U.S. judge jails Muslim woman over head scarf

Ga. resident refused to remove hijab at court's security checkpoint

17 December 2008

DOUGLASVILLE, Ga. - A judge ordered a Muslim woman arrested Tuesday for contempt of court for refusing to take off her head scarf at a security checkpoint.

The judge ordered Lisa Valentine, 40, to serve 10 days in jail, said police in Douglasville, a city of about 20,000 people on Atlanta's west suburban outskirts.

Valentine violated a court policy that prohibits people from wearing any headgear in court, police said.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations urged federal authorities to investigate the incident as well as others in Georgia.

"I just felt stripped of my civil, my human rights," Valentine told The Associated Press on Wednesday from her home, after she said she was unexpectedly released once CAIR got involved. Jail officials declined to say why she was freed.

No comment from judge
Municipal Court Judge Keith Rollins said that "it would not be appropriate" for him to comment on the case.

Last year, a judge in Valdosta in southern Georgia barred a Muslim woman from entering a courtroom because she would not remove her head scarf. There have been similar cases in other states, including Michigan, where a Muslim woman in Detroit filed a federal lawsuit in February 2007 after a judge dismissed her small-claims court case when she refused to remove a head and face veil.

Valentine's husband, Omar Hall, said his wife was accompanying her nephew to a traffic citation hearing when officials stopped her at the metal detector and told her she would not be allowed in the courtroom with the head scarf, known as a hijab.

Hall said Valentine, an insurance underwriter, told the bailiff that she had been in courtrooms before with the scarf on and that removing it would be a religious violation. When she turned to leave and uttered an expletive, Hall said a bailiff handcuffed her and took her before the judge.

Britain withdraws terror detention law after defeat

13 October 2008

by Alice Ritchie

LONDON -The British government on Monday withdrew a plan to extend the time suspected violent extremists can be held without charge after the House of Lords voted against it.

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she would remove plans to extend the limit from 28 to 42 days from a proposed counter-terrorism bill, but could re-introduce the measure in a separate law at a later date.

Opponents of the proposal, including opposition lawmakers, civil liberties campaigners and some members of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party, declared it a "humiliating retreat" and a victory for individual rights.

Earlier Monday, peers in the unelected upper chamber of parliament defeated the move by 309 votes to 118. In June, the 42-day measure scraped through the House of Commons by just nine votes after a rebellion by 36 Labour lawmakers.

Speaking to lawmakers afterwards, Smith said Britain faced a "severe" threat and accused opponents of being "prepared to ignore the terrorist threat for fear of taking tough but necessary decisions".

"My priority remains the protection of the British people. I do not believe, as some MPs clearly do, that it is enough simply to cross our fingers and hope for the best," the minister said.

"That is not good enough because when it comes to national security, there are certain risks I'm not prepared to take.

"I am not prepared to risk leaving the British people without the protections they need."

As a result, a new bill had been drawn up which could be put to parliament "if and when the need arises", she said. It would enable the chief prosecutor to apply to a judge to hold suspected extremists for a maximum of 42 days.

Opposition parties welcomed what they saw as a defeat for the government, and strongly rejected Smith's claims they were a soft touch.

"We on this side of the House are perfectly prepared to be firm on terrorism, to take resolute measures and, if necessary, pass difficult bills," said Dominic Grieve, home affairs spokesman for the main opposition Conservatives.

"But they have to be credible, they have to be based on evidence and they must not be put forward in a way that smacks of mere political posturing and gimmicks."

Chris Huhne, a lawmaker with the smaller opposition Liberal Democrats, said the government was in "humiliating retreat", adding: "These excessive powers were a dagger thrust to our hard-won liberties."

Rights groups also welcomed the decision. Shami Chakrabarti, director of campaign group Liberty that had lobbied hard against the plan, said: "Common decency says we don't lock people up for six weeks without charge."

The pre-charge detention time limit was increased from 14 to 28 days by Brown's predecessor Tony Blair in the wake of the July 2005 London suicide attacks which killed 56 people, including four bombers.

At that stage, Blair's government was defeated in a bid to introduce 90-day detention without charge and 28 days was a compromise measure.

Military action on U.S. soil

Opinion

13 October 2008

by JACOB MORRIS

The Army Times reported Wednesday, Oct. 1 that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team was deployed in Seattle after spending 15 months on the battlefields in Iraq.

They are considered an “on-call federal response force,” according to the report. They are designed to respond with crowd control tactics and are under the direct command of U.S. Army North with President Bush as their commander-in-chief.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1807, which prevented active military from being deployed on American soil, has been obliterated by the president’s insistence that the entire world act as the battlefield for the war on terror.

It appears our commander-in-chief is not completely finished with his destruction of our civil rights.

This is happening while the administration, in tandem with the Federal Reserve, has passed an almost 500-page bill providing hundreds of billions of dollars to acquire ownership and, indeed, control over U.S. financial institutions. The bill grew rapidly and the pressure on Congress to pass it was unlawful.

“The only way they can pass the [bailout] bill is by creating and sustaining a panic atmosphere,” Rep. Brad Sherman of California said in open forum on the congressional floor.

“Many of us were told in private conversations that if we voted against this bill on Monday, that the sky would fall, the market would drop two or three thousand points the first day and a couple thousand the second day. And a few members were even told there would be martial law in America if we voted no.”
The administration continues to use their familiar fear tactics to intimidate Congress into granting the president more power.

The bailout explicitly grants $100 billion for the president to use at his personal discretion.

I don’t want to believe there is any imminent danger, our president is abusing his power or there could be ulterior motives to this military deployment in our own backyard. But with the upcoming election less than a month away, my suspicions have risen.

U.S. Senate panel to study military eavesdropping

10 October 2008
By Scott Shane

WASHINGTON-The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator John Rockefeller IV, said Thursday that the committee would investigate claims by two military eavesdroppers that they routinely listened in on private calls home from American military officers, aid workers and journalists stationed in Iraq.

Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, called the accusations "extremely disturbing."

"Any time there is an allegation regarding abuse of the privacy and civil liberties of Americans it is a very serious matter," he said.

The two former intelligence officers, Adrienne Kinne, an army reservist, and David Murfee Faulk, a navy linguist, spoke Thursday to ABC News. They also were interviewed for a book on the National Security Agency by James Bamford, a former ABC producer and author of two earlier books on the agency, that is scheduled for publication next week.

Kinne and Faulk, both Arabic linguists, were based at Fort Gordon, Georgia, where the NSA has a large listening post focused on the Middle East. Kinne was there from 2001 to 2003 and Faulk was there from 2003 to 2007, Bamford said.

Kinne, who became an anti-Iraq-war activist, has spoken about her experiences as an eavesdropper to several Web publications since last year, but her accusations have not drawn broad attention. Faulk does not appear to have spoken out before.

Faulk told ABC that he and his colleagues listened to "personal phone calls of American officers, mostly in the Green Zone, calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends."

He said the eavesdroppers would swap recordings of intimate calls for entertainment. "At times I was told: 'Hey, check this out. There's some good phone sex,' " he said.

Faulk said that when another eavesdropper protested that they were personal calls and should not be transcribed, a supervisor replied, "My orders were to transcribe everything."

Under so-called minimization rules, an eavesdropper who inadvertently picks up an American's private call is required to cut off the monitoring immediately and not to transcribe or keep a recording of the call.

Kinne spoke of listening to aid workers and journalists. She said the calls had often involved "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

It was unclear whether the intercepts the two former intelligence officers described were part of the program of surveillance without warrants that President George W. Bush approved shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks. He and other officials said that program intercepted only calls of people believed to be linked to Al Qaeda.

A statement issued by the NSA on Thursday night said, "Some of these allegations have been investigated and found to be unsubstantiated; others are in the investigation process."

The statement said the agency operated within the law and took accusations of wrongdoing seriously. "When we find misconduct, we take swift and certain remedial action," the statement said.

Mark Mansfield, a spokesman for General Michael Hayden, who was director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and is now director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said he had never approved illegal eavesdropping. "The notion that General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face," Mansfield said.