This article has some intriguing information and ideas about crime and punishment. There are too many to mention (so, go read it), but here’s one bit:
The obvious (but hard-to-administer) common-sense alternative is to make the rules less numerous, the monitoring tighter, and the sanctions swift, certain, and reasonably mild, and to clearly tell each probationer and parolee exactly what the rules are and what exactly will happen, every time and right away, when a rule is broken. Mildness—or proportionality, if you like—is essential to making the threat credible, and severity turns out to be unnecessary. Experimental evidence from the HOPE program in Hawaii showed that two days in jail is as good a deterrent to drug use as six weeks, as long as the two days actually happen, and happen every time. We don’t know yet whether a day in jail, or a couple of hours in a holding cell, or a weekend of home confinement, or a week of a 9 p.m.-6 a.m. curfew, would do the trick, but we ought to learn.
The evidence seems to be that this type of justice system will decrease crime, reduce the number of people in prisons, and help the people who commit the crimes. The problem is that it needs money upfront and shows results later. Also, the new money would come from localities while the savings would go to the state. It’s the type of thing a federal government is needed for: it’s easier to borrow money, is insulated a bit from local politics, and can organize large-scale experiments. Of course, in our current environment, this isn’t likely to happen, but wouldn’t it be interesting if someone with influence (President Obama for example) pushed for it?
… Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said the White House had agreed to give the committee access to all Justice Department legal opinions on the targeted killing of Americans. Two such opinions were briefly shared with senators at the time of Brennan’s confirmation hearing last month; it is unclear how many more memos will now be shared.
Republicans have pressed for more details on the administration’s response to the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in September, which killed the US ambassador, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans. The committee has been given additional Benghazi material as well, though not enough to satisfy some Republicans.
In addition, a staff member for each senator on the Intelligence Committee will now be permitted for the first time to see the Justice Department memos, which govern the use of drones and other weapons to kill US citizens overseas who have been identified as dangerous terrorists. Previously, only senators themselves were permitted to read the memos, a restriction that Feinstein had strongly protested, staff members said.
‘‘I have reached an agreement with the White House to provide the committee access to all OLC opinions related to the targeted killing of Americans in a way that allows members to fulfill their oversight responsibilities,’’ Feinstein said, referring to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. ‘‘I am pleased the administration has made this information available. It is important for the committee to do its work and will pave the way for the confirmation of John Brennan to be CIA director.’’
Congressional officials said the administration had also agreed to provide public, unclassified information about its position on when people suspected of terrorism can be killed legally on US soil. Several members of Congress, including Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, have raised the question, but neither Brennan nor Obama has given a clear answer in public.
As the ACLU representative says at the end of the article, this is a good, but small, first step. The rationale for killing someone needs to clear and needs to be public–we are a nation of laws. On the other hand, the Benghazi stuff is stupid and to be ignored.
On Thursday, Warren urged regulators to step up the legal actions.
“There are district attorneys and US attorneys who are out there every day squeezing ordinary citizens on very thin grounds and taking them to trial in order to make an example,” she said.
As for taking on banks, she added, “I’m really concerned ‘too big to fail’ has become ‘too big for trial.’ That just seems wrong to me.”
Here’s the video:
Warren pushed to establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but was blocked from becoming its director by Republicans and the financial industry. The financial industry then spent a lot of money to defeat her in her Senate run. Now they get to face her from the Senate where she has a much bigger audience when she wonders why more bankers aren’t in jail and why Republicans filibuster to weaken the CFPB:
Working alongside Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Jack Reed (D-R.I.), Warren held news conferences Wednesday and Thursday calling on Republicans to bring Cordray’s confirmation to a vote. In response to GOP claims that the bureau operates without controls, the senators noted that CFPB can be overruled by the Financial Stability Oversight Council and has a statutory cap on its funding.
“It is past time for an up-or-down vote,” Warren said Thursday. “The financial industry needs certainty, and families need to know there is a strong and independent watchdog on their side in Washington.”
Despite the fact that the financial industry has done really well under Obama, they really don’t like him–he seems to have hurt their feelings. Maybe Warren will make them appreciate that Obama has been extremely nice to them given that they crashed the world economy.
The Boston Globe has a series on detention of illegal immigrants (part 2 is here). Whatever you think about illegal immigrants, this type of thing should upset you:
If Bamenga had been accused of a crime, she would have been entitled to a public court hearing within hours of her arrest, giving her a chance to state her case and to plead for treatment of her congestive heart failure. But as a prisoner awaiting deportation inside the nation’s most secretive detention system, she had no right to a hearing or a court-appointed lawyer. Most important, she had no reliable access to the six medicines that she needed to stay alive.
People in this country are supposed to have inalieanable rights. It might not seem a big deal because these are illegal immigrants, but this type of attitude tends to expand. And if there is no accountability this type of thing happens:
For days, as Bamenga was transferred from one New York jail to another, she either got no medications or reduced doses, even though she told jailers she was struggling to breathe and had palpitations. She even filed a written request for medical help. Finally, on the 12th day of detention, her cellmates found her lying on her bunk, eyes wide open, not breathing — dead after receiving what the immigration system’s own investigators concluded was poor medical care.
Well then, here’s Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito:
His comments to the overwhelmingly conservative and Republican crowd were part of his broader analysis of arguments put forth by the Obama administration in recent years that Alito said would curtail individual freedoms in favor of stronger federal power.
He said opponents of the 5-to-4 decision have conducted an effective, but misleading, public relations campaign by stressing that the court extended free speech rights to corporations.
But Alito rattled off the names of the nation’s leading newspapers and television networks, all owned by corporations and possessing acknowledged rights to print and say what they wish about politics and government.
‘‘The question is whether speech that goes to the very heart of government should be limited to certain preferred corporations; namely, media corporations,’’ he said. ‘‘Surely the idea that the First Amendment protects only certain privileged voices should be disturbing to anybody who believes in free speech.’’
Hmm, sounds like he’s trying to mislead people. The main problem is money–this Supreme Court has said that money is free speech which means Bill Gates has about a billion more free speech rights than I do. Also, you would think a Federalist Judge wouldn’t say that inventing a right is ok just because not having it would cause problems. If corportations don’t have free speech rights then they can be given them by Congress. Here’s more.
Taken together, Alito said, the views put forth by the government begin to suggest a vision of society ‘‘in which the federal government towers over people.’’ He noted that in several cases, not a single justice endorsed the administration’s arguments.
It was not the first time Alito has taken on critics of the outcome in the Citizens United case. At President Obama’s State of the Union address soon after the court’s ruling in January 2010, the president said the court ‘‘reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests — including foreign corporations — to spend without limit in our elections.’’
Alito, sitting with five other justices, was seen to mouth, ‘‘Not true.’’
He also humorously recounted his experience at Yale Law School in the early 1970s when he was a student of constitutional law professor Charles Reich, who by then was more interested in American counterculture than the law.
He quoted from Reich’s bestselling ‘‘The Greening of America,’’ in which the author painted a frightening picture of a disintegrating society and called the era a ‘‘moment of utmost sterility, darkest night, most extreme peril.’’
Here, Alito paused and, to the delight of a crowd dismayed by Obama’s reelection, added, ‘‘So our current situation is nothing new.’’
It’s good to know that Alito thinks just like a partisan conservative Republican, I’m sure he only decides things on the merits of the case. And I hope Alito noticed that corporations spent a huge amount of money this election season.
The Obama administration early on decided not to prosecute many people who were involved in torture. It now turns out they will prosecute no one:
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the C.I.A.
Mr. Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The closing of the two cases means that the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end. Without elaborating, Mr. Holder suggested that the end of the criminal investigation should not be seen as a moral exoneration of those involved in the prisoners’ treatment and deaths.
“Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” his statement said. It said the investigation “was not intended to, and does not resolve, broader questions regarding the propriety of the examined conduct.”
The Justice Department did not say publicly which cases had been under investigation. But officials had previously confirmed the identities of the prisoners: Gul Rahman, suspected of being a militant, who died in 2002 after being shackled to a concrete wall in near-freezing temperatures at a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit; and Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in C.I.A. custody in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where his corpse was photographed packed in ice and wrapped in plastic.
Gee, Holder is being really rough on them, he might think badly of them it seems. I really hate Obama’s proclamation that we need to look forward not back, does he feel the same way for other major crimes (well, he seems to for the banks that crashed the world economy)? On the other hand if you leaked information about torture:
While no one has been prosecuted for the harsh interrogations, a former C.I.A. officer who helped hunt members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and later spoke publicly about waterboarding, John C. Kiriakou, is awaiting trial on criminal charges that he disclosed to journalists the identity of other C.I.A. officers who participated in the interrogations.
The only exceptions were two particularly brutal cases, both of which resulted in the death of the detainee. One involved the 2002 abuse of Gul Rahman, who froze to death in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan known as the “Salt Pit”, after he was beaten, stripped, and then shackled to a cement wall in freezing temperatures.
The other was the 2003 death of Manadel al-Jamadi at Abu Ghraib, who died in CIA custody after he was beaten, stripped, had cold water poured on him, and then shackled to the wall. It was al-Jamadi’s ice-packed body which was infamously photographed with a smiling US Army Sgt Charles Granier standing over it giving the thumbs-up sign.
This is disgusting and really makes me want to vote for someone other than President Obama. The problem is Republicans are at least as bad on this issue (they have been complaining about even the minimal investigation by Holder). Perhaps I’ll vote for Jill Stein and the Green Party
As I noted a few days ago, Republicans are aching to impeach somebody and President Obama has decided to help them along:
A House committee voted to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt Wednesday for not releasing documents related to Operation Fast and Furious, a botched gun-tracking operation in which federal agents permitted Mexican drug smugglers to buy thousands of firearms that were eventually used in crimes.
The invocation of executive privilege or state secrets is often used to hide something embarrassing or incriminating, so it should be used only in rare situations and this is not one of them.
As you think about the operation Fast and Furious (the ideas behind it originated under President Bush), remember the reasons behind it. There is a huge drug war going on in Mexico being fueled by the US in two ways: most of the drugs go to the US; many of the guns come from the US. Given that, there is a lot of pressure from Mexico to do something about US guns making their way into Mexico. The sensible thing to do would be to crack down on the ability to buy guns in the US, but imagine what the NRA or Republicans would say about that. So instead we got Fast and Furious.
This is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve seen in quite some time:
Perhaps it would be more constructive for the court to decide cases by majority vote and issue a single opinion in the name of the court without publishing the votes or opinions of individual justices.
By eliminating dissenting opinions, which are sometimes longer than the majority opinion, the justices could focus more on crafting one clear opinion than on framing contentious responses. Any loss of egocentric exposition or subjective satisfaction caused by ending separate opinions would be more than compensated for by the added force, weight, and dignity unified Supreme Court decisions could command. The focus would be upon the rule of law, not upon judicial personalities.
The problem is that the Supreme Court is no longer seen as unbiased and their favorability ratings are way down. The reason is pretty obvious:
Frequent fractured opinions — especially in controversial and politically charged cases, like election challenges, campaign financing, or strip search practices — create the impression that those decisions may be politically motivated or agenda-driven and do not deserve the same respect and vitality given decisions rendered by greater majorities. They lead to charges of judicial activism and result in increasing partisan intrusion into the judicial process. Too often significant decisions are determined by one swing justice, giving the impression that Supreme Court precedent can be influenced merely by filling a vacancy with the right judge.
If you change ‘create the impression’ to ‘show’ in the above passage (and make other, similar changes) then you see the problems. Most of the Supreme Court justices are now just as partisan as any other politician (and they are now politicians). This editorial does a better job of acknowledging the problem:
Protected by lifetime tenure, many have chosen to enter the political fray rather than insulate themselves from it. Their involvement with politically motivated organizations reflects a shocking lack of concern for the court’s image. All other federal judges are bound by the Judicial Conference’s Code of Conduct, which says they can’t engage in political activity and shouldn’t undermine their impartiality. But as a self-administering branch of the government, the nine justices have exempted themselves. They should reverse course, endorse the Code of Conduct, and forgo politics — for their own integrity, and that of the court.
This is the first of a series of editorials so I won’t pass judgement on it yet, but the article by Joseph Nadeau basically wants to deal with the problem by ignoring it. That won’t solve the problem, because some of the decisions (such as Bush v. Gore and Citizens United) are obviously due to partisan politics. Pretending that they’re not won’t change that.
The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) signed last year expanded the authority of the President to indefinitely detain anyone who ‘supports’ terrorism. A few days ago, a judge declared part of it unconstitutional:
A federal district judge today, the newly-appointed Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York, issued an amazing ruling: one which preliminarily enjoins enforcement of the highly controversial indefinite provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President Obama last December. This afternoon’s ruling came as part of a lawsuit brought by seven dissident plaintiffs — including Chris Hedges, Dan Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, and Birgitta Jonsdottir — alleging that the NDAA violates ”both their free speech and associational rights guaranteed by the First Amendment as well as due process rights guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.”
…
Significantly, the court here repeatedly told the DOJ that it could preclude standing for the plaintiffs if they were willing to state clearly that none of the journalistic and free speech conduct that the plaintiffs engage in could subject them to indefinite detention. But the Government refused to make any such representation. Thus, concluded the court, “plaintiffs have stated a more than plausible claim that the statute inappropriately encroaches on their rights under the First Amendment.”
It’s pretty amazing that the court had to rule that people arrested in the US have a right to a trial, but it’s nice that they did.
On the other hand (via here), most Republicans in the US House think that constitional right is bad for the US:
In two votes Friday morning, the House backed the president’s powers to indefinitely detain terror suspects captured on U.S. soil.
Lawmakers rejected an amendment that would have barred military detention for terror suspects captured in the United States on a 182-231 vote, beating back the proposal from a coalition of liberal Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans led by Reps. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Justin Amash (R-Mich.).
…
supporters of indefinite detention suggested that the Smith-Amash amendment would incentivize terrorists to come to the United States, because they would receive more rights on U.S. soil than outside the country.
Gohmert suggested at one point that terrorists “supported”Smith’s amendment.
“We cannot look to guarantee those who seek to harm the U.S. the constitutional rights granted to Americans,” said Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.).“If we extend that to them, this war on terror, now it’s a criminal action.”
Yes, Allen, it would be a criminal action as the Constitution says it should be.
I should note that one of the sponsors of the amendment was a Republican (Justin Amash), but only 18 other Republicans voted for it (including Ron Paul) while 163 out of the 190 Democrats voted for it.
My headline might seem like hyperbole, but look at the case:
Insisting that it has no expertise in how to run a jail or prison, the Supreme Court divided 5-4 Monday in ruling that every person arrested and held temporarily can be subjected to a routine strip search, so long as it involves only a visual inspection without touching or abusive gestures. The prisoner, however, may be told to manipulate some part of the body. Some difference of emphasis among the five Justices in the majority made it appear that the decision might be more limited than at first glance.
…
The ruling also was a personal defeat for a Burlington County, N.J., man, Albert W. Florence, who was subjected to strip searches at two county jails over a six-day period of confinement after he had been arrested while driving on a state highway, based upon an out-of-date warrant. The warrant was for failure to pay a fine, but he had actually paid the fine; court records had not been updated. Florence has contended in public comments that he believed he had been targeted because he was a black man driving an expensive car. After a week in jail, he was released, and no charges were pursued against him.
As if somehow to help justify its ruling against his challenge to the strip searches, the Court’s main opinion by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy opened with a description of Florence’s earlier run-in with police, seven years before the arrest that led to the strip searches. He had been arrested after fleeing from police, and was charged with obstruction of justice and use of a deadly weapon. He had pleaded guilty to less serious offenses, had paid part of the fine, but had fallen behind in his payments. That, and a failure to appear at a court hearing about the fine, led to the issuance of an arrest warrant. He had paid the remainder of the fine a week later, but the warrant remained open in computer files.
I looked at this here and here and this leaves out a bit:
Albert W. Florence believes that black men who drive nice cars in New Jersey run a risk of being questioned by the police. For that reason, he kept handy a 2003 document showing he had paid a court-imposed fine stemming from a traffic offense, just in case.
It did not seem to help.
In March 2005, Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled it over for speeding. His wife, April, was driving. His 4-year-old son, Shamar, was in the back.
The trooper ran a records search, and he found an outstanding warrant based on the supposedly unpaid fine. Mr. Florence showed the trooper the document, but he was arrested anyway.
So, he was sent to jail even though he had proof that the warrant was wrong and even though owing a fine is not a jailing offense. And he was in jail for 8 days and strip searched twice.
My guess is that the majority didn’t want to admit that a previous ruling (via here) was bad, so they doubled down–the previous ruling said that people could be arrested and brought to jail for even very minor offenses.
Together these two rulings say that you can be sent to jail and strip searched for very minor offenses–remember that the next time you’re speeding or litter or eating a french fry in the wrong place or really almost anything. Freedom!
Both cases were among more than 400 sex-crimes reported to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office during a three-year period ending in 2007 – including dozens of alleged child molestations – that were inadequately investigated and in some instances were not worked at all, according to current and former police officers familiar with the cases.
In El Mirage alone, where Arpaio’s office was providing contract police services, officials discovered at least 32 reported child molestations – with victims as young as 2 years old – where the sheriff’s office failed to follow through, even though suspects were known in all but six cases.
…
El Mirage Detective Jerry Laird, who reviewed some the investigations, learned from a sheriff’s summary of 50 to 75 case files he picked up from Arpaio’s office that an overwhelming majority hadn’t been worked. That meant there were no follow-up reports, no collection of additional forensic evidence and zero effort after the initial report of the crime was taken.
That’s not just lazy, it’s criminal. Most of the cases involve illegal immigrants, which is not surprising considering what Arpaio thinks of them. It would be interesting if Arpaio is put in one of his own jails.
So, the US has now committed an extra-judicial killing and is trumpeting this fact:
A missile fired from an American drone aircraft in Yemen on Friday killed Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who was a leading figure in Al Qaeda’s affiliate there, according to an official in Washington.
The NY Times downplayed how momentous this is in the earliest version of the article, but now talks about some of the problems:
The American Civil Liberties Union, which fought unsuccessfully in the American court system to challenge the American decision to target Mr. Awlaki, condemned the killing. “As we’ve seen today, this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts,” Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director, said in a statement.
Glenn Greenwald has more of the details. One thing to notice is that where al-Awlaki was didn’t matter, thus Obama is saying that the US government can kill a US citizen without a trial even if they pose no immediate threat with NO oversight. How can this happen in the US without a huge outcry? At least in the past the US tried to keep their involvement secret.
A New Jersey state trooper pulled over their car as Florence and his family were on their way to his mother-in-law’s to celebrate their new home. He was handcuffed and arrested in front of his distraught, pregnant wife and young son.
He spent seven days in jail because of a warrant that said, mistakenly, he was wanted for failure to pay a court fine. In fact, he carried proof that the fine had been paid years earlier.
And he was strip-searched twice, the humiliation that he says most remains with him six years later.
You might think this would be an easy case, but the appeals court in NJ ruled that the jail did have the right to strip search him (the lawsuit is about the strip search, I don’t know if anything is being done about him being in jail for 8 days when he had proof that he shouldn’t be jailed). And this might apply to you, offenses that might lead to you being strip searched include: being detained for “driving with a noisy muffler, failing to use a turn signal, and riding a bicycle without an audible bell.”. The Obama administration and a bunch of states want the strip searches to be allowed. Florence’s lawyer notes these other cases:
The police thus regularly invoke their settled power to arrest an individual lawfully for any minor offense. Officers conducted a strip search in a case that closely parallels the arrest of a girl for eating a french fry in a Metro station. A woman arrested for eating a sandwich on the Metro was strip-searched in full view of male guards; when she began to cry, she was locked in an isolation cell for fifteen hours in only her underwear.
Other reported examples abound:
• California: Sister Bernie Galvin, a nun who appeared at an anti-war protest and was charged with trespassing.
• Washington, D.C.: Bettye Heathcock, who attempted to exit a parking garage immediately upon entering because she thought the cost was too high and was charged with “false pretenses.”
• Kentucky: Karen Masters, who failed to appear in traffic court because the judge gave her the wrong appearance date.
• Maryland: Vivian Anderson Smith, who failed to appear at a child support hearing and “was ordered to remove her clothing and squat while a female guard inspected her vaginal and anal cavities in the presence of another female detainee.”
The lower courts reasoning for allowing the strip searches:
The Third Circuit majority ignored doubts about the effectiveness of respondents’ policies and found no Fourth Amendment violation on the mere basis that it “is plausible that incarcerated persons will induce or recruit others to subject themselves to arrest on non-indictable offenses to smuggle weapons or other contraband into the facility.” Pet. App. 23a (emphasis added). The Eleventh Circuit similarly found it sufficient that “[n]ot everyone who is arrested is surprised” by the arrest and therefore unable to engage in coordinated smuggling.
No evidence was provided that this has actually occurred, so the fact that someone can imagine something being done is now good enough to take away constitutional rights. Great.
The same-sex marriage bill was approved on a 33-to-29 vote, as 4 Republican state senators joined 29 Democrats in voting for the bill.
…
Senate approval was the final hurdle for the same-sex marriage legislation, which is strongly supported by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and was approved last week by the Assembly. Mr. Cuomo is expected to sign the measure soon, and the law will go into effect 30 days later, meaning that same-sex couples could begin marrying in New York by midsummer.
The northeast is now pretty firmly set for same-marriage, with it permitted in New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and now New York (it also almost made it in Maine–on the other hand there are rumblings in NH that Republicans there might try to end it). Very nice.
bin Laden is dead. This is obviously a good thing, but I’m not sure how consequential it is.
First, Al Qaeda is a decentralized group and so this probably will not change much with them. In some sense I think the response might be more important–if Al Qaeda isn’t able to have a big response, that might be important. Also, I think the demonstrations and revolutions across the Arab world have shown that Al Qaeda does not represent the typical Arab and this has diminished them.
Second, I think it really shows that Pakistan is not an ally of the US. Parts of the government might very well have known where bin Laden was and Pakistan iscertainlynot a tolerantcountry. And yet Pakistan is necessary if things are going to stabilize in Afghanistan. I’m not sure how this works.
Albert W. Florence believes that black men who drive nice cars in New Jersey run a risk of being questioned by the police. For that reason, he kept handy a 2003 document showing he had paid a court-imposed fine stemming from a traffic offense, just in case.
It did not seem to help.
In March 2005, Mr. Florence was in the passenger seat of his BMW when a state trooper pulled it over for speeding. His wife, April, was driving. His 4-year-old son, Shamar, was in the back.
The trooper ran a records search, and he found an outstanding warrant based on the supposedly unpaid fine. Mr. Florence showed the trooper the document, but he was arrested anyway.
A failure to pay a fine is not a crime. It is, rather, what New Jersey law calls a nonindictable offense. Mr. Florence was nonetheless held for eight days in two counties on a charge of civil contempt before matters were sorted out.
The article goes on at length about him being strip searched, but it sounds like he shouldn’t have been in jail at all and he ended up spending 8 days in jail? That’s pretty bad.
After the success that demonstrators had in Tunisia and Egypt, protests have spread to a long list of countries: Bahrain (where one demonstration had more than 10,000 people–in a country with a total population of a million); Yemen; a reprise in Iran. There are even protests in Libya. Wow, this is one of the biggest outbreaks of protests in a long time. Viva Democracy!
The protests in Egypt have grown even larger, big enough that the army has been called out. This is actually good news, as noted in the Lede:
The Egyptian Army were previously twice deployed in Cairo in 1977 during bread riots and in 1986 to quell police riots. During the last six decades, the army has never fired on Egyptian civilians.
If that last bit is true, that’s pretty amazing.
I link to the NY Times, but even they say that Al Jazeera is the place to get the latest news (such as here).
The revolution in Tunisia seems to still be moving forward and the unrest is spreading into Egypt. The first article notes that Tunisia is a special case:
Western diplomats and political scientists say the Tunisian military is unlike any other in North Africa and the Middle East — much smaller, more professional and historically apolitical. It has never fought wars and instead worked mostly on efforts like peacekeeping missions or disaster relief.
The soldiers themselves expressed considerable pride at the difference between their force and those in other countries in the region, like Egypt, where all three post-revolutionary dictators have come from the military and, they said, the military’s first loyalty is often to itself. The soldiers all smiled with evident delight as they volunteered that their democratic revolution might threaten other Arab leaders.
Still the unrest in Egypt could impel Mubarak to make some changes and open up the country somewhat. That shouldn’t be enough for Egyptians but would be welcome as a first step.
Update: The demonstrations in Egypt seem to be much larger than expected. This could be interesting (hopefully interesting in a good way).
Sudan will shortly, probably, be split in the near future. Sudan is still very much a troubled country, but the fact that it split with little violence after years of civil war is a very good sign.
Tunisia could be an even more significant sign of hope. Widespread, non-religious, protests have lead to the ouster of a dictator. What’s interesting is that it seems that Wikileaks and Al-Jazeera had more to do with this than the US (the US considered the old dictator an important ally in the war on terrorism). It’s very early, but this could be a sign that people are willing to reach across groups to bring about better government.
The Ivory Coast, on the other hand, shows the potential problems. Years of conflict have divided the country so much that it might be impossible to govern a unified country (here one candidate won a very large majority in one part of the country and the other won a very large majority in the other part).
None of these situations is final, so it will be important to watch what happens.
