysis, but even that request was denied. But the worst came once Chacon gave birth to her baby girl.

Still chained to the bed, Arpaio’s police staff refused to allow Chacon to hold her newborn baby and then warned her that if no one came to pick up the child within 72 hours, she would be turned over into state custody.

There’s a video interview with Chacon at the link. She was apparently detained on suspicion of being in the country illegally.

MORE: The Phoenix New Times has more details. Chacon had a warrant for $1,000 in traffic fines and a misdemeanor shoplifting charge pending against her, though neither was the reason she was pulled over.

Google is taking a swing at the Lexis/Nexis / Westlaw duopoly by offering free searches and free access to the full text of state, district, and appellate court opinions. Law journals, too.

Starting today, we’re enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptability of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the “How Cited” link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).

While the full text of most landmark cases are already available through sites like FindLaw, in giving access to the full range of federal and state decisions Google is providing an important service that, frankly, the government should be already be providing. There’s really no reason why the federal government and every state government shouldn’t provide their respective criminal codes and all court decisions online for free. These, after all, are the laws we’re supposed to follow.

UCLA law professor and blogospherian legal guru Eugene Volokh says the service is a decent start, but needs some obvious improvements, and is still a far cry from replacing Lexis or Westlaw. More feedback over at the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog.

Senator Benjamin Louis “Ben” Cardin (D-MD) stops by the Editor’s Desk to chat about the letter he just sent to Secretary Robert Michael Gates regarding his concerns over the amount of prescription drugs being given to troops in the war zones and the long-term consequences of that practice.  Senator Cardin also talks about President Obama’s war strategy and the future of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Read Senator Cardin’s letter to Secretary Gates here.

UPDATED AND EXPANDED: In the wake of the Fort Hood tragedy, there have been media reports that mental health staff had been concerned about Major Nidal Malik “AbduWali” Hasan, but did not report their concerns to higher authorities. Rather, these staff hoped he would disappear, into Fort Hood and then Afghanistan. The press and pundits have been extremely critical of those professionals for failing on act on their concerns.

Meanwhile, Mark Benjamin today tells of a psychiatrist serving the military who did express his concerns about potential tragedy, and was “disappeared” by firing as a consequence. Benjamin tells the story of Dr. Kernan Manion, a civilian contract psychiatrist at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina who repeatedly warned that Marines recently returned from combat zones were in danger of acting violently, whether toward themselves or others.

“A significant number of Navy medical officials and Marine commanders do not get it,” a frustrated Manion said about the situation at Camp Lejeune. “They do not understand the implications of what happens if somebody loses it,” explained Manion, who has 25 years of experience as a psychiatrist and who also specializes in traumatic brain injury — exactly the kinds of skills needed so desperately at military hospitals, because mental problems and brain injuries are the signature wounds of the ongoing wars. “People either commit suicide, commit homicide, get drunk, beat up the wife, all these things. I’ve seen it,” he added. “That is how serious this is and they just don’t get it.”

Dr. Manion followed procedures and expressed his concerns to the chain of command:

In an April 24 memo to his superiors, including Cmdr. Robert O’Byrne, head of mental health for the Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital, Manion describes a frustrated Marine punching a telephone pole with his bare fists outside a treatment clinic, then storming around, cursing, with a piece of lumber with a nail in it, though nothing was done to ensure he didn’t hurt himself, again, or others. In another case, a severely homicidal and suicidal Marine pounded his fists into a table and stormed out of treatment. Yet the hospital, Manion complained to his superiors, made no efforts to discuss these cases or how to better handle similar events in the future.

Manion was instructed by his contractor employer to shut up:

On June 24, a supervisor for the contractor warned Manion to stop making trouble. “Kernan Manion, it is requested that you cease and desist all further correspondence with the government,” the supervisor with NiteLines, Pamela Friend, wrote to Manion.

When he got no response from his employer or the commanders at the base, he took the next step specified by regulations for complaints. He wrote to the various Inspectors General:

On Aug. 30, he appealed to a series of military inspectors general in a written complaint. He warned of an “immediate threat of loss of life and/or harm to service members’ selves or others” if conditions did not improve. He complained of a “complete disregard for … implications for patient safety and well-being.” He decried that officials at Lejeune had ignored “repeated overt and emphatically stated concerns about the very safety and overall welfare of the affected patients.” And he warned that “many patients’ lives are imminently at risk.”

As a result, four days later Manion was fired, effective immediately, with no reason given. His contractor employer told Benjamin that the firing was at the request of the Navy.

While it may be tempting to see a giant conspiracy at work here, I believe the processes involved are more subtle. There are indications that the top military brass and Pentagon officials are genuinely concerned about the rampant trauma, including Posttraumatic stress disorder among troops returning from combat zones. They have funded studies, instituted screening programs, and increased treatment resources, both on the battlefield and after deployment.

There is, however, little evidence that this concern has filtered down to middle-level officers and officials. The problem is at least partly psychological. Much of the military is still in a “see no evil, hear no evil” mode of massive denial, in which they assume that highly traumatized troops are malingerers. The macho culture of the military, especially the Marines, is threatened by real acceptance that exposure to combat can profoundly damage many otherwise healthy individuals. It is easier to assume that those negatively affected must have had something wrong with them to begin with.  The brass and Pentagon officials would need to take much stronger steps to get officers, NCOs, and officials up and down the chain of command to openly face this serious problem.

Further, to really accept the extent of combat-associated trauma among our troops is to face some of the consequences of our wars without end. The pursuit of these wars depends upon the ability to deny, to oneself and to the public, the immensity of their negative consequences. US officials denied the extent of civilian casualties in Iraq and they deny the extent of trauma their policies are creating among US troops.

Often the denial isn’t total. It is briefly acknowledged and then turned away from with a claim to oneself and to others that the problem is being dealt with. But efforts to improve the mental health of troops while laudable, remain woefully inadequate. The single action that would most improve the situation, to end the repeated deployments to combat settings where the dangers are many and the goals elusive, remains off the table.

In the meantime, Dr. Manion remains concerned about the marines he is no longer allowed to treat:

He still worries. “I don’t like seeing these guys mistreated,” Manion said. “This is akin to somebody dying on the battlefield and not being attended to,” he added. “These guys are saying they are broken and need help, and the system is saying, ‘next, next, next.’”

Mark Benjamin’s article:

Camp Lejeune whistle-blower fired
A psychiatrist who tried to prevent Fort Hood-style violence among Marines about to “lose it” instead loses his job

By Mark Benjamin

Last April, two Marines at Camp Lejeune predicted to a psychiatrist that some Marine back from war was going to “lose it.” Concerned, the psychiatrist asked what that meant. One of the Marines responded, “One of these guys is liable to come back with a loaded weapon and open fire.”

They weren’t talking about Marines suffering from a tangle of mental and religious angst, like news reports suggest haunted the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. The risk they reported at Camp Lejeune was broader and systemic. Upon returning home, troops suffering mental health problems were getting dumped into an overwhelmed healthcare system that responded ineptly to their crises, the men reported, and they also faced harassment from Marine Corps superiors ignorant of the severity of their problems and disdainful of those who sought psychiatric help.

As Dr. Kernan Manion investigated the two Marines’ claims about conditions at the North Carolina military base, the largest Marine base on the East Coast, he found they were true. Manion, a psychiatrist hired last January to treat Marines coming home from war with acute mental problems, warned his superiors of looming trouble at Camp Lejeune in a series of increasingly urgent memos.

• Continue Reading

But instead of being praised for preventing what might have been another Fort Hood massacre, Manion was fired by the contractor that hired him, NiteLines Kuhana LLC. A spokeswoman for the firm says it let Manion go at the Navy’s behest. The Navy declined to comment on this story.

While military officials and the media examine whether the Army missed warning signs that might have indicated an unhinged Nidal Hasan was capable of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Manion’s Camp Lejeune story is a cautionary tale of what happens to those who blow the whistle on conditions for military personnel with mental problems.

Manion says the April incident with the two Marines was just one of a series of disturbing events and serious problems with mental healthcare he saw at Camp Lejeune, a base that may be best known for a water contamination scandal that led to high rates of cancer and birth defects among Marines and their families who lived there. He was particularly concerned to see that troubled Marines were stricken with the overwhelming impulse to commit suicide or murder, telltale signs of severe combat stress.

In a telephone interview from his Surf City, N.C., home, Manion talked of overburdened staff and inadequate resources at the Naval hospital at Camp Lejeune. The psychiatrist charged that medical officials failed to study and discuss violent events among returning Marines in an effort to prevent further, similar events, and did little planning to improve handling distraught Marines who were killing themselves and others in shocking numbers. In 2008, for example, 42 Marines committed suicide and 146 attempted to do so, according to the Marine Corps.

Coincidentally or not, within 12 hours of Hasan’s shooting spree, Camp Lejeune officials discovered the body of one Marine and took into custody another Marine, Pvt. Jonathan Law, who is accused of killing his colleague. Law, who had served a seven-month tour in Iraq, was suffering from self-inflicted wounds when arrested.

Mirroring reports from military installations across the country, Manion also reported harassment of Marines seeking mental help. The psychiatrist began to worry about the possibility of a major outburst of violence on the base.

“A significant number of Navy medical officials and Marine commanders do not get it,” a frustrated Manion said about the situation at Camp Lejeune. “They do not understand the implications of what happens if somebody loses it,” explained Manion, who has 25 years of experience as a psychiatrist and who also specializes in traumatic brain injury — exactly the kinds of skills needed so desperately at military hospitals, because mental problems and brain injuries are the signature wounds of the ongoing wars. “People either commit suicide, commit homicide, get drunk, beat up the wife, all these things. I’ve seen it,” he added. “That is how serious this is and they just don’t get it.”

Manion believes he likely prevented a “Columbine-style attack” late last April after the two Marines who warned that someone might “lose it” directed him to a third Marine who seemed on the verge of violence. Manion also provided his superiors with documentation showing troubling incidents and neglect for the needs of returning Marines that could easily precipitate violence. Maybe not on the scale of the massacre at Fort Hood, but more like the rampage by a frustrated Sgt. John Russell, who gunned down five fellow soldiers at a military mental health facility in Baghdad last May.

Manion provided to Salon a stack of correspondence with superiors, a virtual crystal ball predicting dire consequences if mental healthcare at Camp Lejeune isn’t immediately improved.

In an April 24 memo to his superiors, including Cmdr. Robert O’Byrne, head of mental health for the Camp Lejeune Naval Hospital, Manion describes a frustrated Marine punching a telephone pole with his bare fists outside a treatment clinic, then storming around, cursing, with a piece of lumber with a nail in it, though nothing was done to ensure he didn’t hurt himself, again, or others. In another case, a severely homicidal and suicidal Marine pounded his fists into a table and stormed out of treatment. Yet the hospital, Manion complained to his superiors, made no efforts to discuss these cases or how to better handle similar events in the future.

“There was — and continues to be — no means of discussion of high-intensity/dangerous cases such as this,” a desperate Manion wrote on April 24. He warned of “immediate concerns of physical safety” at the base’s mental health facilities. Manion wanted to set up special protocols for handling intense situations, such as having specially trained MPs ready to intercede if things got bad, and a plan to hospitalize potentially violent patients quickly. “They dragged their feet on that,” he told me.

Within days that April, Manion intervened with the two Marines who’d warned of colleagues potentially losing it. They directed him to a third Marine who they believed was going to go on a shooting rampage. Manion worked hard to get that Marine into treatment, possibly averting bloodshed. The two Marines involved also reported harassment for working limited duty while seeking mental healthcare for themselves. They heatedly claimed that two noncommissioned officers had recently told them, “I don’t care why you are on [limited duty]. You are nothing but worthless pieces of shit,” according to an April 29 e-mail Manion sent to O’Byrne and others, complaining about such attitudes.

Like many healthcare providers at military bases across the country, Manion technically worked for a military contractor, Spectrum Healthcare Resources, a subcontractor for  NiteLines Kuhana LLC.

On June 24, a supervisor for the contractor warned Manion to stop making trouble. “Kernan Manion, it is requested that you cease and desist all further correspondence with the government,” the supervisor with NiteLines, Pamela Friend, wrote to Manion.

But Manion was still frustrated that Camp Lejeune did not seem to be taking these risks seriously. On Aug. 30, he appealed to a series of military inspectors general in a written complaint. He warned of an “immediate threat of loss of life and/or harm to service members’ selves or others” if conditions did not improve. He complained of a “complete disregard for … implications for patient safety and well-being.” He decried that officials at Lejeune had ignored “repeated overt and emphatically stated concerns about the very safety and overall welfare of the affected patients.” And he warned that “many patients’ lives are imminently at risk.”

Four days later, the contractor fired Manion “effective immediately,” according to his termination e-mail. The note provides no reason for the firing. Manion was directed to clean out his office the next day, under the watchful eye of a chief petty officer, and have no further contact with his patients.

In a statement to Salon, NiteLines said the Navy wanted Manion fired, but did not explain why. “The treatment facility at Camp Lejeune notified (Nitelines) that Dr. Manion did not meet the Government’s requirements in accordance with the contract, and they directed he be removed from the schedule,” it reads.

Salon e-mailed the spokesman for the Naval Hospital Camp Lejeune, Raymond Applewhite, with details of this story and then described some of these facts with him in a follow-up telephone call, requesting an interview with O’Byrne. The Navy did not respond further.

Manion left Camp Lejeune after he got fired, but he did not stop worrying about the potential for violence there. In mid-September, Manion filed a 14-page complaint with the Department of Defense inspector general. On Sept. 29, he warned the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery inspector general in writing of “serious mismanagement of post-deployment mental health services that was both endangering patient, staff and community safety as well as severely compromising the quality of care” for returning Marines. Manion noted that the poor care at Camp Lejeune continued despite “the ever present threat of life-threatening violence by distraught service members towards themselves or others.”

Finally, Manion wrote President Obama that same day. “Frankly, in my more than 25 years of clinical practice, I’ve never seen such immense emotional suffering and psychological brokenness — literally a relentless stream of courageous, well-trained and formerly strong Marines deeply wounded psychologically by the immensity of their combat experience,” he wrote to the president. Manion added, however, that at Camp Lejeune, that immense problem was being met with “inadequate treatment” and “callous indifference.”

He still worries. “I don’t like seeing these guys mistreated,” Manion said. “This is akin to somebody dying on the battlefield and not being attended to,” he added. “These guys are saying they are broken and need help, and the system is saying, ‘next, next, next.’”

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) – A new law eliminating mandatory minimum drug sentences in Rhode Island has taken effect without the governor’s signature.

Similar measures had been vetoed in past years by Gov. Donald L. “Don” Carcieri, but supporters say they compromised on this year’s legislation by removing a provision that placed a cap on the maximum sentence a judge could give for drug possession crimes.

The new law, which took effect this month, leaves the sentence to the judge’s discretion.

Under the old law, anyone caught manufacturing, possessing or dealing up to one kilogram of heroin or cocaine, or up to five kilograms of marijuana, could face a minimum 10-year sentence.

Despite that, many drug offenders in Rhode Island actually receive and serve far shorter sentences.

New York times article on Anwar al-Awlaki is here.

Some posts from his blog, retrieved from Google’s cache:

Website coming back online, November 11, 2009

Nidal Hassan Did the Right Thing, November 9, 2009

RSS Feed, November 9, 2009

Response to Abdullaah bin Abdur-Rahmaan al-Jarboo, October 11, 2009

Eid Mubarak! Taqabbal Allah minna wa jami3un!, September 20, 2009

The Boko Haram of Nigeria, August 5, 2009

Meeting Somalia’s al-Shabab, August 1, 2009

The Army of Yemen Confronts the Mujahideen, August 1, 2009

When Scholars Visit Rulers, July 18, 2009

The Voting for Sharia in Somalia, April 20, 2009

An Interview From the Caucasus, March 5, 2009

State of the Ummah, March 2, 2009

A Comment From a Muslim in India, February 26, 2009

Tawfique Chowdhury’s Alliance with the West, February 12, 2009

Two Muslim Women Raped by CIA Station Chief in Algeria, January 30, 2009

Suicide or Martyrdom?, January 22, 2009

44 Ways of Supporting Jihad, January 5, 2009

A New Year: Reality and Aspirations, December 31, 2008

The Meaning of Gaza:, December 28, 2008

The Best Shoes in the World!, December 15, 2008

A Muslim for the Sake of the Disbelievers, December 11, 2008

Eid Mubarak, December 7, 2008

Finding a Balance:, December 1, 2008

Do You Like Cheese?, November 25, 2008

Now That the Elections are Over, November 5, 2008

Part 2: Voting for the American President, November 3, 2008

Voting for the American President, October 31, 2008

Is the Franklin morphing into the Washington?!, October 6, 2008

Interview with InFocus: Imam Anwar al-Awlaki Reflects on Vacation from this World, September 17, 2008

Food Reviews from Behind Bars: Everthing Else, September 15, 2008

Ramadan Mubarak, September 1, 2008

A Question about the Method of Establishing Khilafa, August 29, 2008

A Question from a Reader on my Islamic Education, August 12, 2008

Book Review 9: English Novels, August 6, 2008

Book Review 8: Majmu Fatawa Ibn Taymiyyah, August 1, 2008

Book Review 7: Nail al Awtaar by al Shawkaani, July 21, 2008

Book Review 6: Commentary of Sahih Muslim by Imam al Nawawi, July 13, 2008

Book Review 3: In the Shade of the Quran by Sayyid Qutb, June 22, 2008

Book reviews from behind bars.., June 9, 2008

Importance of Dhikr, June 4, 2008

Assalamu alaykum all,, May 31, 2008

The Dust will Never Settle Down, May 27, 2008

Allah Is Preparing Us For Victory, May 6, 2008

The Maccan Minority, May 5, 2008

Moazzam Begg Interviews Imam Anwar al-Awlaki, May 5, 2008

The Citizen Media Law Project announced the launch of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University’s Online Media Legal Network (OMLN), a new pro bono initiative that connects lawyers and law school clinics with online journalists who need legal help. OMLN will provide free assistance on a variety of legal issues, including business formation and governance, copyright licensing and fair use, employment and freelancer agreements, access to government information, pre-publication review of content, and representation in litigation.

Obama Administration Defending Law that Makes Speech Advocating Human Rights a Terrorist Crime

November 17, 2009, New York – Yesterday, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed the first brief in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the first case to challenge a portion of the Patriot Act before the Supreme Court. The case, originally brought in 1998 on behalf of a human rights group, a retired federal administrative judge, a doctor, and several nonprofit groups, challenges the constitutionality of the law that makes it a crime to provide “material support” to groups the administration has designated as “terrorist.”  In particular, the plaintiffs charge that the law goes too far in making speech advocating lawful, nonviolent activity a crime.  The lower courts have unanimously declared several provisions of the law – including one added by the Patriot Act – unconstitutionally vague because they encompass speech and force citizens to guess as to their meaning.

The case challenges those aspects of the “material support” statute that criminalize pure speech – specifically the prohibitions on providing “training,” “personnel,” “expert advice or assistance,” and “service.”  Under the law, any speech that falls within these terms – no matter how peaceable and nonviolent – is a crime if communicated to, for, or with the collaboration of any organization placed on a list of “foreign terrorist organizations” maintained by the Department of State. Convictions can result in sentences of fifteen years to life.  According to the government, the statute requires no showing that the donor intended to further any act of terrorism or violence.

Said CCR Cooperating Attorney David D. Cole, “This statute is so sweeping that it treats human rights advocates as criminal terrorists, and threatens them with 15 years in prison for advocating nonviolent means to resolve disputes. In our view, the First Amendment does not permit the government to make advocating human rights or other lawful, peaceable activity a crime simply because it is done for the benefit of, or in conjunction with, a group the Secretary of State has blacklisted.”

The lower courts held unconstitutionally vague the law’s prohibition on the provision of “services,” “expert advice or assistance,” and “training,” reasoning that these terms could easily encompass a wide range of lawful speech, such as providing training in international law.  The Obama administration sought Supreme Court review of that decision.

Plaintiffs in the case include the Humanitarian Law Project (HLP), a human rights organization in Los Angeles that seeks to provide human rights advocacy training to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the main Kurdish political party in Turkey, and a former federal administrative law judge, Ralph D. Fertig, who is the president of the HLP. Once the State Department designated the PKK a terrorist organization, it became a crime for HLP to continue to train the group in human rights advocacy, even though that assistance is designed to reduce violence by encouraging peaceful ways of resolving conflict.

“To deny me the right to speak of peace to a group because it  is branded ‘terrorist’ is to defer the possibility that it could ever be anything else,” said plaintiff Ralph D. Fertig, JD, ACSW, retired U.S. Administrative Judge and Clinical Associate Professor, University of Southern California School of Social Work. “And to punish those who seek peaceful resolutions of conflict is to yield to violence. Surely the First Amendment must protect against such government action.”

The Patriot Act added a prohibition on the provision of “expert advice or assistance” to the statute.  After earlier court decisions declared that and other parts of the statute unconstitutional, Congress amended it in 2004 to try to correct the infirmities.  However, the district court and court of appeals concluded that the prohibitions on “services,” “expert advice and assistance,” and “training” remained unconstitutionally vague. The court of appeals decision the administration is seeking review of is the sixth ruling from the lower courts since 1998 finding significant parts of the material support statute to be unconstitutionally vague.

For more information on the case, including briefs and a detailed explanation of material support, visit http://ccrjustice.org/holder-v-humanitarian-law-project.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.

Tiburon, California, is a twee little place. If you aren’t familiar with the old-country colloquialism “twee,” it means, well, something like “precious.” Like one of those dogs Paris Hilton used to carry in her purse.

When one wanders through its little streets, just north of San Francisco, one gets the sense that a few of the residents, on seeing someone who appears not to be from around those parts, reach for their handkerchief and hand sanitizer.

How can one, therefore, be surprised that a meeting of the Tiburon Town Council voted on Wednesday by 4 to 0 to install cameras to photograph every single car that enters or leaves this little Disneyland?

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that this may be the first community in the country to have defended itself with cameras in such a way. The idea is to photograph the license plates of every car that treads Tiburon’s hallowed roads and compare the information with the police’s list of the stolen and nefarious.

The Tiburon police chief, Michael Cronin, told the Chronicle: “I think it makes the community safer.”

There are certainly even more definitions of the word “safety” than of the word “twee.” However, it is heartwarming that the Tiburon police–inspired, perhaps, by Google–promise that the information will be kept for only 30 days.

The strange thing is that Tiburon, a northern suburb of San Francisco, isn’t exactly Oakland. It doesn’t enjoy high crime figures. Indeed, some might say that the most criminal elements in the place are to be seen on the racks of its clothes stores.

The town is fortunate, however, in that it is on a peninsula, from which there are only two roads. So the total cost of putting up six cameras is estimated to be no more than $200,000, which works out at something near $20 per resident. (Tiburon residents enjoy, by the way, a median income somewhere above $125,000.)

I know there will be some who believe you can never have enough security cameras in this heinous and half-witted world. But perhaps some will worry that the police might make rather instinctive judgments about the provenance of certain cars and their intentions.

Others will wonder whether this decision might affect businesses in Tiburon. Still others will ponder whether the police might be willing to offer a Web site showing the movements of all its officers.

I merely wonder how many people, knowing they might have to go to Tiburon for a meal of organic Kobe beef, rosemary ice cream, and plenty of Stags Leap cabernet, will choose to remove their front license plates. You know, just to be on the safe side.

SAN BERNARDINO – Wylena Andrews landed in jail, she says, because police wanted her brother for burglarizing a sergeant’s house.

When they couldn’t find him, they took Andrews as a bargaining chip and threatened to haul her siblings off to Child Protective Services unless her brother turned himself in.

“I kept saying I hadn’t done anything, but they put me in the cell and that’s where I stayed,” Andrews, 30, recalled of the day San Bernardino Police Department officers charged into her family’s Fontana home in 2006. “I fell asleep crying. I was just devastated. They basically played me and acted like it was all a big joke.”

Andrews claims that in holding her against her will without probable cause, police violated her civil rights. She blames San Bernardino police Sgt. Brad Lawrence, whose tumultuous career has landed him in the middle of several internal and criminal investigations over the years.

See also:

San Bernardino Police Sgt. Bradley Lawrence

Investigation into “on ice” allegations against San Bernardino police sergeant reopened

Criminologist William H. Schneid, who was hired by San Bernardino Police Chief Keith Kilmer to investigate allegations of misconduct in the department, confirmed Andrews’ case was part of his probe but declined to comment on his findings.

Sources close to the investigation say a portion of the findings have been turned over to the District Attorney’s Office for consideration of criminal charges.

In an e-mail, Kilmer also declined to discuss specifics of the investigation.

“First, it may impact the process by our department or any other agency that may be involved or become involved,” Kilmer wrote. “Secondly, internal personnel information cannot be discussed outside of a court ordered process.”

Lawrence was placed on paid administrative leave Nov. 4.

Almost immediately after taking over the department in June, Kilmer hired Schneid to review an Internal Affairs probe into past allegations that Lawrence and his former narcotics team illegally detained people without probable cause, a practice commonly known as keeping someone “on ice.”

That investigation uncovered claims that money went missing from a department fund used to pay informants and buy drugs for undercover operations. Lawrence, who at that time supervised a narcotics team, is being investigated by the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department for misappropriation of funds, sources say.

Reached by phone, Lawrence said he was not told why he was put on leave and said he doesn’t remember Andrews.

He declined to comment further.

He also declined to have his attorney speak on his behalf.

Lawrence has worked as a patrol sergeant since March, when he returned to duty after a seven-month leave that ended when former Chief Michael Billdt declared past “on ice” allegations to be unfounded.

It is unclear whether Andrews’ ordeal was included in investigations handled by Billdt’s administration.

Andrews’ mother, Minerva Santana, filed a complaint after San Bernardino police took Andrews from her home Jan. 18, 2006. The family says investigators never followed up on the complaint or interviewed them until recently, when Schneid took their statements.

“This was swept under the table,” Andrews said. “Cops act like they can uproot people and do what they want. That’s wrong. They’re supposed to be protecting us, not incriminating us.”

Andrews has served time for burglary, forgery, theft and possession of narcotics.

But her past, Andrews says, does not give law enforcement the right to violate her civil rights and essentially hold her hostage because of a case involving her brother, Wiley Andrews.

Police wanted to question Wiley Andrews, 29, about the burglary of a sergeant’s San Bernardino home on Jan. 17, 2006. His fingerprint was reportedly found on a doorknob inside the sergeant’s house.

Wiley Andrews was on probation after being convicted of receiving stolen property, which enabled police to quickly identify him in their system.

Police couldn’t find an address for Wiley Andrews so they decided to go speak to Santana, who at the time was letting both Wylena and Wiley live in her Fontana condominium.

A boy, 14, and girl, 11, were the only ones home when Lawrence and his narcotics team arrived. The family claims they forced their way into the house and kept their hands on their guns while yelling for Wiley Andrews to come out.

An officer then called Santana and allegedly told her that she needed to come home immediately or they would call Child Protective Services. Since Santana could not leave work on such short notice, she asked Wylena Andrews to meet with the officers.

Wylena Andrews did not know where her brother was, but Lawrence eventually tracked him down on his cell phone.

“They said, `We’ve got your mom, we’ve got your sister and we’re taking them to jail,” Wiley Andrews said in an interview. “It was basically a deal with me that they’d let my family go if I turned myself in.”

Wiley Andrews told police he was in Las Vegas and would turn himself in the next morning.

Lawrence allegedly ordered Wylena Andrews to be taken to the city’s jail for a parole violation. Her parole agent would later tell authorities that she had not violated her parole and police never contacted him about Wylena Andrews, sources say.

Wylena Andrews spent nearly 24 hours in the Police Department’s jail cell. She was taken out only once to be grilled about her brother’s whereabouts.

When Wiley Andrews arrived at the station the following evening, his sister was immediately released.

Wylena Andrews was never charged with a parole violation. Her brother pleaded guilty to the burglary, though he says he did so only for his family’s safety.

Internal Affairs detectives interviewed the family last week and showed them several photographs, asking them to identify any officers they remembered.

Wylena Andrews says she remembers Lawrence’s face “like it was yesterday” but did not see him in the line-up of photographs.

She has not retained an attorney and said she only wants justice “so this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”

History of controversy:

Brad Lawrence joined the San Bernardino Police Department in 1984.

- In 1989, a school officer reported that Lawrence had threatened to tie an uncooperative suspect to the trunk of his car during a field interrogation. Lawrence was charged by the District Attorney’s Office and fired but was rehired after the trial ended with a hung jury.

- On July 2, 2008, Sgt. Michael Desrochers accused Lawrence of illegally detaining two men driving in a car.

- In August 2008, another officer lodged a complaint against Lawrence for allegedly overstepping the boundaries of a search warrant while raiding a San Bernardino motel.

- On Sept. 19, 2008, a booking log shows that a man named Greg Parker was “on ice” in the police jail. Parker’s attorney claims Lawrence kidnapped his client and later searched his home without a search warrant.