The four coordinated hijackings, resulting in three deliberate attacks and one downed passenger jet, took 2,977 innocent lives and sowed fear and dismay across the world. They were acts of unconscionable evil intended to not only harm innocents and terrify the wider population, but to destabilize American democracy itself, and derail a people’s journey through history, possibly to erode its most virtuous contributions.

It was a clear, sunny morning and the first plane crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center had sparked a sustained global news flash, bringing hundreds of millions of eyes to the television footage. There was confusion and disbelief, and just as it was becoming clear there must have been a devastating loss of life, a massive fireball engulfed the top half of the South Tower, clearly signaling a deliberate terrorist attack was underway.

Less than 2 minutes later, the White House chief of staff told the president, then in a public event with schoolchildren, that “America is under attack.” A third plane flew into the Pentagon, headquarters of the US Dept. of Defense, while the fourth crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after passengers reportedly made a fateful and heroic decision to rush the cockpit and take back the plane from the hijackers.

In the days after the attacks, it was often said such heinous acts would not be allowed to change our open, democratic culture or to reduce our commitment to moral leadership in the world. Pres. Bush made a visible, conscious effort to ask that no one treat Muslims or people of Arabic origin or descent, as anything other than members of an open, democratic society, as neighbors and possibly as victims, of the attacks.

But in the months and years that followed, the pressures and temptations inherent in legislating and prosecuting the war on terror drew the US federal government into planning and implementing policies that marked an appreciable and concerning detour away from many of our most cherished shared principles.

We have suffered, in the aftermath of the attacks, fully a decade of war. From the standpoint of an idealist democracy, or of just war theory, from the standpoint of a civilization committed to peaceful coexistence and negotiated outcomes, war is failure. It is the failure of peace, of the institutions of peaceful negotiation; it is the threat of a descent into chaos. War tests the moral fiber of a society more than any other experience.

In one of the most emotional and solemn of the speeches given to commemorate the legacy of those lost, Vice President Joseph Biden noted that “Never before in our history, has America asked so much over such a sustained period of an all volunteer force. I can say without fear of contradiction or being accused of exaggeration that the 9/11 generation ranks among the greatest our nation has ever produced.”

He spoke of 4,478 “fallen angels” who died in Iraq, another 1,648 who gave their lives in Afghanistan, over ten years, many of them in recent weeks, and the more than 40,000 wounded in both wars. Biden has visited the wounded soldiers many times, and said “I am awed not only by their capability, but by their sacrifices, today and every day.”

To this day, military strategists disagree about whether going to war as a response was a major strategic blunder. It was important, and positive, to oust the Taliban from power, to end the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein, but the unity and the worldwide human fabric of sympathy that grew immediately after the 9/11 attacks bled away as a politics of division and confrontation took hold.

Some professional politicians deliberately adopted the attacks as a “wedge issue”, and sought to paint rivals to their political philosophy or to their job security as enemies of the state. A naturally occurring sense of democratic, civic unity was replaced by a push for ideological uniformity. Many Americans began to feel, for the first time in their lives, as if dissent, or even critical thinking, was not welcome in the public discourse.

The very idea of engaged citizenship was challenged by a prevailing attitude of hardline politics, and for many, fear and suspicion. In retrospect, it may have been possible to depose the Taliban and to counter Al Qaeda, without ever going to war in Iraq, without adopting interrogation techniques borrowed from Cambodian death camps, and without giving in to the suspicion that due process was somehow a risky departure from the best service of justice in a free society.

In retrospect, there may have been better ways to channel the collective emotional upheaval that followed the attacks. Historians were already talking of how quickly the political capital of the moment was “squandered”, as less than two years after the attacks, an aggressive, unilateralist drive had totally overtaken American foreign policy. There was, for several years, a great risk that American democracy would be forever changed, and many of its most vital ideals eroded.

But today, in northern Virginia, Vice President Biden reminded us of something else: the attackers misunderstood the nature of the event they had planned and its likely impact on the nation they were targeting. While the risk was there that our culture could be comprehensively destabilized by the grief and anger that follow such an event, Biden suggested we were ultimately protected against that deviation by something Al Qaeda may never have understood:

With the fully restored Pentagon behind him, Biden intoned: “The true source of American power does not lie within that building, because as Americans, we draw our strength from the rich tapestry of our people.” He added that “The true legacy of 9/11 is that our spirit is mightier, the bonds that unite us are thicker, and the resolve is firmer than the millions of tons of limestone and concrete that make up that great edifice behind me.”

Biden explained the miscalculation of a small group of extremists who “never imagined” that the killing of 3,000 people would inspire 3,000,000 to volunteer for military service, to strengthen and defend a population of over 300,000,000. He spoke of the “sleeping giant” that was awakened by the shock and horror of the attacks. He was speaking not of a will to violence or retaliation, but of a spirit of aid to one’s fellow citizens.

In the hours after the attacks on New York City, a fleet of ferries, fishing boats, tug boats, small craft, commercial vessels and patrol boats, spontaneously gathered around lower Manhattan. The United States Coast Guard then sent out a message to “all available boats” to “report to Governor’s Island”. Hundreds of boats converged on the city to assist in the evacuation, arriving at what witnesses describe as astonishing speed.

After the North Tower collapsed into its footprint, engulfing lower Manhattan in a cloud of toxic dust, heat, smoke and debris, tens of thousands of evacuees—some injured, some in shock, many hysterical with panic, some just acting in service of those around them—were flooding the waterfront. Some were jumping into the water, despite the heavy boat traffic, desperate to get off the island and if possible swim to safety.

In what is now referred to as the great Manhattan “boatlift”, nearly 500,000 civilian refugees were evacuated in just nine hours. It was the largest evacuation by sea in history. By comparison, the legendary military evacuation of Dunkirk, during some of the darkest days of World War II, evacuated 350,000 French and British soldiers from France to Britain.

The great Manhattan boatlift was possible because conscientious citizen volunteers from across the region shot into action, heading into the unknowable dangers of an unprecedented disaster zone, risking their lives and livelihoods to help total strangers in desperate need. This was emblematic of a society infused with a strong sense of public trust and civic responsibility, where citizenship and shared destiny are implicit in our sense of who we are.

Ten years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, we have seen a spiritual recovery, in which people recognize that the values of such a society cannot be cast aside for any temporary sense of security. Our politics have seen a reversal, in which an unprecedented number of people voted, in 2008, for a politics of unity and civic engagement. And the hotly contested political campaigns have continued, with fevered disagreement over policy and ideology, but we can, perhaps say, that the freedom to disagree so vehemently is a celebration of the virtues of a free and open society.

Vice President Biden said to the families of victims today, “My prayer for you is that ten years later when you think of them, ten years later when you think of them, that it brings a smile to your lips instead of a pain in your heart.” There are many ways in which the legacy of the 9/11 attacks has long since been reclaimed from both the terrorists and the hardliners, and has come to inspire a commitment to service and shared responsibility.

Speaking of the bond between her family and the family of her brother’s great friend, coworker and fellow victim of the 9/11 attacks, Debra Epps today said, at the opening of the World Trade Center’s new 9/11 Memorial park, that the tragedy had brought the lesson that “People really do catch you, when you fall. It’s been a blessing.”

There are societies where unity in service of the civic space and one’s fellow citizens is a rare, if not unthinkable eventuality, and there are societies that are strong because free people naturally and voluntarily engage with each other with a sense of holding the civic space in trust, with a sense of commitment to the virtues and the vulnerabilities of their common humanity.

Ten years after the attacks of 9/11, the United States has been through many choices, many complexes of complicating choices, in response to the attacks. Many of those choices were controversial, and many have been reversed. Many curbs on civil liberties are still in place, and top officials disagree vehemently about whether there needs to be a trade-off between commitment to Constitutional protections of civil liberties and security.

Now, we enter a new period, in which withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan is already underway, a sometimes clumsy and always complicated process of nation-building is giving way to remote security actions, forceful “smart diplomacy” and a cooperative effort to prevent civil war in both countries. Osama bin Laden, and a number of “second-in-command” and “third-in-command” Al Qaeda operatives have been killed.

Some say the struggle against militant groups with “global reach” may be entering a more conscious deliberative phase, where the liberty-security tradeoff is not seen as being so economical. There is a hunger for reviving a less militaristic civic space, in which the cooperative voluntary citizenship of free people is the strength and the hope of a great democracy, in which the value of the service of millions of volunteers can be truly honored as an expression of their selflessness.

9/11 should, after this 10th anniversary, and in the aftermath of the deviation from and restoration of core values that we have undergone, become a national day of solemn recognition, collaborative restoration, and an affirmation of our civic space, in which citizenship is a sacred trust and human interest in the principal goal of our activity. It should be a day of national reflection and of the reaffirmation of the value of an open, democratic and voluntary civic space.

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Cross-posted from Independents of Principle

Amid a flurry of damning reports about Bush-era counterterrorism tactics and government secrecy, CNN now reports “President Obama has ordered national security officials to look into allegations that the Bush administration resisted efforts to investigate a CIA-backed Afghan warlord over the killings of hundreds of Taliban prisoners in 2001.”

Obama told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, during an interview in Ghana, that the concerns that the killings had not been properly investigated had only “recently” come to his attention. He added that “what I’ve asked my national security team to do is to collect the facts for me that are known, and we’ll probably make a decision in terms of how to approach it once we have all of the facts gathered up”.

The allegations involve Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a prominent and controversial Afghan warlord who fought against the US-backed mujahedeen in the Soviet era and sided with the US during the invasion to fight the Taliban. Dostum’s influence around the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif is so vast, he had not only a private army and flag, but also a currency and an airline.

The prisoners who died are said to have been in the custody of soldiers under Dostum’s control. (Dostum was later named interim defense minister when Hamid Karzai established an interim government after the Taliban’s defeat, in 2003 was named presidential security adviser and in 2005 was named chief of staff of the nation’s armed forces.)

The issue Obama wants investigated was first reported in 2002 by Newsweek, which according to CNN:

… cited a confidential U.N. memo saying the prisoners died in cramped container trucks while being transported from their Konduz stronghold in northern Afghanistan to Sheberghan prison, west of Dostum’s stronghold at Mazar-e Sharif.

A physicians group, Physicians for Human Rights, said it had located a mass grave and Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the Afghanistan invasion, supported an investigation. But on Friday, the New York Times reported that the Bush administration “repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode”. It is now being reported that the State Dept. had urged the Karzai government not to renew Dostum’s appointment as military chief of staff.

Dostum, who had been forced into exile in Turkey, in the past, has reportedly been living in exile again, until recently, due to allegations he kidnapped Akbar Bai, a former political ally who became a rival. Now, Obama seems to be using language that suggests the US cannot let such violations of the laws of war go unanswered.

Susannah Sirkin, who is deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, expressed support for Pres. Obama “for ordering his national security team to collect all the facts in the Dasht-e-Leili massacre and apparent U.S. cover-up.” Sirkin has previously said “U.S. military and intelligence personnel were operating jointly and accepted the surrender of the prisoners jointly with General Dostum’s forces in northern Afghanistan”.

She has also said the Obama administration has a “legal obligation” to find out what involvement US officials may have had. Obama, for his part, told CNN “I think that, you know, there are responsibilities that all nations have, even in war. And if it appears that our conduct in some way supported violations of laws of war, then I think that, you know, we have to know about that”.

Malalai Joya is a pioneer in Afghan politics, one of the female members of Parliament, as of 2005, and a voice for women’s and human rights generally in a nation increasingly beleaguered by corruption, mass violence and social disintegration. Joya was stripped of her seat in parliament in 2007, in extralegal proceedings, for criticizing the warlords among her colleagues.

She now lives a nightmare of constant persecution, in which she is forced to change location nearly every night to avoid falling into the hands of those who threaten to kill her for speaking out. Joya says that Afghan democracy and the “voiceless” people of her country are engaged in an invisible and desperate struggle with enemies of her nation and her people, enemies of peace, like the Taliban leaders and warlords who seek to subjugate the population.

Joya has said she might be killed but her voice will live on and that she is determined to do her part to contribute to combating the forces of extremism and those factions that seek to imprison or repress women, deny them education or force them out of public life. She says her international reputation should be valued only insofar as it allows her to raise awareness of the plight of millions of those who cannot speak for themselves.

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She has reportedly not met the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, and she has told a BBC reporter she would prefer not to meet him, as his government has been characterized by making deals with the enemies of the Afghan people. “What matters is whether my living or dying has had any effect on the wellbeing of others”, she said.

Joya’s words evoke those of other prominent dissidents or rights activists who have been targeted by political enemies, such as Russia’s Anna Politkovskaya —an investigative journalist gunned down in her apartment building while reporting on atrocities in Chechnya—, Sri Lanka’s Lasantha Wickramatunge —a newspaper editor shot to death after reporting on atrocities committed in the war against the LTTE—, or Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto, who led a potent pro-democracy movement in the waning days of a military dictatorship whose arch rival was a surging fundamentalist insurgency.

Joya does not necessarily share the experience or situation of these other figures, and there are a wide range of differences among them, but she does share their prophetic sense of their own possible untimely demise. She is not as well protected as members of the government or powerful provincial governors, but she does have a network of people willing to support and protect her.

Human rights activists abroad and within Afghanistan have sought to elevate Joya as an example of a modern Afghan woman, fighting for democratic rights in a deeply traditional society; they have also called on the government to protect her against potential threats and restore her to parliament.

Defiant, Joya continues to openly critique the warlords and corrupt politicians she believes are undermining democracy and human rights in her country. She told the Washington Times in a recent interview “These warlords are killers, drug smugglers and dirty-minded criminals who are ruining our country, with support from the United States”. US policy has been criticized by members of both major parties throughout the war for not adequately working to marginalize warlords.

That Washington Times report explains that for Joya:

The Kabul government’s stated willingness to negotiate with militant fundamentalist leaders such as Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Omar and warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, while tolerating the alleged drug-related activities of President Hamid Karzai’s own brother is, in her view, proof that “one group of criminals has replaced another.”

As for Afghan women, who were supposed to be liberated by the U.S. toppling of the Taliban in 2001, she said, “The situation for most women today in Afghanistan, if I say it is still like hell, this is not enough.”

Joya requires a complicated array of security measures to protect her from elements in Afghanistan who seek her death. She has been an adamant champion of the need to defend women against abusive treatment and extreme violence, which she says is all too easily concealed by a return to fundamentalism that increasingly strips women of any access to the public sphere.

According to Ms. Joya, “Last year, 47 women burned themselves to escape abusive husbands. Today 80 percent of marriages are forced. Almost as many women are beaten at home.” Even high profile cases of gang rape have gone unpunished, due to political corruption or the lack of authority women have to speak on their own behalf. There have been cases of women killed for defiling their family’s honor, by becoming unwilling victims of rape.

One example often cited of the desperate and worsening conditions for Afghan women was a “family law” passed earlier this year that barred Shi’a women from refusing sex with their husbands. Stripping women of the right to refuse sex is clearly to turn women into sex objects —an odd choice for so conservative a society—, but with 80% of women forced into unwanted marriages, it was undeniably a law that would legalize rape.

After international outcry, the Karzai government rejected the new law and said rape would be prosecuted as a crime. But it remains to be seen whether the government will actually hold to that position, or whether attempts to appease groups that seek that law’s implementation might be ongoing.

Malalai Joya rose to prominence during the historic Loya Jirga (or council of tribal and political representatives) that was called in order to discuss the forming of a democratic post-Taliban constitution. In the words of Jason Motlagh:

Then, in December 2003, at the age of 24, she stepped up to a microphone. As the youngest elected delegate to the Loya Jirga, or grand council, called to ratify the Afghan constitution, she publicly denounced assembled mujahideen leaders as warlords guilty of destroying the country during the civil war of the early 1990s.

When the stunned assembly chairman demanded an apology, she refused. Shouts of “whore” and “infidel” shot back. The video clip was broadcast around the world and the plucky Ms. Joya became a small sensation.

She has been bold and consistently brave in her willingness to speak truth to power and demand that those who abuse their public authority be called to account. But some say her way of seeking justice is reckless, that her safety should be an integral part of her work to achieve the laudable goals that obsess her. For her part, Joya is philosophical and pragmatic about the danger she faces: “Even if I am killed, people around the world now know what is happening here.”

Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office have been a flurry of major reforms and of global political and economic strategy. He took the oath of office on 20 January 2009 with the worst recession in 70 years setting in, major banks on the verge of insolvency, record numbers of home foreclosures, two wars in Asia, an increasingly hostile Russia and a predecessor’s policy of using torture to “enhance” interrogations. Not only has he moved forward on the economy, healthcare, security, and energy; he has reformed the entire American diplomatic paradigm, moving toward a “smart power” based on 3d vision: diplomacy, development, defense.

Not one major bank has collapsed, his economic recovery and reinvestment plan was passed on schedule, major efforts have been made at the federal level to slow or halt foreclosures, allowing millions to renegotiate their outstanding debt and payment schedules, and he has devoted record amounts to moving the American economy toward a clean-energy paradigm. Over $30 billion in incentives has been spent this year already to spur innovation in renewable fuel technologies.

On his second day in office, he banned torture and called for a review of all cases of terror suspects, to craft the proper means of bringing them to justice within the Constitutional system of government that by law the United States adheres to. He ordered the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, where prisoners were held without legal counsel, without the hearing of evidence and without charge, indefinitely, and the closing of CIA ‘black site’ prisons around the world.

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On his fifth day in office Obama held a major energy innovation and fuel efficiency meeting, at which he pledged to raise the CAFE standards for fuel efficiency and devote record amounts of federal funding to the development of renewable energy sources. He warned that America’s devotion to huge spending on oil “bankrolls dictators, pays for nuclear proliferation and funds both sides in our struggle against terrorism”. He ordered a review of the EPA’s role in regulating carbon emissions, a move that would eventually lead to the EPA officially adopting the policy ordered by a court ruling, that it had authority to cap carbon emissions.

Having pledged “the most transparent” administration in US history, Obama swiftly moved to launch Recovery.gov, a website designed to allow the public to track how the massive amounts of money flowing through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act‘s programs and initiatives is being spent. This is part of Obama’s governing philosophy that “sunshine is the best disinfectant” and the people have a right to know what government does in the process of governing.

In line with the president’s reforms designed to improve transparency, the Pentagon lifted its ban on photographing the coffins of American casualties returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Decisions on press access were transferred to the families of the soldiers themselves. Those who preferred privacy could have it, while those who wanted exposure for their loved one’s sacrifice were also entitled to invite the free and independent press guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Documents mandated by court order to be released, but which the previous administration had refused to release, have been released, providing a new window into how the previous administration crafted and justified its policy of physically and psychologically abusive interrogations of terror suspects. The Pentagon has agreed to release some 2,000 photos by the end of May, some of which show previously unseen images from harsh interrogations.

Perhaps most important, Obama moved by executive order, during his first days in office, to limit presidential powers by requiring that all high-level classification of documents involving presidential decisions be reviewed by a panel of legal experts, in order to prevent his own administration or future administrations from using the classification system to cover up potential wrongdoing.

On 21 January 2009, Cafe Sentido reported:

On the morning of his first full day as chief executive of the United States government, Pres. Obama phoned four heads of state across the Middle East —Israel, Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Jordan— to discuss his feeling that there is an urgent need to start a practical and viable process of sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

He also met with his top economic advisors, and established what will be a new process of a daily economic briefing which he will take in order to stay abreast of the latest indicators of the direction and the troubles of the American economy. He also began issuing executive orders, one of which established the strictest ethics guidelines of any White House to date, and capping White House staff pay at $100,000, in an effort to keep from over-stressing the already disatrously out of balance federal budget.

Obama has been criticized for allowing loopholes to be put into ethics rules for lobbyists, permitting the White House to make exceptions to the strict ban. But there has been no report showing that any of the exceptions used to date actually violated the spirit of the ban on former lobbyists engaging in work that would signify a serious conflict of interest or potential for favors. The White House has defended such loopholes, saying they allow for exceptions to be made where the best public servant available requires such an exception.

Indeed, a group of open democracy organizations has praised Obama’s efforts on sweeping ethics reforms as historic. Democracy 21 reported just yesterday:

In a statement released today, reform groups strongly praised President Obama “for the unprecedented steps he has taken during the first hundred days of his Administration to strengthen ethics, lobbying and transparency rules for the Executive Branch.”

Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters, Public Citizen and the US Public Interest Research Groups, found that:

The Ethics Executive Order issued by the President at the outset of his Administration contains precedent-setting revolving door provisions. These provisions are designed to prevent potential conflicts of interest for incoming government officials involving their former employers or clients, and to prevent improper trading on government service for personal gain by outgoing government officials.

The Executive Order contains the first-ever “reverse revolving door” provisions for incoming presidential appointees, which are designed to prevent new appointees from importing the interests of their former employers and clients when they enter government and to help assure citizens that the public interest will come first. The Executive Order requires all appointees to recuse themselves from matters that significantly affect the interests of anyone who was a former employer or client of the incoming official within the two years prior to joining the Administration.

They also praised Obama’s initiatives to ensure greater transparency in government:

The pilot project for the stimulus package opens the door to establishing a government-wide policy for public disclosure of all lobbying contacts by registered lobbyists with Executive Branch officials. This would greatly expand existing lobbying disclosure requirements.

The Administration also has made an important change regarding the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by ordering agencies and departments to adopt a presumption of disclosure for information requested under FOIA. This should make it far easier for citizens and the media to obtain information under FOIA.

Obama has challenged the entire banking system to reform in the interests of survival, not only aiming to prevent major bank failures and individual home foreclosures, but pressuring banks to lend again, and to cease accounting practices that lead to over-leveraging and phony claims about capital in reserve. With banks reeling from incomprehensible losses, and a credit freeze gripping the nation’s consumer markets, Obama did not relent in applying financial-analysis “stress tests” to banks’ books, to see what they could withstand and what real fiscal stability or resilience they had.

Even as the banks said they wanted out of the TARP bailout program, Obama insisted the stress tests are designed to make sure that real solvency can be measured, and that the proper precautions can be taken to save the financial system and prevent economic fallout across the economy. He persuaded the other 19 largest economies in the world to devote $1 trillion to international loans to shore up banks and national economies around the world, to lessen the impact of the global financial crisis.

He acted immediately to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Plan (SCHIP) program, in which states use federal dollars to ensure that all children have some form of payment coverage, should they need healthcare. He held a solution-seeking healthcare summit at the White House, declaring “it’s time” and promising to work for comprehensive reform. And his negotiations with Congressional leaders have led to Sen. Kennedy and Sen. Baucus saying comprehensive healthcare reform legislation will be ready for debate in June of this year.

While orchestrating the globalized economic recovery effort at the G20 summit, he met with Russian pres. Dmitri Medvedev, who joined him in pledging to achieve a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (StART) by the end of this year. In Prague, Obama announced he will direct American strategic planning toward the goal (which he admits may take decades to achieve) of a world without nuclear weapons, lending the most credibility seen to date to the nuclear non-proliferation regime that seeks to prevent any further nations from acquiring the world’s deadliest weapons.

In his Prague speech, Obama intoned on the need to recognize that concerted effort to achieve the improbable is the best and most hopeful way to achieve the good, in international relations:

When I was born, the world was divided, and our nations were faced with very different circumstances. Few people would have predicted that someone like me would one day become the President of the United States. (Applause.) Few people would have predicted that an American President would one day be permitted to speak to an audience like this in Prague. (Applause.) Few would have imagined that the Czech Republic would become a free nation, a member of NATO, a leader of a united Europe. Those ideas would have been dismissed as dreams.

We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told them that the world could not change.

He won rousing applause with his call for global cooperation. He urged the nations of the world to work together to prevent a global economic crisis from worsening, and said “to protect our planet, now is the time to change the way that we use energy”. He pushed for bold environmental and energy reforms across the planet. And, most famously, he called for the total elimination of nuclear weapons, by all nations, warning:

The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. No nuclear war was fought between the United States and the Soviet Union, but generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light. Cities like Prague that existed for centuries, that embodied the beauty and the talent of so much of humanity, would have ceased to exist.

Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.

That Russia has already agreed to work toward a new StART pact by the end of this year is a sign that Obama’s nuclear stance is neither naïve nor excessively bold. It is, in fact, a new kind of principled realism. Though Washington generally has been skeptical about such overtures, Iran pledged its assistance in combatting the spread of the opium trade in Afghanistan, which is fueling radical fundamentalism and the Taliban insurgency there and in Pakistan.

Tehran has now been invited to direct talks with 6 major powers, the United States included, on plans to help it achieve the energy independence it seeks without also continuing the alleged parallel development of nuclear weapons technologies. Such talks could mark the most comprehensive and aggressive effort seen to date to address the practical issues at the heart of the Iranian nuclear program and prevent further proliferation.

And after 50 years of mutual intransigence, the US and Cuba are now moving toward talks on “everything” as Cuban pres. Raúl Castro said, shortly before the Summit of the Americas. While progress is tentative, and the retired dictator, Fidel Castro, has said his brother’s pledge was misinterpreted, the prospect of improved US-Cuba relations looks more realistic than ever, and fully two-thirds of Cuban Americans support the president’s move for talks.

Not to be overlooked, Pres. Obama brought the US in line with UN policy on gender rights, establishing for the first time a White House Council on Women and Girls, to ensure that the treatment of women is fair and equitable in American society broadly, and in the areas of economic and professional advancement. The US still has a deep pay gap between the average male and average female compensation for equal work, and economic hard times often impact women, especially where they are forced to care for children while working, disproportionately.

In an impressive show of media savvy, reminiscent of his political campaign, Pres. Obama opened the White House to a global community forum online, in what was called the Open for Questions Online Town Hall. Over 3.5 million people tuned in, with over 100,000 questions being put to the president, through an online ‘open for questions’ form. The Obama White House has pledged to listen to the public and to the rest of the world, in order to shape the best policies for America’s future, and the progress made in moving toward that new paradigm is unprecedented.

One area where Obama has been criticized heavily by his own base has been his unwillingness to do away with all Bush era intelligence measures. For instance, he has maintained the program of warrantless wiretaps and has defended the authority of the executive branch to keep secrets based on national security. Whether his reforms in transparency and limited executive fiat with regard to secrecy balance out these other points remains to be seen.

Pres. Obama’s first term is only a little over 1/16 in the books, and he faces a very rocky road ahead, but public support for his initiatives and his modus operandi has been very high. He still garners near 70% approval in national polls, and the percentage of people who see the nation as headed in the right direction has climbed, in just 100 days, from 18% to 50%. The Republican party is tearing itself apart in squabbles over why it has lost favor so severely, and on Pres. Obama’s 99th day in office, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennyslvania, a Republican senator for 29 years, switched parties, accusing his former party of an ideological purge of moderates.

A point which is perhaps the most subjective of all, and difficult to measure in terms of concrete benefits for the US, but which may be one of the most important achievements Barack Obama will ever have, is the degree to which he has regenerated worldwide admiration and affection for the United States. He has recently been described by historian Douglas Brinkley as the “our first global president”.

His predecessor had been viewed around the world as an autocrat and a bully, creating widespread hostility to the US and its interests, while Obama is seen as a figure of hope around the world. His example has led to calls across Africa and Asia for substantive democratization of electoral politics, and his policy reforms have spread hope that the US will again “light the way” by representing the ideals of its founding.

With an Afghan-Pakistani hybrid Taliban taking hold of significant areas inside Pakistan, the nuclear-armed nation has become a grave security risk to the rest of the region and the world. After signing a deal with Pakistan’s government to take control of the Swat Valley and impose a brutal distortion of shari’a law, the Taliban almost immediately launched attacks deeper into Pakistan, taking control of parts of the Buner district. 

As the Huffington Post reports:

Police and officials appear to have fled as armed militants also broadcast radio sermons and spread fear in Buner district, just 60 miles from Islamabad, officials and witnesses said Wednesday.

Pakistan’s president signed off on the peace pact last week in hopes of calming Swat, where some two years of clashes between the Taliban and security forces have killed hundreds and displaced up to a third of the one-time tourist haven’s 1.5 million residents.

Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a Lahore University professor, has said the Taliban’s activity in Buner jeopardizes the ceasefire agreement for the Swat Valley, and could lead to wider clashes between government forces and the “non-local” militants. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said this week that Pakistan’s deteriorating security situation, exacerbated by its possession of nuclear weapons, “poses a mortal threat to the security and safety of our country and the world“. 

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According to the Reuters news service:

Under pressure from conservatives, Zardari earlier this month signed a regulation imposing Islamic law in Swat, a northwestern valley once one of Pakistan’s most popular tourist destinations.

Asked about the matter, Clinton bluntly replied: “I think that the Pakistani government is basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists.”

Maulana Fazlullah, the fundamentalist cleric linked to the rise of the Taliban movement in the Swat Valley, and who broadcasts is messages of religious doctrine , advising the population on the strictures of shari’a and the extreme punishments that can ensue from disobedience, reportedly began broadcasting orders for militia to move into Buner and attack government officials and facilities. 

The AP has reported that significant numbers of militant fighters have taken up positions inside the Buner district and are setting up roadblocks. As local politicians and police flee the area, the government is increasingly unable to prevent a takeover, and will be pressured by the insurgents to again capitulate to Taliban rule, as it did in the Swat Valley. 

A spokesman for the Swat Taliban recently said their regime would give shelter to Osama Bin Laden or any other militants aiming to force the US out of Afghanistan. Pakistan’s government condemned the remarks, but has not announced any concrete measures planned to undermine the Taliban’s spreading influence or prevent such safe harbor from being offered. 

It is now increasingly widely believed that the Zardari government does not have adequate control of the military and intelligence services and that his government may fall. With the opposition, led by PPP arch-rival Nawaz Sharif, jockeying for the ouster of Zardari and the party of his deceased wife, Benazir Bhutto, even as the insurgency claims record numbers of civilian lives and inches toward the capital, the stability of the Pakistani state is considered to be in jeopardy. 

Pakistan has, since its independence from India, fashioned itself as a both a muslim nation and a government of secular laws and civil process. It has been prone to military takeovers, usually justified as an attempt to prevent the spread of extremism or to combat corruption (as was the case with Musharraf’s takeover ten years ago). Its lawyers have persistently and vocally defended the rule of law, even at peril to themselves, and the struggle for Pakistan’s soul (secular or fundamentalist, free or authoritarian) presently hangs in the balance. 

As the issue of Pakistan receives increasing attention from world diplomats, and with the US military openly stating “The activities in the Swat do concern us. We’re keeping an eye on it, and are working daily with the Pakistan military” (in the words of Maj. Gen. Michael Tucker), there must be serious intellectual effort devoted to strategic planning for the long-term isolation and security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, for the safety of the Pakistani people and the region. 

This will, however, pose a serious political problem, in that relinquishing effective military control of its most powerful weapons will be seen, by nationalist secular politicians, Taliban insurgents and regional rivals alike, as a sign of the endemic weakness of the Pakistani state. Neither the ruling party, the security establishment nor Pakistan’s western allies can afford such a clear sign of collapse. 

Both Pakistan and the US will likely favor, in the short term, a series of targeted raids, to undermine the reach of the Swat Taliban, and police actions, aimed at criminalizing the insurgents under Pakistani law, thus reinforcing the legitimacy of the state itself. A new wave of combat in the Swat Valley could be in the offing.

After just over two weeks of sporadic fighting in the Buner district of Pakistan, between the Swat Valley —now under shari’a law and run by the Taliban— and the nation’s capital, Taliban fighters have reportedly forced the local government to flee. This leaves them within 100 km of the capital, Islamabad, where the insurgents may seek to claim control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

The government of Pres. Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto and interim head of her Pakistan People’s Party —until her son is old enough to assume control—, recently ceded the Swat Valley to Taliban-linked groups, who have imposed shari’a law, in an effort to prevent the further spread of the insurgency. But the insurgents immediately fanned out from Swat, moving into Buner, where they have reportedly seized control of the local government, looted hospitals, international charities and government offices, and from which they may seek to stage further attacks on government forces.

The Times of India reports:

The continued presence of the Taliban has forced the leaders of the Awami National Party, which rules the North West Frontier Province, to leave the region and the intervention of the tribal peace jirga to make them vacate the area has failed, The News daily reported on Tuesday.

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The Taliban from Swat moved into Buner district about two weeks ago. They have occupied a three-storey bungalow owned by a businessman in Sultanwas village and are using it as their headquarters, the newspaper said.

Fateh Muhammad, a Taliban militia commander has been installed as regional political chief, and the Taliban have named Mufti Bashir to act as Qazi, or religious judge who takes the complaints of the people. Militants have reportedly murdered over 130 ANP activists in Swat, along with relatives of the party activists; as the ANP had governed in Buner, many officials have fled their homes, leaving a power vacuum. Some Buner ANP leaders have reportedly renounced their allegiance to the party, while others are calling for a crackdown on militants.

The problem is particularly striking due to the fact that the militia are made up of local and non-local elements, some from Afghanistan, and there is concern the local clerics who seek to overtake the Taliban movement may be naive in their own assumptions about the guerrilla movement. ANP figures have sought to use nationalist sentiment to turn the public against the rise of the Taliban militants, but local clerics have been instrumental in spreading the fundamentalist message.

Women in Swat and in Buner are now being forced to wear the full burqa, not a traditional part of their cultural life prior to the arrival of the Taliban. Caught up in the struggle for these Pakistani territories is the problem of national destabilization and the threat of nuclear proliferation. Pakistan is the only majority muslim country to have built nuclear weapons, and so it is the prize of prizes for the Taliban insurgency, which seeks to spread its radical fundamentalist brand of shari’a law to as many lands as possible.

Recent tensions between Washington and Tehran, specifically relating to the jailing of an American journalist by Iran and Pres. Ahmedinejad’s anti-Israeli tirade at the Geneva anti-racism conference this week, are making real cooperation between the two states less likely, but Iran had pledged its help to the US-led forces in Afghanistan in combatting the spread of the drug trade there. And Iran has a direct interest in Pakistan’s stability.

Nevertheless, there is the possibility that some low-level talks may occur between Washington and Tehran to negotiate an agreed policy for combatting the Taliban, to avoid any opposition from Iran if the US takes military action to combat the threat. Pakistan’s government has been increasingly willing to admit weakness in calling for recognition, both by the Pakistani people and the international community of the grave threat posed to the nation’s political integrity —and by extension the region’s stability— by this insurgency.

ThoughtPossible.com :: Today comes the news that the Taliban have taken more territory in Pakistan’s Buner district, just 100 km from the capital Islamabad. The shockingly weak government of Pres. Zardari has already ceded the Swat Valley to the Taliban, allowing harsh shari’a law to be imposed. The local government has been forced out of Buner, and the area is becoming a stronghold. If the Taliban reach Islamabad, they may be able to seize control of the one of the world’s 9 known arsenals of nuclear weapons.

The Bush administration’s obsessive adventure in Iraq led directly to the Taliban’s ability to destabilize huge swaths of northwestern Pakistan, moving ever closer toward the northern border regions closer to Islamabad. The Iraq war diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in military activity and supplies from potential deployment in Afghanistan to the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein, based on false pretexts.

Meanwhile, billions of dollars in aid were given to Pres. Musharraf, a military dictator opposed by secular society for his actions against constitutional democracy and opposed by conservative muslims for his non-religious government and allegiance to Western powers. Musharraf waffled between fighting militants and combatting fractious tribalism in the northwestern frontier region and buying off those who threatened his reign.

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Ultimately, it is suspected Musharraf not only made deals with Taliban-linked figures, but also funneled hundreds of millions in payoffs to warlords and tribal leaders, potentially to the Taliban themselves, in an effort to buy their support. Essentially, instead of fighting the Taliban head-on, the Bush administration funded a campaign of bribery and appeasement that only empowered the militants and gave them increasing power in Pakistani territory.

That the Bush administration mysteriously gave $150 million to the Taliban themselves in the summer of 2001 has been glossed over by most press accounts of the struggle against Afghan extremism. The money was supposed to help facilitate a gas pipeline project that would transit natural gas from Central Asia through Afghanistan to port cities in Pakistan, where it could then be sent on to other parts of the world.

That appeasement money did not win enough favor with the Taliban for them to cooperate in the capture of Osama Bin Laden in September 2001. Even when faced with the potential annihilation of their regime and much of their nation’s infrastructure, the Taliban were unfazed by Bush administration threats of invasion. So why did the policy toward Pakistan continue the logic of mass funding of bribery and appeasement?

We may never be able to answer that, except to say that massive irresponsibility and disregard for catastrophic risk was instrumental in the Bush administration’s decision-making process, on any number of issues. Iraq invasion would be “a cakewalk”, never a quagmire. It would cost less than $50 billion. Katrina could never destroy a city, and if it did, just put the refugees in concentration camps on the side of the highways, no need to spend real money.

Pakistan could easily be controlled by a friendly military dictator. That was the logic.  What could possibly go wrong? The Taliban, emboldened by American inaction against them, by the dictator’s preference for bribing them, would build an arsenal, train an army, take over the message of the most susceptible fundamentalist congregations, recruit a new generation of Pakistan-based clerics and radicals, stage an insurgency against the 5th most populous nation-state in the world.

Of course they would. They were given the means, the leeway. They were even offered treaties of appeasement over and over, and at every turn they violated their agreement not to continue fighting. Nevertheless, for 5 years, after the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration’s policy was bribery and appeasement. The deliberate funding of a government whose intelligence services are known to be linked to the militants we consider our enemy.

That policy clearly put the Taliban in a position to mount the most credible insurgency against the Pakistani government, and to take aim at its nuclear arsenal. Now, with a government that handed over a massive piece of territory to a foreign guerrilla militia with far fewer resources, the Taliban are just 62 miles from the capital, and as far as we know, until Pres. Obama, with his message of firm opposition to Taliban expansion, took office, there was no plan in the works to prevent nuclear weapons falling into the hands of medieval terrorists.

In a gesture of cooperation toward the United States, and in answer to a call for regional assistance, Iran has offered its help in combating the spreading drug trade in Afghanistan. The offer has not been formalized by a diplomatic meeting or by policy-specific talks, but may be a signal that some negotiations could be begun between the two states. The US government insists that Iran halt any activities that could be part of a weaponization program for nuclear materials.

Iran has been defiant about its “right” to pursue and to use nuclear technology, but also has consistently said its efforts are intended only to produce a civilian nuclear energy infrastructure. The two issues of proliferation and of Iran’s alleged support for groups the US government says are terrorist organizations or which are fighting for the destruction of the state of Israel, have been obstacles to any US government entering into dialogue with Tehran.

The Iranian government recently said they were hopeful but had seen no substantive change in policy, as Obama has not even proposed lifting the sanctions against Iran. Some skeptics have said they believe Iran may be seeking to soften American perceptions of the regime and of its nuclear program, in order to distract attention while it accelerates its development of nuclear weapons. But assistance in Afghanistan could mean serious security gains for the US, which would be a starting point for better relations.

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According to Reuters:

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhoundzadeh told an international meeting on Afghanistan in The Hague that Tehran was ready to help both in fighting the country’s huge opium trade and in reconstruction of the impoverished state.

Clinton, in The Hague to seek broad support for a revamped strategy unveiled by President Barack Obama to tackle Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, welcomed the gesture by Tehran that will be closely watched for any follow-up.

The Afghan drug trade finances the chronic instability that has wrought the landlocked central Asian nation famed for being unconquerable and for baffling powerful empires like the British Empire and the Soviet Union. That chronic instability is the condition which makes it possible for warlords and tribal factions to control most of what could be called Afghan politics, especially outside the capital Kabul.

Warlordism is the chief reason for the rise of the Taliban, both in its initial seizure of power, in the years before the attacks of 11 September 2001, and again in the present environment, where the US is fighting to support a friendly government and uproot extremism. The Taliban insurgency has been spreading and increasing in ferocity, so much that the government of Pakistan is now openly worrying about its rise there, and the US has begun to express its support for Afghan pres. Karzai’s efforts to achieve “conciliation” with non-violent members of the Taliban.

For the moment, US secretary of State Hillary Clinton has made no indication of any plans for direct high-level talks on this or other issues, but seems to acknowledge that a more conciliatory tone could be the beginning of a change in direction. Pres. Obama himself has said there is no need to lift sanctions before negotiations, as well as that he does not believe in setting “preconditions” for talks, but he has also repeatedly said that action to abide by Security Council resolutions would be a sign that negotiations might be possible.

As the world’s focus begins to shift, with the priorities of the American administration, to the conflict zone in Afghanistan, which may or may not include the tribal areas along the border, inside Pakistan, we must ask: will the administration of Barack Obama pressure officials in either country to end the brutal violence suffered by women?

Prominent women in Afghan society have been repeatedly targeted over recent years, either by the Taliban, by Taliban sympathizers and copycats, angered by their speaking up for women’s rights, or by warlords, angered by protests over their brutalization of the civilian population, including women and children.

In September 2006, the Taliban murdered Safia Ama Jan, head of the provincial women’s affairs department for Kandahar province. She was gunned down in cold blood, targeted because she was working to make it possible for women to be participants in a more democratic Afghan society.

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RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) reports that 25% of women in Afghanistan are victims of sexual violence. Earlier this year, authorities detained several men for murdering female family members, in separate incidents. In one case, it appeared male relatives of the husband accused of murdering his wife assisted him in what was a severe escalation of domestic violence.

Also according to RAWA, at least 30.7% of Afghan women are victims of physical assaults, while an additional 30% suffer routine psychological abuse. Mohammad Zahir Zafari, an Afghan human rights official, is reportedly “worried over the growing rate of violence against women”. Zafari has also said there are increasing numbers of reports about serious violence against women, including child rape and murder.

One such case is the killing of a girl of 8, named Fatima, from Takhar. She may have been traveling to fields where she would have worked, when assaulted by a 21-year-old, who then raped and murdered her. The perpetrator was reportedly caught and sentenced to death. But RAWA reports that cases of violent assault against women are increasing steadily, year after year.

In June 2007, Zakia Zaki, a 35-year-old reporter, teacher and owner of a local radio-station, was shot 7 times in what was described by authorities as an “act of terror” against women. Head of the US-funded service Radio Peace, Zaki was killed just days after another female reporter was murdered in mysterious circumstances authorities linked to a “family” dispute.

Attacks on women and journalists have been extraodinarily high in Afghanistan, since before the Taliban were ousted by the 2001 US invasion. Women who seek to work in the public sphere face serious threat of violence, especially as the Taliban have graduated to promoting and/or sponsoring attacks on young schoolgirls, using acid or other deadly substances, solely to prevent women from becoming educated.

In July 2008, reports of a Taliban murder of two women in public, with journalists present and local civilians calmly watching, sparked outrage. An AP photographer was assailed, perhaps unfairly, for filming a “snuff video”, which the Taliban clearly hoped would serve as propaganda, but which journalists and human rights activists hope will provoke widespread anger and rebellion against the fundamentalist militia.

The Taliban have consistently explained their extreme level of violence against women and dissenters as punishment for moral corruption. The two women they killed were accused of prostitution, then summarily executed. Afghan authorities were not present, nor —according to reports— was an effort made to stop the killing. Clearly, the failure of the Afghan government to create the conditions for civil society or to maintain order has allowed the Taliban to terrorize and take over much of the remote countryside.

The new American campaign in Afghanistan will focus on “disrupting” Al Qaeda-linked activities and undermining the Taliban insurgency. A major component of the strategy will be to keep both groups from operating inside Pakistan. But we must ask: what can Pres. Barack Obama, Sec. Hillary Clinton and Gen. David Petraeus do to move the Afghan government closer to eliminating this constant threat to women in Afghanistan?

It might be that the right development strategy, backed by targeted military activity aimed at undermining not only the Taliban and Al Qaeda, but corrupt warlords and the bloody tribalist grudges that are destroying the fabric of Afgahn society, could help women and also establish some of the conditions necessary for a more modern, more moderate Afghan civil society to emerge.

Timothy Geithner, whose nomination for secretary of Treasury has been questioned due to a tax-filing mistake he made years ago, which has been accounted for and paid in full, has been approved by a Senate committe vote, clearing the way for an approval vote before the full Senate in coming days.

Sec. of State Hillary Clinton took the helm at the Dept. of State, to rousing applause from staffers. She declared her arrival the beginning of a new era in smart power and the exercize of a more comprehensive, more effective, more intelligent diplomacy. The commitment to using “diplomacy and development” —which could almost serve as a substitute title for Dept. of State, according to the philosophy professed by Sec. Clinton— as part of the exercise of “smart power”.

In a major event held to celebrate the beginning of Clinton’s tenure at State, the new administration introduced Sen. George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East, to help work for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Mitchell helped to negotiate the Good Friday agreement that led to the 1998 ceasefire in the conflict in Northern Ireland.

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Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was introduced as the new special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan. Holbrooke has a long and acclaimed career in diplomacy and has worked through some of the most pressing and intractable conflicts in recent decades, principally during the presidency of Bill Clinton.

He said one of the aims of his work will be to establish a more “comprehensive” strategy for dealing with the “infinitely complex” situation in the two very distinct countries. Holbrooke dealt with the problems of tribalism and ethnic rivalry in what is considered exemplary work as a diplomat and was one of the principal architects of the Dayton accords that helped bring an end to the ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Pres. Obama said Sec. Clinton is a gift to American diplomacy and believes she will be effective in all the complex areas she will be tasked with addressing or assisting the foreign service staff in addressing. Obama told the diplomatic staff gathered for Sec. Clinton’s first day on the job:

We are proud of you; you are carrying out a vital task for the safety and security of the American people … and you will be critical to our success in the years to come … not just in projecting America’s power, but in projecting America’s values.

Obama also told the staff he had signed 3 executive orders this morning and that he could say “without equivocation or exception, the United States will not torture”, that the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay will be closed and that the US will abide by its obligations under the Geneva Conventions, so that “our actions in defense of liberty will be as just as our cause”, that “America’s moral example must be the bedrock and beacon of our global leadership”.

Obama took on the brutal complications of the Israel-Palestine crisis and said that just as loss of civilian life in Israel, due to hostile rocket fire into civilian neighborhoods is unacceptable, so is the situation in which Palestinians live, subjected to unending hardship and overwhelming military force in civilian areas.

He said he was personally disturbed by the loss of life and mass suffering among Palestinian civilians in the recent Israeli offensive against Gaza. He said that the Arab peace initiative contains “constructive” elements that can help achieve a lasting state of peace and security, backed by official Arab recognition of Israel’s “rightful place” in the community of nations.

The Obama White House also held its first official press briefing today, with the new press secretary Robert Gibbs dealing effectively with some probing questions about security of information, freedom of information, the risks of closing Guantánamo, and the degree of effectiveness in Obama’s first meeting with the military chiefs yesterday.

Citigroup forced to join with Morgan Stanley —which will hold 51% of shared assets— to hold onto Smith Barney, which accounts for 30% of its profits. Analysts suggest government of $45 billion to prop up massive bank now “underwater”, Citi will be forced to start selling assets.

US retail sales fell by 2.7% last month, raising concerns that recession is in fact deepening. With comprehensive economic stimulus still not enacted, American consumers of all income levels are struggling to keep up their levels of spending or payments on the specifics of their standard of living, as already established. Consumer spending accounts for roughly 70% of GDP.

US federal budget deficit projected to hit $1.2 trillion in 2009, even before counting the $775 billion Pres.-elect Obama wants to devote to economic recovery and reinvestment, and without counting the huge “war supplementals” for Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been funded outside the standing Pentagon budget over recent years.

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Oakland-area demonstrators clash with police, after mounting protest against delays in charging a police-officer who fatally shot an unarmed man. The clashes are reminiscent of the violence that spread across Greece after the fatal shooting of an unarmed youth by police. According to the Associate Press:

Witnesses say Mehserle fired into the back of 22-year-old Oscar Grant while the man was lying facedown on a train platform at a station in Oakland. Grant and others had been pulled off a train after reports of fighting, as New Year’s Eve revelers were shuttling home after midnight.

The shooting was captured on several cell phone cameras and widely viewed on the Internet. Hundreds of protesters have taken to the streets calling for the prosecution of Mehserle, with one rally last Wednesday spiraling into violence and resulting in more than 100 arrests and dozens of businesses damaged.

US Congress to debate release of second $350 billion tranche of funds for the ‘Troubled Asset Recovery Program’ (TARP). The bill is a response to an official request, by Pres.-elect Barack Obama, to Pres. Bush, that the process of releasing the remaining TARP funds be initiated, to give maximum choice to incoming administration in dealing with economic crisis.

Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, facing impeachment on corruption charges, will drop the gavel to open the first session of the new state Senate. The first order of business will be to officially designate the Senate leader, after which Blagojevich will hand the gavel to that leader. One of the first orders of business will be to begin the impeachment trial of the governor, with the aim of removing him from office. Blagojevich says he believes he will be “properly exonerated”.

The government of US pres. George W. Bush has staked its legacy in the “war on terror” on a series of military tribunals, in which it intends to bring to judgment a number of accused terrorist suspects held at the US naval facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. After a series of setbacks, including rulings against proposed prosecution procedures on Constitutional grounds, and the granting of access for detainees to federal appeals courts, the first “military commissions” judgment was handed down yesterday, showing some of the cracks in the process.

The jury of military officers and judges issued a split verdict against Yemeni-born Salim Ahmed Hamdan, accused of being a driver for Osama Bin Laden and forming part of his security detail. Hamdan was found guilty of providing “material support” to a terrorist organization, but was acquitted of direct involvement in any terrorist conspiracy. The acquittal on terrorism charges was considered a defeat for the Bush administration, which had been widely criticized for equating the work of chauffeur or even bodyguard to substantive criminal terrorist activity.

Some critics of the process have said they see numerous dangers in the administration’s approach to terror prosecutions, which essentially rests on rendering “illegal” not only the individuals at the top of declared enemy terrorist groups, but also any activity that demonstrates cooperation with their criminal organization. Legal scholars have said the retroactive illegalization of activities like driving or working as paid security for individuals the accused may not know are criminals, undermines basic principles of the legal system.

But government officials have argued the Hamdan trial is a sign the commissions afford due process and protect vital intelligence and security interests at the same time, claiming a major victory in the difficult balancing act essentially mandated by numerous court rulings over previously proposed tribunal structures. Whether the Hamdan case is a useful precedent for subsequent terrorist war crimes trials, may depend in large part on what legal factors are in question in those other cases.

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The administration seems to have won a victory in its effort to show that Hamdan’s cooperation could be considered a criminal activity, even if it constituted only driving or working as a paid security guard. The Christian Science Monitor reports that:

Supporters of the commission system say its stripped-down trial protections are necessary to safeguard sensitive intelligence sources and methods while providing a fair trial. Critics say the process is rigged to produce convictions and cover up alleged torture and other mistreatment of terror suspects.

“Any verdict resulting from such a flawed system is a betrayal of American values,” says Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The rules for the Guantánamo military commissions are so flawed that justice could never be served. From start to finish, this has been a monumental debacle of American justice.”

One of the fundamental criticisms of the Guantánamo military commissions is that the hearsay evidence prohibition, which typically applies in American criminal proceedings to ensure the fairness of the proceedings, is partially lifted. Due to the government’s reliance on intelligence documents, evidence against the accused has been gathered in many cases in ways that do not fall within the standard Constitutional procedure for criminal trial in the US judicial system.

The military judges overseeing the commissions did rule, however, that the accused will be able to see all evidence against them, including Classified: Top Secret files, but that they must swear an oath not to disclose any of the information found in those files to anyone outside the trial proceedings. The process has been and is likely to continue to be messy at best, as it diverges so seriously from key principles of American criminal prosecutorial standards.

Hamdan’s lawyers argued that he was never a committed jihadist, just a low-paid employee, earning only $200/month. While evidence was presented that Hamdan in his role as driver “transported weapons” and in his role as bodyguard “received weapons training”, his lawyers said these activites are not war crimes and should not be prosecuted as such.

The government accused Hamdan of being part of Bin Laden’s “inner circle”, a charge some find unlikely if only because Bin Laden and his top-level operatives are highly educated, wealthy individuals, presiding over sophisticated international networks of communications to sleeper cells, militant recruits and militia groups. There was no evidence Salim Ahmed Hamdan played any such role, fit such a profile, or participated directly in any violent acts of any kind.

Though, also according to CSM:

A criminal investigator with the Navy testified that Hamdan admitted under questioning that he’d sworn a loyalty oath to Bin Laden. When Hamdan was captured, soldiers found two SA-7 surface-to-air missiles in his car.

Supporters of the military commissions system say the acquittal on terrorist conspiracy charges is a vindication of the system, demonstrating that it can be fair and evaluate evidence on balance and not solely on the word of government prosecutors. The integrity of the commissions process going forward will hinge on such a judicious approach to the facts, and on how closely the actual trial processes adhere to basic Constitutional standards for due process, despite the extra leeway afforded in the special legal structuring of the commissions.

A 3-judge panel on the DC-circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against the evidentiary grounds on which the Pentagon has held Huzaifa Parhat, a Uighur Muslim from western China, for 6 years as an enemy combatant. The government argued it had grounds to hold Parhat because the charges they allege against him had been repeated in three secret documents; evidence supporting the claims has not been made public.

As the New York TImes reported today:

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”

“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The most serious problem with the ad-hoc process for detaining alleged terror suspects across the world appears to be the departure from Constitutional rules of evidence —which, for instance, were applied to Nazi war criminals at the Nuremburg trials—, leading to the possibility that legal due process can never be provided to the accused.

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In a move suggesting this is the case, the 3-judge panel, including one of the circuit’s most conservative judges, has unanimously ordered Parhat’s release, or a new military hearing. Parhat’s defense has argued he was in Afghanistan fleeing oppression of Muslims in China, and the Bush administration acknowledges they cannot return him to China for fear of mistreatment.

If the Parhat case is a relevant precedent —attorneys for other Guantánamo inmates have said the evidence against most of the detainees is of the sort presented in the Parhat case, according to the Times—, then the Bush administration could see its anti-terror efforts undermined by its own detention and interrogation practices. Perhaps the most damning issue relates to the use of intelligence documents that include no evidence of wrongdoing, only findings or interpretation:

The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.

“Those bare facts,” the decision said, “cannot sustain the determination that Parhat is an enemy combatant.”

Critics of the review process argue that the detentions are military actions, taken on as part of a miliitary operation, and “civilian” courts should not interfere. The problem with this reasoning is that civilian law governs all government activity, including military operations, and the Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly in recent years that the government cannot craft alternative jurisdictions where executive actions are not subject to contest or review by Congress or the courts.

11 April :: Tsvangirai “optimistic” after meeting with South Africa pres. Thabo Mbeki; opposition, some int’l observers accuse regime of intimidation tactics, including arrests, paramilitary sweeps, confiscation of property; ruling Zanu (PF) party has ceded to perception it could not have won majority, is pressing MDC to accept runoff vote… Cubans now able to buy cell phones, computers, or DVD players, or stay at hotels previously reserved for international tourists; while critics say the new rules are merely superficial changes, the gov’t of Raúl Castro, which has announced no intentions of seeing through any deep political transition, says it hopes the new freedoms will allow for more pervasive economic reform over time; for most Cubans, the newly available items are stratospherically expensive, but access may be the most important change… Difference deepen within top ranks at Pentagon regarding Iraq troop reductions; Pres. Bush has committed large numbers of troops to Afghanistan, while Iraq field commander says he does not expect further cuts in troop levels or stabilization of situation in Iraq for several months… Sen. John McCain reported likely to forego private funding for his general election campaign, opt for public financing; move “severely limits the amount of money [McCain] can raise and spend”, but his campaign is reportedly urging supporters to donate to the RNC, which can recieve more than ten times the donation per individual that any one candidate can; both Democrats have raised more than twice what McCain has so far, a likely motive for the decision; McCain has also reversed his position on public assistance for homeowners hit by the collapsing sub-prime mortgage market, after coming under heavy criticism for perceived “indifference” to working people’s hardships…

13 November :: New report by Congressional Joint Economic Committee says wars in Iraq, Afghanistan have already cost taxpayers $1.5 trillion over last 6 years, including long-term cost rises related to oil, veterans’ healthcare, borrowing… Bhutto again under house arrest, calls for Musharraf to resign office, form interim “coalition of interests” to govern in run-up to elections; some 4,000 police have barricaded Bhutto’s home in Lahore, using concrete, barbed wire and wet-sand barriers; reports say Musharraf forces have jailed over 7,000 opposition activists, British Commonwealth yesterday gave regime 10 days to lift martial law… Two Spanish cartoonists for El Jueves magazine face judgment for “damaging the prestige of the crown”; originally, prosecutors sought 3 years jailtime for cartoon mocking crown prince… Citing evidence Afghan authorities have been torturing detainees, Amnesty Int’l has called for suspension of all prisoner transfers from NATO-controlled ISAF operation to Afghan authorities; Afghan gov’t acknowledges police continue to engage in persistent abuse, Pres. Karzai has called on police to cease use of torture as recently as last week… Food prices in China have risen by over 17% in October alone, while pork, the staple Chinese meat, rose by 55% in just one month, with 11-year high inflation across economy, creating concern of political unrest as poor Chinese run out of money to pay for basic food items; many poor Chinese already pay more than 1/3 of their income for food alone, wealth gap growing to historic records, undermining Communist party’s claim to economic legitimacy… EU parliament votes to impose emissions caps on airlines, includes int’l flights; IHT reports “The measures, approved by the European Parliament, are fiercely opposed by the United States and the airline industry, which could cost companies billions of dollars and lead to sharp price rises for passengers. On the opposing side, some environmental groups criticized the proposed measure, which still must be approved by individual EU states, as far too timid”…

13 October :: Fmr commander of US forces in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, yesterday declared the war plan “catastrophically flawed”, said the soldiers on the ground and Iraqi civilians are “living a nightmare with no end in sight”, and added that “The administration, Congress and the entire interagency, especially the State Department, must shoulder the responsibility for this catastrophic failure, and the American people must hold them accountable”; criticism is significant because Sanchez is attacking the very plan he was ordered to execute while in command as the insurgency burst forth and Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal surfaced… A passage in Gen. Wesley Clark’s new book says that Pentagon insiders informed him in Sept. 2001 that Defense Dept. was planning to impose “regime change” in “seven countries in five years” across the Middle East, that Iraq was only one part of the long-term strategy; Clark was Supreme Allied Commander for NATO forces in 1990s Balkan war… GAO has reported FCC has violated rules governing its regulatory enforcement powers, leaked information to corporate interests prior to publishing it, possibly harming investigatory procedure; FCC ordered to follow rules, hold violators accountable… New York Post devotes front page above-fold to covering its own story from yesterday about naked man on Manhattan streets, ignores war, famine, climate change, Russia security talks, Pakistan vote, contractors thrown out of Afghanistan; owner Murdoch still negotiating takeover of Wall Street Journal, which he promises will not be subjected to tabloid-quality distortions…

12 October :: UN Security Council passes unanimous non-binding declaration that it “strongly deplores” the violence used by Burma’s military gov’t against peaceful demonstrators; statement also calls for release of “all political prisoner and remaining detainees”, as well as urging direct talks with opposition, pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, significant action to move Burma toward a lasting democratic process; statement is first ever Council action on Burma’s military junta… Fmr US VP Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to raise global awareness of the climate change crisis; since spring 2007, Gore has won an Academy Award, an Emmy and now the Nobel, he said in response “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity”, two advisers told the press the award does not make it more likely he will run for US presidency… CNN reported yesterday “Afghan authorities this week shut down two private security companies and said more than 10 others —some suspected of murder and robbery— would soon be closed, Afghan and Western officials said Thursday”; move comes amid growing concerns over role of private security firms in Iraq violence, UN urging US to investigate alleged crimes… Crude oil hits record high trading price of $84/barrell, just after noon New York time; cost for alternative fuels expected to drive adoption of new fuel sources, transport costs straining overall economic output… Russian Soyuz rocket launched from Kazakhstan carrying American, Russian, Malaysian to Int’l Space Station; Peggy Whitson to be first woman to command Space Station, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor 9th Muslim in space, 1st Malaysian…

4 October :: North and South Korean leaders to call summit to establish formal lasting peace to 1950-53 conflict; analysts say “hermit” regime in North still appears unwilling to make necessary concessions to bring about re-unification, end to dictatorship; North signed new pact to dismantle nuclear facilities one day before… Burmese military junta reported to be planning to jail for two to five years “those who clapped” during pro-democracy rallies in the capital; dissenters are being rounded up, even as military occupation of Rangoon is slowly “relaxed”… Blackwater security firm involved in at least 195 shootings since 2005, according to Congressional report, which also criticized the State Dept. for poor to non-existent oversight of contractor’s activities… Of 3,200 South African gold miners trapped 1.4 miles underground, 1,950 were rescued during an all-night mission, using a small lift for safety reasons; rescue ongoing, with general manager classifying morale among those remaining below ground “fairly brittle”; workers blame “negligence” and 24-hour operation of mine… NPR reports “President Bush on Wednesday vetoed a bipartisan bill that would have dramatically expanded children’s health insurance, after saying the legislation was too costly and had strayed from its original intent”, some Republicans complain Bush’s 4th veto in 7 years could be used against the party in 2008 elections… Editor & Publisher and Boston Globe report family of Ciara Durkin “says she had told them to push for an investigation if anything ever happened to her”; Durkin, an Irish-born US soldier was killed by a single gunshot-wound to the head while serving with finance unit in Afghanistan, family says military “dragging its feet” on releasing information from investigation, observers suspect Durkin may have been killed for uncovering financial wrongdoing or possibly because she was a lesbian… Canadian dollar pulls even with US dollar, trading at 1 to 1, amid worries of spreading fallout from US sub-prime mortgage crisis…

30 September :: US pres. George W. Bush has approved $25 million in fuel aid for North Korea, as part of a February deal to shut down nuclear facilities, dismantle weapons and allow IAEA inspections; the Yongbyon reactor was shut down in July… Six-party talks to negotiate North Korean denuclearization have been suspended for two days, to allow six nations’ negotiators to contemplate discussions to date… Tutu, Mandela’s ‘The Elders’ initiative gathers established elder humanitarians to “speak freely, be fiercely independent and respond fast and flexibly in conflict situations”, will make first formal visit to Sudan, in effort to end Darfur killing; group has said chair is left open for detained Burmese opposition leader Suu Kyi… Burmese junta has reportedly allowed UN negotiator Ibrahim Gambari to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi, opposition leader under indefinite house arrest; security forces have reportedly detained more religious and lay ‘activists’; EU foreign minister Solana has said the Union is examining all possible measures that could be taken if military does not cease attacking demonstrators; military reported to be assaulting anyone with camera in streets of Rangoon… Sufi muslims celebrate 800 years since birth of mystic poet Rumi, Turkey will hold great ‘dance of the whirling dervishes’ to observe history of the pacifist Sufi order; the poet was “born in 1207 in Balkh in Central Asia, now part of Afghanistan”, reports BBC; in Afghanistan, the Taliban attempted to eliminate Sufism by banning music, imposing fundamentalist dogma… As Afghan conflict now longer than WWI, Pres. Hamid Karzai has said he wants negotiations with the Taliban, would “go to them”, may offer them position in gov’t… Intense flooding over western and central Africa has hit 20 nations; Togo has made an urgent appeal for food and medical aid; the EU has promised some 2 million € to help Togo, Burkina Faso and Ghana collectively… Hundreds have gathered to protest state violence in Islamabad, used to suppress bloody riots spurred by ruling allowing Musharraf to run for president while holding control of military… UK PM Brown rumored to be considering an early election to capitalize on high poll numbers just weeks after taking power from Blair; Conservative party calls national conference to prepare for possible vote… Ecuador voting today to choose delegates to new Constituent Assembly, aimed at replacing Congress, traditional power structures…