Injustices that fit neatly into U.S. political ideologies will receive much press attention. Many others fall through the cracks, such as the world’s longest-held POWs.

408 Moroccans are still being held by the Polisario Front as a result of a territorial dispute in the Sahara. The remaining POWs have been held in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions since the declaration of a cease- fire in 1991, and are today the longest-held prisoners of war anywhere in the world.

In May, John McCain, along with six other former Morrocan POWS called for the immediate release of the remaining POWs.

“I know all too well that appeals to decency and justice can make a difference in the lives of prisoners,” said McCain. “I have sent a letter to the leadership of the Polisario Front, calling for the immediate release of all prisoners of war, and I hope that my colleagues in the Senate and others will join this call as well.”

The six former prisoners spoke about seeing their fellow prisoners murdered, tortured, forced to perform slave labor and forced to give their own blood to their enemies. The group explained that they had come to America to plea for the active support of the United States in helping to free the 408 Moroccan soldiers who are still facing torture, isolated confinement and regular humiliation.

But the story did not have the political sex appeal of an Abu Graib or Guantanamo Bay and quickly sank below the waves.

Do what you can for these people–take a moment to sign the petition for their immediate release.

ROME (AP) - An Italian judge ordered the arrests of 13 people in the purported CIA abduction of an imam, who then was sent to Egypt, the Milan prosecutor’s office said Friday. An Italian official said earlier the 13 were CIA officers involved in U.S. anti-terrorism efforts.

The 13 are suspected of seizing Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, on the streets of Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, and sending him to Egypt, where he reportedly was tortured, Milan prosecutor Manlio Claudio Minale said in a statement.

An Italian newspaper said all 13 were American agents.

The U.S. Embassy in Rome and the CIA in Washington declined to comment.

The prosecutor’s statement did not name any of the suspects, give their nationalities or mention the CIA by name, but an Italian official familiar with the investigation confirmed newspaper reports Friday that the suspects were working for the CIA. The official requested anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information.

Minale said the suspects remained at large, and Italian authorities would ask the United States and Egypt for assistance in the case.

Prosecutors believe the officers seized Omar as part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, in which terror suspects are transferred to third countries without court approval, according to reports Friday in newspapers Corriere della Sera and Il Giorno.

The statement said Omar was attacked by two people while walking from home to a local mosque and hustled into a white van. He was taken to Aviano, a joint U.S.-Italian base north of Venice; another American air base in Ramstein, Germany; and then Cairo.

Investigators confirmed the abduction through an eyewitness account and other, unidentified witnesses, the statement said.

The statement said Omar was abused by interrogators in Egypt, according to phone calls made by Omar from Egypt to his wife and another unnamed Egyptian citizen in April-May, 2004.

Italian papers have reported that Omar, 42, said in the calls he was tortured with electric shocks.

On Friday, Corriere della Sera cited another Milan-based imam as telling Italian authorities that Omar had been tortured in Egypt after refusing to work in Italy as an informer.

According to the testimony, Omar was hung upside down and subjected to extreme temperatures and loud noise that damaged his hearing, Corriere reported.

Minale said the judge rejected a request for arrest warrants for six more suspects believed to have helped prepare the operation.

Judge Chiara Nobile ordered the arrests after investigators traced the 13 through check-in details at Milan hotels and their use of Italian cell phones during the operation, the reports in Corriere and Il Giorno said.

Il Giorno said the 13 were American agents, and three of them were women.

Minale said a judge also issued a separate arrest warrant for Omar on terrorist charges. In that warrant, Judge Guido Salvini claimed the seizure of Omar represented a violation of Italian sovereignty, according to Italian news agency Apcom.

Omar was believed to have fought alongside jihadists in Afghanistan and Bosnia, and prosecutors were seeking evidence against him before his disappearance, according to a report in La Repubblica newspaper last year, which cited intelligence officials.

The prosecutor’s office said Omar was released by the Egyptians after his interrogation but later was arrested again.

Corriere said Italian police picked up details, including cover names, photos, credit card details, and U.S. addresses that the 13 had given to a number of five-star hotels in Milan around the time of Omar’s alleged abduction.

It said investigators also found the prepaid highway passes the 13 used for the journey from Milan to the air base.

The report said investigations showed the 13 ran up $144,984 in hotel bills in Milan, and two couples took holidays in northern Italy after delivering Omar at the Aviano air base.

It would now appear that Bush II is stressing the military through his policies; because of Iraq the number of enlistments is dropping, thus causing troops to stay longer in theater and thus stressing the military even further. It’s now a vicious cycle. One wonders if Bush II is visiting the coffins that are flown back Andrews Air Force Base. It is the decent thing to do, after all.

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/24/AR2005062400149.html
washingtonpost.com
Poll Finds Most Oppose Return to Draft

By WILL LESTER
The Associated Press
Friday, June 24, 2005; 2:58 AM

WASHINGTON — Americans overwhelmingly oppose reinstatement of the military draft and most say they wouldn’t encourage their children to enlist in the service either, an AP-Ipsos poll found.

That resistance underscores the dilemma facing the Bush administration as it struggles to recruit a volunteer military in war time.

The Army is falling short of its recruiting goals this year at a time the country is fighting extended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has repeatedly missed its monthly recruiting goals this year, falling short by 42 percent in April.

And all four branches of military service are having trouble attracting recruits to their reserve forces.

Despite the recruiting problems, seven in 10 Americans say they oppose reinstatement of the draft, and almost half of those polled strongly oppose that step, the AP-Ipsos poll found. About a quarter of the people in this country say they favor reinstating the draft.

“Things have been working well with the all-volunteer army and that’s how it should stay,” said Kathy Fowler, a 44-year-old mother from Chillicothe, Ohio.

More than 1,700 members of the U.S. military have died since the start of the Iraq war and thousands more have been wounded. Gen. John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East, told members of Congress on Thursday that the Iraqi insurgency is as active as six months ago and more foreign fighters are flowing in all the time.

The shortfalls in military recruiting have led to speculation that the government might be forced to reinstitute the draft. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has ruled it out, saying the all-volunteer force has proved the wisdom of discontinuing the draft in 1973.

“There isn’t a chance in the world that the draft will be brought back,” Rumsfeld told a House hearing Thursday.

New York Congressman Charles Rangel introduced a bill in January 2003 to bring back the draft, and more than a year later he reintroduced it. The legislation went nowhere, which did not surprise the New York Democrat.

Rangel said he initially introduced the draft legislation because he thought people would think twice about going to war in Iraq if their own children might be required to serve. And he objects to the way the military is recruiting troops _ offering cash bonuses to needy young people in poor neighborhoods.

The Army has responded to the recruiting slump by increasing the number of recruiters and offering bigger signup bonuses.

Some feel the military’s recruitment problems will force a return to the draft.

“If we had more manpower in the Middle East we could get this over with,” said James Puma, a retiree from Buffalo, N.Y. “I’m a Republican, I’m with the president. But things in Iraq are not going good at all.”

However, Jeremy Miller, a sales manager from Denver, said the Iraq war is “a situation the president has gotten us into and should be able to get us out of” without bringing back the draft.

More than half of those polled said they would discourage a son who was the right age to serve from enlisting in the military, while two-thirds said they would discourage a daughter from joining.

If a military draft were reinstated, more than half in the poll, 54 percent, said they would oppose women being drafted.

The American public has strongly opposed reinstating the draft for the past couple of decades, according to various polls. And the decreasing support for the war in Iraq suggests that is unlikely to change anytime soon.

“People simply don’t want their kids to be sent off to Iraq to be shot at in a situation in which the value of the war is becoming more and more questionable,” said John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University and author of “War, Presidents and Public Opinion.”

Men were more likely than women to favor reinstating the draft, those over age 50 were more likely to favor it than younger adults. And Republicans were more likely than Democrats to support the idea. But a majority of each of those groups opposed the draft.

“The draft has never been popular and there’s little reason to believe it would be popular now,” public opinion analyst Karlyn Bowman said.

The poll of 1,000 adults was conducted June 20-22 for the AP by Ipsos, an international polling firm, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

© 2005 The Associated Press

Unusual or not, evidently there is valid reason for concern here….

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/22/AR2005062201988.html?nav=most_emailed
washingtonpost.com
Pharmaceuticals in Waterways Raise Concern
Effect on Wildlife, Humans Questioned

By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 23, 2005; A03

Academics, state officials and environmental advocates are starting to question whether massive amounts of discarded pharmaceuticals, which are often flushed down the drain, pose a threat to the nation’s aquatic life and possibly to people.

In waterways from the Potomac to the Brazos River in Texas, researchers have found fish laden with estrogen and antidepressants, and many show evidence of major neurological or physiological changes.

No one has seen evidence of effects on human health, but a number are asking publicly why the federal government is not taking a more aggressive approach to what they see as a looming problem.

In October 2002, Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection asked federal scientists to analyze water samples to determine to what extent prescription drugs had seeped into the state’s waterways. Worried that discarded birth-control pills, antidepressants and other drugs could affect the state’s fishing industry and public health, the department’s Ann Pistell hoped the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Northeast office could give her a speedy answer.

It was 2 1/2 years before she received a partial report identifying drugs in the water without a detailed explanation — it came in the past week — and she said she is still waiting for a full breakdown.

“We’re sort of baffled and frustrated by the lack of a sample analysis,” said Pistell, an environmental specialist. “We see this as an emerging issue. The more we find out, the more concerned we are.”

Some state officials have started organizing. Raoul Clarke, an environmental administrator in Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, has worked with colleagues to establish a listserv where state and local officials can exchange information with concerned activists.

“There are many unanswered questions, but these things are showing up, and people are taking notice,” Clarke said.

EPA officials say they are still gauging the seriousness of the threat. Technological advances in testing make it possible to detect very low levels of hormones and chemical compounds in waterways, they say, and it is unclear whether such levels harm animals and people.

Hal Zenick, who monitors health issues in the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, said several agencies are working to determine whether such contaminants “lead to exposures, and do these exposures have implications for health effects.”

Others, including drug manufacturers and sewage treatment operators, say that while they are monitoring the contaminants, their threat has been overstated.

Thomas White, an environmental consultant for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), said industry studies indicate there are “no appreciable human health risks” and no “appreciable impacts on the aquatic environment” linked to drugs in the water.

In recent months, however, scientists have issued a series of findings suggesting that discarded drugs, which pass through municipal wastewater systems and into rivers, lakes and streams, could affect the environment. In 2002, a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) study found these kinds of contaminants in 80 percent of the 139 streams it sampled in 30 states. Other researchers suspect that hormones and medicines in the water may be responsible for effects on wildlife that include feminizing male fish and making others sluggish or uninterested in eating.

Rebecca D. Klaper, an ecological genomics scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, recently exposed fathead minnows to a popular anti-cholesterol drug at a level that was only slightly higher than what now occurs in area streams. She had to stop the week-long experiment after 24 hours because the fish were struggling to survive.

“They were sitting at the bottom of the tank, barely moving and barely breathing,” Klaper said in an interview. “We’re concerned [these pharmaceuticals] are not only having an effect on aquatic organisms, but on human populations as well.”

Timothy S. Gross, a USGS toxicologist, has spent several years studying how fish are faring downstream from Las Vegas. He examined three species — carp, largemouth bass and the endangered razorback sucker — and detected “a very large and marked decrease in sperm quality and quantity” in all three populations.

There are enough carp and bass to withstand such effects, Gross said, but the razorback sucker may not recover. “When you have a species already on the brink, this may push them over the brink,” he said.

Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who has secured $2.5 million over the past decade to fund the Geological Survey’s water quality studies in the Las Vegas Valley, said the government needs “to do a comprehensive national study to determine how these contaminants might affect our health, our water supplies and our environment. I think it would be irresponsible not to provide funding on this issue. It is a wise, and necessary, investment in our future.”

But several rank-and-file EPA employees said senior agency officials have expressed little interest in the subject. Hilary Snook, an EPA research scientist who has been analyzing pharmaceutical levels in about 45 water samples from Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont, said he has yet to receive funding from headquarters for the project. As a result, he said, his office lacks the money to complete the study quickly.

“I don’t think there’s much political will at all” to tackle the issue, Snook said. “We should at least look at it. We shouldn’t be burying our heads in the sand.”

State and local officials are growing increasingly impatient. David Galvin, who manages the hazardous waste program in King County, Wash., is coming under pressure from county residents to collect unused pharmaceuticals from hospitals as well as from elderly residents’ homes. He is working with the nonprofit Product Stewardship Institute in Boston to start a national dialogue between drug manufacturers and government agencies on how to minimize the environmental impact of discarded medicines.

“Otherwise, we at the local level are going to be stuck with figuring out how to deal with it and having to pay for it,” Galvin said. “I’d rather that not happen.”

Maine officials hope to establish a program that would encourage consumers to mail back unused drugs to be incinerated, and they want drug manufacturers to pay for it. But in February, according to a letter obtained by the Natural Resources News Service, PhRMA wrote that it was “opposed to the recommendation that manufacturers solely fund this approach.”

Pistell and others would like to start taking back medicines, but, she said, “the state is not in a position to pay for it.”

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

ARRRRGH!!! The Detroit Pistons lost to the San Antonio Spurs!

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062302279.html

Here, George Will offers his opinion about yesterday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision.

–Nathan

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/23/AR2005062301420.html?sub=AR
washingtonpost.com
Damaging ‘Deference’

By George F. Will
Post
Friday, June 24, 2005; A31

The country is bracing for a bruising battle over filling a Supreme Court vacancy, a battle in which conservatives will praise “judicial restraint” and “deference” to popularly elected branches of government and liberals will praise judicial activism in defense of individual rights. But consider what the court did yesterday.

Most conservatives hoped that, in the most important case the court was to decide this term, judicial activism would put a leash on popularly elected local governments and would pull courts more deeply into American governance to protect the rights of individuals. Yesterday conservatives were disappointed.

The case came from New London, Conn., where the city government, like all governments, wants more revenue and has empowered a private entity, New London Development Corp., to exercise the awesome power of eminent domain. It has done so to condemn an unblighted working-class neighborhood in order to give the space to private developers whose condominiums, luxury hotel and private offices would pay more taxes than do the owners of the condemned homes and businesses.

The question answered yesterday was: Can government profit by seizing the property of people of modest means and giving it to wealthy people who can pay more taxes than can be extracted from the original owners? The court answered yes.

The Fifth Amendment says, among other things, “nor shall private property be taken for public use , without just compensation” (emphasis added). All state constitutions echo the Constitution’s Framers by stipulating that takings must be for “public use.” The Framers, who weighed their words, clearly intended the adjective “public” to circumscribe government’s power: Government should take private property only to create things — roads, bridges, parks, public buildings — directly owned or primarily used by the general public.

Fighting eviction from homes one of them had lived in all her life, the New London owners appealed to Connecticut’s Supreme Court, which ruled 4 to 3 against them. Yesterday they lost again. The U.S. Supreme Court issued a 5 to 4 ruling that drains the phrase “public use” of its clearly intended function of denying to government an untrammeled power to dispossess individuals of their most precious property: their homes and businesses.

During oral arguments in February, Justice Antonin Scalia distilled the essence of New London’s brazen claim: “You can take from A and give to B if B pays more taxes?” Yesterday the court said that the modifier “public” in the phrase “public use” does not modify government power at all. That is the logic of the opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens and joined by justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer.

In a tart dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Justice Clarence Thomas and Scalia, noted that the consequences of this decision “will not be random.” She says it is “likely” — a considerable understatement — that the beneficiaries of the decision will be people “with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

Those on the receiving end of the life-shattering power that the court has validated will almost always be individuals of modest means. So this liberal decision — it augments government power to aggrandize itself by bulldozing individuals’ interests — favors muscular economic battalions at the expense of society’s little platoons, such as homeowners and the neighborhoods they comprise.

Dissenting separately, Thomas noted the common-law origins and clearly restrictive purpose of the Framers’ “public use” requirement. And responding to the majority’s dictum that the court should not “second-guess” the New London city government’s “considered judgment” about what constitutes seizing property for “public use,” he said: A court owes “no deference” to a legislature’s or city government’s self-interested reinterpretation of the phrase “public use,” a notably explicit clause of the Bill of Rights, any more than a court owes deference to a legislature’s determination of what constitutes a “reasonable” search of a home.

Liberalism triumphed yesterday. Government became radically unlimited in seizing the very kinds of private property that should guarantee individuals a sphere of autonomy against government.

Conservatives should be reminded to be careful what they wish for. Their often-reflexive rhetoric praises “judicial restraint” and deference to — it sometimes seems — almost unleashable powers of the elected branches of governments. However, in the debate about the proper role of the judiciary in American democracy, conservatives who dogmatically preach a populist creed of deference to majoritarianism will thereby abandon, or at least radically restrict, the judiciary’s indispensable role in limiting government.

georgewill@washpost.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company