Afghanistan and corruption

I don’t really like Afghanistan’s President Karzai. He obviously is willing to sell people out for votes and his government is corrupt enough that it might not make sense to back him. Still, I love this push back:
But Afghan officials have begun to push back, complaining the Americans are often overpaid, underqualified, and unfamiliar with the culture [...]

Karzai signs law that makes women second class

The updating of the infamous law for Shia women has now been published and thus is law. Human Rights Watch talks about it here:
A copy of the final law seen by Human Rights Watch shows that many regressive articles remain, which strip away women’s rights that are enshrined in Afghanistan’s constitution. The law gives a husband the [...]

Karzai and women

I found this bit in Afghanistan President Karzai’s speech about Afghanis held in American detention camps to be funny:
“The Afghan people are happy because you have paved roads, built schools, and the salaries of the government are paid by the international community and United States,’’ he told the crowd in a field before a mosque. [...]

Problems in Afghanistan

Back in March, Afghanistan passed a rule that severely restricted the rights of Shia women but a huge international outcry forced President Karzai to say he would rewrite it. The new version is out and it seems it’s not much better:

The changes, which are not yet approved by Parliament, would delete sections that said a woman [...]

Women in Afghanistan

Back in April there was a big outcry about a bill that Afghanistan had passed that severely restricted women’s rights. Because of the outcry, President Karzai said the law would be reviewed. So far nothing has happened–if Karzai was as outraged as this article says that seems a bit weird. Perhaps, this article is more [...]

More on torture

Via Tom Tomorrow, Mark Danner has two long reports on torture based on the Red Cross’ report. Together they make it obvious that there was torture (and show how simple things become torture: standing, sitting, being in a box, …) and how the Bush administration used the debate on torture to to turn the discussion [...]

Why did the US torture?

As more information comes out, it becomes more and more difficult to know why the Bush administration turned to torture. This op-ed by an FBI interrogator notes that they got information without using torture:
It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers [...]

Karzai=Taliban?

It seems that Karzai might care more about getting elected than women’s rights. One of the problems here is:
The final document has not been published, but the law is believed to contain articles that rule women cannot leave the house without their husbands’ permission, that they can only seek work, education or visit the doctor [...]

Another reason why arbitrary detention is so bad

I would have liked this article by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell, a lot better if it had come out when this was all happening. Many of the things he mentions are now widely known, but this really shows what can happen when you don’t follow the rules:
The fourth unknown is the [...]

Blasphemy

Here’s another example of how tolerant religions can be:
In a case that has illustrated Afghanistan’s drift toward a more radically conservative brand of Islam as well as the fragility of its legal system, an appeals court Tuesday overturned a death sentence for a student convicted of blasphemy but sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
What [...]

Guantanamo and the Rule of Law

One of the bright spots in the Guantanamo trials has been the military lawyers. They recognized that the system as set up by the administration is not fair:
The lawyers, trained in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, were selected to defend detainees in a judicial system established especially for terrorism suspects. But many of them [...]

More McClatchy

The fourth day of McClatchy’s series on Guantanamo and other detention facilities looks at how the framework was decided:
It was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern [...]

Torture and Terrorists

Via here, McClatchy’s has a week long series on the capture, detention, and running of camps for Afghanistan prisoners.

The first shows why Habeas Corpus is such an important legal concept:

In 2002, a CIA analyst interviewed several dozen detainees at Guantanamo and reported to senior National Security Council officials that many of them didn’t belong there, a [...]

Justice at Guantanamo

It turns out that Abdul Razzaq Hekmati was given a life sentence at Guantanamo, he died of cancer there at the end of last year after being there more than 4 years. His story has been told before, but it’s important to repeat it to see how justice works at Guantanamo:
Several high-ranking officials in President [...]

Canada and Afghanistan

It seems like Canada is really having second thoughts about having troops in Afghanistan:
A government panel said Tuesday that the Canadian military should withdraw from a combat role in Afghanistan next year unless it is reinforced with 1,000 additional troops from other NATO countries.
Canadians are divided about the role their military should play in Afghanistan [...]

Afghanistan

Via Kevin Drum, there was just a story in the Post about tensions between the US and allies about fighting in Afghanistan. It seems that the US thinks the other allies are not doing enough (or at least not well enough) counterinsurgency, while the allies in the south (where most of the fighting is) are upset [...]

Afghanistan Police

Let’s look in shall we to see how things are going in Afghanistan:
Until December, when a colonel arrived to replace him, Mr. Mohammad, 30, had been the acting police chief in the Nawa district of Ghazni Province. The job gave him jurisdiction over hundreds of square miles near Pakistan that the Taliban had used as [...]

Iraq and Afghanistan

Via Kevin Drum, none of the candidates for president are talking about Afghanistan, but it seems to be getting worse:
In last year’s Operation Medusa, Jones said, Canadian combat troops fought hard for control of the Panjwai district, south of Kandahar. “Four weeks ago,” he said, “the levels of Taliban in Panjwai . . . were [...]

Chinese Photos

China has now released the first photos taken by its lunar probe. Nothing that interesting, but who took them is.
2/20/09 Update: Yahoo doesn’t seem to keep their files for long periods so the link is gone. Here’s a link to the picture with a comment about a possible controversy of the time.

Bush Administration Still Doesn’t Understand Geneva

I know this is more about US law than the Geneva Conventions, but it shows how the Bush Administration thinks:
The Bush administration, preparing for the next Supreme Court argument on the rights of the hundreds of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, asserts in a new brief that they “enjoy more procedural protections than any other captured [...]