Non-truth and reconciliation in Indonesian peacebuilding
John Braithwaite, Valerie Braithwaite, Michael Cookson, Leah Dunn.
ISBN 9781921666223 $29.95 (GST inclusive) ISBN 9781921666230 (Online) Published March 2010
Indonesia suffered an explosion of religious violence, ethnic violence, separatist violence, terrorism, and violence by criminal gangs, the security forces and militias in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By 2002 Indonesia had the worst terrorism problem of any nation. All these forms of violence have now fallen dramatically. How was this accomplished? What drove the rise and the fall of violence? Anomie theory is deployed to explain these developments. Sudden institutional change at the time of the Asian financial crisis and the fall of President Suharto meant the rules of the game were up for grabs. Valerie Braithwaite’s motivational postures theory is used to explain the gaming of the rules and the disengagement from authority that occurred in that era. Ultimately resistance to Suharto laid a foundation for commitment to a revised, more democratic, institutional order. The peacebuilding that occurred was not based on the high-integrity truth-seeking and reconciliation that was the normative preference of these authors. Rather it was based on non-truth, sometimes lies, and yet substantial reconciliation. This poses a challenge to restorative justice theories of peacebuilding.
Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University doctoral student, arrived at San Francisco International Airport with her 14-year-old daughter for a 9 a.m. flight home to Malaysia. She asked for a wheelchair, having recently had a hysterectomy.
Instead, when a ticket agent found her name on the no-fly list, Ms. Ibrahim was handcuffed, searched and jailed amid a flurry of phone calls involving the local police, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security. Two hours after her flight left, Ms. Ibrahim was released without explanation. She flew to Malaysia the next day.
But when she tried to return to the United States, she discovered that her visa had been revoked. And when she complained that she did not belong on a terrorist watch list, the government’s response came a year later in a form letter saying only that her case had been reviewed and that any changes warranted had been made.
Every year, thousands of people find themselves caught up in the government’s terrorist screening process. Some are legitimate targets of concern, others are victims of errors in judgment or simple mistaken identity.
Either way, their numbers are likely to rise as the Obama administration recalibrates the standards for identifying potential terrorists, in response to intelligence failures that let a would-be bomber fly to Detroit from Amsterdam last Christmas. On Friday, the administration altered rules for identifying which passengers flying to the United States should face extra scrutiny at the gate. And it is reviewing ways to make it easier to place suspects on the watch list.
“The entire federal government is leaning very far forward on putting people on lists,” Russell E. Travers, a deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a recent Senate hearing. Before the attempted attack on Christmas, Mr. Travers said, “I never had anybody tell me that the list was too small.”
Now, he added, “It’s getting bigger, and it will get even bigger.”
Even as the universe of those identified as a risk expands, the decision-making involved remains so secretive that people cannot be told whether they are on the watch list, why they may be on it or even whether they have been removed. The secrecy, government officials say, keeps terrorists off balance. But civil liberties advocates say it can hide mistakes and keep people wrongly singled out from seeking redress.
Now, five years after Ms. Ibrahim’s arrest at the United Airlines ticket counter, a lawsuit she filed is chipping away at that wall of secrecy. While judges have dismissed many similar cases, a federal appeals court let hers proceed, endorsing a new legal strategy for challenging placement on the watch list. In December, a federal judge scoffed at the government’s claim for secrecy and ordered it to release files on Ms. Ibrahim’s detention.
Ms. Ibrahim’s case has also raised legal questions about detaining people whose names appear on the no-fly list, and it casts light on the role of private contractors in deciding whether someone should be held. The police in San Francisco said they had acted on the instructions of a contractor working for the Homeland Security Department.
The government is fighting back, and there is no guarantee that Ms. Ibrahim, a 44-year-old mother of four, will ever learn more about what happened. However, an examination of her case, along with documents from other lawsuits, government audits and official testimony, offers some broad hints about the murky system.
The watch list is actually a succession of lists, beginning with the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, a centralized database of potential suspects. Mr. Travers said that about 10,000 names come in daily through intelligence reports, but that a large percentage are dismissed because they are based on “some combination of circular reporting, poison pens, mistaken identities, lies and so forth.”
Analysts at the counterterrorism center then work with the Terrorist Screening Center of the F.B.I. to add names to what is called the consolidated watch list, which may have any number of consequences for those on it, like questioning by the police during a traffic stop or additional screening crossing the border. That list, in turn, has various subsets, including the no-fly list and the selectee list, which requires passengers to undergo extra screening.
The consolidated list has the names of more than 400,000 people, about 97 percent of them foreigners, while the no-fly and selectee lists have about 6,000 and 20,000, respectively.
The standards for adding names to the lists have gone through a cycle of tightening, then relaxing. After the Sept. 11 attacks, hundreds of names were added with few guidelines, eventually leading to complaints that too many innocent travelers were being stopped. Two years ago, the government developed a reasonable suspicion standard and secret protocols for applying it; their last major revision was outlined in a 72-page memorandum in February 2009 that clarified the “minimum substantive derogatory criteria.”
A federal official involved in the process said that under those rules, associating with a known or suspected terrorist was not enough to warrant being listed; there had to be evidence that the person supported terrorism. The criteria also generally require more than a single source of “derogatory information,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss security matters.
A task force formed after the Christmas Day episode is considering changes to the process, including making it easier to label suspects extremists and giving greater weight to credible “single-source walk-ins,” the official said. The suspect in the attempted bombing, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was known to American intelligence analysts because his father, a banker in Nigeria, had reported him to the authorities, but he had not been placed on the watch list.
Putting United States citizens on the watch list requires more than just a single tip, although one tip could prompt an investigation that eventually leads to placement on the list. Local police officers are encouraged to file “suspicious activity reports” with the F.B.I. or the Homeland Security Department, which finances about 70 intergovernmental intelligence cooperatives nationwide.
While federal policies prohibit profiling, a wide range of innocent activities can be deemed suspicious. Guidelines distributed by several cooperatives advise landlords to be alert for tenants who prefer ground-floor apartments and have little furniture. Among the warning signs listed by one in Ohio are “immersion in a purely Muslim environment” and the “study of technical subjects” like engineering.
By such standards, Erich Scherfen could look suspicious. A veteran of the Persian Gulf war and a commercial pilot from Pennsylvania, Mr. Scherfen converted to Islam and married a Pakistani-born woman, Rubina Tureen, who runs a small business selling religious books. They have taken part in Islamic conferences and interfaith seminars.
In May 2006, a co-worker told the state police that Mr. Scherfen had retrofitted the family car to carry bombs, court records show. (He said he had simply removed a broken seat from his old Mazda.) Not long after, Mr. Scherfen and Ms. Tureen began being detained at airports, jeopardizing his job.
The couple filed a lawsuit, and his job was saved after a judge was given secret evidence that apparently indicated that Mr. Scherfen had been taken off the selectee list.
“I think some ill-informed people were putting the dots together and came to faulty conclusions,” Ms. Tureen said.
Their lawsuit cited rulings in Ms. Ibrahim’s case as precedents.
A Muslim who came to the United States to study civil engineering, Ms. Ibrahim impressed colleagues at Stanford. “Of all the people you could think of who might be on a list of terrorism suspects, she would be pretty close to the bottom,” said Raymond Levitt, one of her faculty advisers.
The judge presiding over her lawsuit appeared skeptical, too.
“It looks like to me it was a monumental mistake, and they identified the wrong person,” the judge, William H. Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco, said at a hearing in December. “I’m just guessing.”
The authorities will not say why they singled out Ms. Ibrahim. A week before her scheduled flight to Malaysia in January 2005, she was visited by two F.B.I. agents, said her lawyer, Marwa Elzankaly.
“They actually claimed they did not know why they were there to interview her,” Ms. Elzankaly said, “and basically just asked her a few background questions about herself, her family, her line of work, her travel plans and her education.”
When the airport ticket agent discovered her name on the no-fly list, he called the San Francisco police, who contacted the Transportation Security Administration in Washington. There, they reached a watch officer working for U.S. Investigations Services, one of several private contractors the agency has hired for its 24-hour operations center.
The contractors’ duties “include receiving telephone inquiries and providing direction as to how to handle passengers,” said Kristin Lee, an agency spokeswoman.
The police incident report says the watch officer told the police to “deny the flight to Ibrahim, contact the F.B.I. and detain her for further questioning.” She was driven to a police substation, where she was searched and placed in a holding cell. Eventually, an F.B.I. agent told the police to let her go, adding that she was being moved to the selectee list and could fly home.
Outraged, she decided to sue for wrongful arrest and to find out why she was on the list. But the law creating the T.S.A. made it virtually impossible to mount a legal challenge against it.
Instead, Ms. Ibrahim’s lawsuit focused on the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center, which does not have the same legal protections. After much of her case was thrown out, a divided United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated it.
“If your name or my name or anybody’s name in this courtroom were put on that list, we would suffer grievously,” the chief judge, Alex Kozinski, said at a hearing in April 2008. “And we want to have some way of going to our government and possibly to our courts and saying, ‘Look, I shouldn’t be on that list.’ ”
Another issue raised by Ms. Ibrahim’s case is whether inclusion on the no-fly list is sufficient grounds for arrest. At a hearing last December, government lawyers agreed that it was not, although the courts generally allow brief detentions for investigative purposes.
The police, as part of their defense, offered to explain why they detained Ms. Ibrahim, but the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security refuse to allow it.
Meanwhile, Ms. Ibrahim earned her doctorate from Stanford but has been unable to return to the United States to participate in the lawsuit. Her lawyers said in a court filing that when she applied for a new visa last September, American Embassy officials in Kuala Lumpur questioned her about the suit, asking what it would take to settle it.
Last month, Ms. Ibrahim accepted a $225,000 settlement from the San Francisco police and U.S. Investigations Services. But she is pursuing her claims against the federal government. None of the defendants’ lawyers would comment for this article.
At the December hearing, Judge Alsup showed his displeasure at the government, telling Justice Department lawyers that they were abusing the secrecy privilege.
“You’re holding onto this five-year-old information like, you know, like another 9/11 is going to happen if you somehow release it,” the judge said, according to a transcript. “That’s just baloney.”
MOSCOW -- He had been a bright but lonely child from a sleepy city near the Mongolian border, in a Buddhist region of Russia far from the nation's Muslim centers. But by the time he was killed last month, thousands of miles away in the volatile North Caucasus, Alexander Tikhomirov had become the face of an Islamist insurgency.
After two young women blew themselves up on the Moscow subway last week, killing 40 people in the city's worst terrorist attack in years, investigators said they suspected that Tikhomirov had recruited and trained them, and perhaps dozens of other suicide bombers.
How the schoolboy whom neighbors called Sascha became the tech-savvy militant known as Sayid Buryatsky remains a question wrapped in rumor and speculation. But the outline of Tikhomirov's journey from the Siberian steppes to the mountains of Chechnya provides a sense of the challenge that radical Islam poses in Russia and the speed with which the insurgency in the nation's southwest is changing.
In less than two years with the rebels, Tikhomirov became their most effective propagandist, drawing in young Muslims with his fluent Russian, colloquial interpretations of Islam and mastery of the Internet. When security forces gunned him down last month at age 27, the guerrillas immediately cast him as a martyr.
Even in death, he remains influential. The rebel leader Doku Umarov has vowed fresh attacks in the Russian heartland by the brigade of suicide bombers that Tikhomirov helped revive. And he remains a digital legend, with his writings and videos preserved on the Web and his DVDs sold outside mosques across the former Soviet Union.
Neighbors in Ulan Ude, capital of the Siberian province of Buryatia, remember Tikhomirov as an awkward boy from a troubled family. His father was Buryat, an ethnic minority related to Mongols, and died soon after he was born. His mother, said to be an ethnic Russian, struggled to make ends meet at a local market.
One resident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of police scrutiny, said Tikhomirov's interest in Islam came after he was forced to drop out of high school and attend vocational school. Others traced it to a stepfather from the Caucasus.
But in a letter posted on a rebel Web site, Tikhomirov's mother said he was simply drawn in by a library copy of the Koran when he was 17. "That same year, he started to search for people who could tell him anything about Islam," she wrote.
Tikhomirov may have had an early brush with Islamic extremism and Russia's heavy-handed efforts to stamp it out. An Uzbek preacher named Bakhtiyar Umarov moved to his city about the time he converted, and Tikhomirov studied with him, acquaintances said. After Umarov caused a stir by trying to build a mosque, Russia deported the preacher to Uzbekistan, where he was jailed on charges of "terrorist propaganda." But his defenders insist that he is a moderate and could not have radicalized Tikhomirov.
In his late teens, Tikhomirov moved to Moscow, where he attended an Islamic college that the authorities later closed in a crackdown on suspected extremism. He then traveled to Cairo, where he studied Arabic and attended lectures by Muslim scholars, one of whom he cited years later to justify violence in the name of Islam.
In 2003, he returned to Moscow, telling friends that the Egyptian authorities had kicked him out for his religious activities. He took the Muslim name Sayid, calling himself Sayid Buryatsky.
But he seemed far from ready to join the rebels in the North Caucasus. Investigators say he took a job as a low-level assistant to the Russian Council of Muftis, which unites the nation's Muslim spiritual boards.
Suppressed by the czars and the Communists, Islam has enjoyed a fitful rebirth in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. Most of the nation's estimated 20 million Muslims are ethnic minorities who adhere to a moderate branch of the faith. But radical views have made inroads, fueled by foreign proselytizers and frustration with state-backed spiritual leaders.
Acquaintances say Tikhomirov embraced a movement known as Salafism, which argues that Islam has been corrupted over the centuries and urges a return to the stricter practices of the earliest Muslims. The movement is popular among young Muslims in Russia, but the security forces often target its adherents as extremists.
Russia's traditional Islamic leaders have tried to steer young people toward moderate views, but a severe shortage of mosques, due in part to state limits, has made that difficult. In Moscow, six mosques serve as many as 3 million believers, the largest Muslim population of any city in Europe.
Aslam Ezhaev, director of an Islamic publishing house, said Tikhomirov voiced frustration with Muslim officialdom and eventually returned to Buryatia, where he took a job as a warehouse guard and offered to translate Arabic books for him.
Ezhaev suggested that Tikhomirov start a podcast for his Web site, Radio Islam. Tikhomirov proved be a talented preacher; his lectures were an immediate hit.
Ezhaev said he opposed violence and forbade Tikhomirov to discuss jihad. "It was easy for him to stay within the limits," he said. "I didn't see any signs of fanaticism."
On the Web, radicals criticized Tikhomirov for refusing to talk about Russia's brutal efforts to crush the insurgency in the Caucasus, where rebels in 2007 declared jihad to establish an Islamist emirate.
In the spring of 2008, Tikhomirov received a recruitment video from a senior rebel commander. "I considered it probably three or five seconds," he recalled in a video of his own, then concluded that God was challenging him to back up his sermons with action.
Because of his mixed ethnicity, he quickly became a powerful symbol for an insurgency trying to expand beyond Chechnya to the rest of the Caucasus. His sermons, which he filmed in combat gear, weaved scripture with sarcasm, striking a chord in an impoverished Muslim region brimming with resentment against the security forces.
Tikhomirov called the screams of injured enemies "music for the ears" and detailed his central role in the campaign of suicide bombings that began last summer with the revival of Riyad-us Saliheen, a brigade that once staged attacks across Russia.
"While I am alive," he wrote in December, "I will do everything possible so that the ranks of Riyad-us Saliheen are broadened and new waves of mujaheddin go on to martyrdom operations."
On March 2, when security forces surrounded him and other fighters in a village in Ingushetia, Tikhomirov recorded a final sermon on his mobile phone, officials said. The authorities recovered the phone, along with a 50-liter barrel of explosives.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Senior Palestinian leaders — men who once commanded militias — are joining unarmed protest marches against Israeli policies and are being arrested. Goods produced in Israeli settlements have been burned in public demonstrations. The Palestinian prime minister has entered West Bank areas officially off limits to his authority, to plant trees and declare the land part of a future state.
Something is stirring in the West Bank. With both diplomacy and armed struggle out of favor for having failed to end the Israeli occupation, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority, joined by the business community, is trying to forge a third way: to rouse popular passions while avoiding violence. The idea, as Fatah struggles to revitalize its leadership, is to build a virtual state and body politic through acts of popular resistance.
“It is all about self-empowerment,” said Hasan Abu-Libdeh, the Palestinian economy minister, referring to a campaign to end the purchase of settlers’ goods and the employment of Palestinians by settlers and their industries. “We want ordinary people to feel like stockholders in the process of building a state.”
The new approach still remains small scale while American-led efforts to revive peace talks are stalled. But street interviews showed that people were aware and supportive of its potential to bring pressure on Israel but dubious about its ultimate effectiveness.
Billboards have sprung up as part of a campaign against buying settlers’ goods, featuring a pointed finger and the slogan “Your conscience, your choice.” The Palestinian Ministry of Communications has just banned the sale of Israeli cellphone cards because Israeli signals are relayed from towers inside settlements. Prime MinisterSalam Fayyad is spending more time out of his business suits and in neglected villages opening projects related to sewage, electricity and education and calling for “sumud,” or steadfastness.
“Steadfastness must be translated from a slogan to acts and facts on the ground,” he told a crowd late last month in a village called Izbet al-Tabib near the city of Qalqilya, an area where Israel’s separation barrier makes access to land extremely difficult for farmers. Before planting trees, Mr. Fayyad told about 1,000 people gathered to hear him, “This is our real project, to establish our presence on our land and keep our people on it.”
Nonviolence has never caught on here, and Israel’s military says the new approach is hardly nonviolent. But the current set of campaigns is trying to incorporate peaceful pressure in limited ways. Rajmohan Gandhi, grandson of the Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi, just visited Bilin, a Palestinian village with a weekly protest march. Next week, Martin Luther King III is scheduled to speak here at a conference on nonviolence.
On Palm Sunday, the Israeli police arrested 15 Palestinians in Bethlehem who were protesting the difficulty of getting to Jerusalem because of a security closing. Abbas Zaki, a senior official in the Palestine Liberation Organization, was arrested, prompting demonstrations the next day. Some Palestinians are also rejecting V.I.P. cards handed out by Israelis allowing them to pass quickly through checkpoints.
Palestinian political analysts say it is too early to assess the prospects of the nonviolent approach. Generally, they say, given the division between Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority here, nothing is likely to change without a political shakeup and unified leadership. Still, they say, popular resistance, combined with institution-building and international appeals, is gaining notice among Palestinians.
“Fatah is living through a crisis of vision,” said Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs in Jerusalem. “How can they combine being a liberation movement with being a governing party? This is one way. The idea is to awaken national pride and fulfill the people’s anxiety and passion. Of course, Hamas and armed resistance still remain a real option for many.”
Khalil Shikaki, who runs the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, said: “The society is split. The public believes that Israel responds to suffering, not to nonviolent resistance. But there is also not much interest in violence now. Our surveys show support for armed resistance at 47 percent in March. In essence, the public feels trapped between failed diplomacy and failed armed struggle.”
Israeli military authorities have not decided how to react. They allow Mr. Fayyad some activity in the areas officially off limits to him, but on occasion they have torn down what he has built. They reject the term nonviolent for the recent demonstrations because the marches usually include stone-throwing and attempts to damage the separation barrier. Troops have responded with stun grenades, rubber bullets, tear gas and arrests. And the military has declared that Bilin will be a closed area every Friday for six months to halt the weekly marches there.
“We respect Salam Fayyad,” one military official said, speaking under the army’s rules of anonymity. “But we don’t want him to engage in incitement. Burning goods is incitement. Destroying the fence is incitement and is not nonviolent. They are walking a thin line.”
One reason a violent uprising remains unlikely for now, Palestinian analysts say, is that in the two years that Mr. Fayyad’s security forces and ministries have been functioning, daily life inside West Bank cities and their surroundings has taken on much greater safety and normality.
The police and the courts are functioning again after the intifada of 2000 that led to many deaths on both sides. Traffic tickets are now routinely handed out. Personal checks, long shunned, are increasingly in use.
Of course, the presence of Israeli forces outside the cities and at checkpoints, the existence of the barrier and continued building inside Israeli settlements send most Palestinians into despair and make them doubt that a sovereign state can be built.
One effort to increase a sense of hope is a new push to ban goods made in the settlements, symbols of occupation. A $2 million project called the Karama National Empowerment Fund, jointly financed by Palestinian businesses and the government, aims to spread the message through ads and public events.
Mr. Abu-Libdeh, the economy minister, said a law was likely to go into effect soon barring the purchase of settlers’ goods, a trade worth at least $200 million a year. Efforts to end Palestinian employment in settlements will not carry penalties, he said, because the government does not offer unemployment insurance and it is unclear whether the 30,000 Palestinians who work in settlements could find new jobs.
Palestinian industrialists have financed the settlers’ goods ban partly because they hope to replace the goods with their own. They do not single out other Israeli goods, which are protected under trade agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.
Mr. Fayyad, the prime minister, a political independent, said his notion was to build the makings of a state by 2011.
“It’s about putting facts on the ground,” he said in an interview. “The occupation is not transitional so we need to make sure our people stick around. If we create services, it gives people a sense of possibility. I feel we are on a path that is very appealing both domestically and internationally. The whole world knows this occupation has to end.”
By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly
Heydays: Michigan Christian militia could have been plotting to commemorate Oklahoma City blast -- or uprisings at Lexington and Concord . . . Not close enough for government work: DHS has inspected just a dozen of 6,000 chemical facilities it says require special security . . . Ditto: Of 15 hypothetical terrorist attack scenarios identified by DHS, incident planning was completed only for one. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.
Know Nukes:Thermo Fisher Scientific has been awarded two U.S. patents for radiation instruments that can help protect the public against nuclear terrorism, Nuclear Street says. The hard-negotiated U.S.-Russian nuke arms pact being inked Thursday “took so long to conclude it has jeopardized Obama’s chances of achieving another nuclear goal: Senate ratification of a nuclear test ban treaty,” AP analyzes. “The most serious threat America faces is nuclear terrorism from Iran, either a nuclear EMP attack launched by missile or a warhead smuggled into a city,” Family Security Mattersleads.
Coming and Going: Although some subway stations in the United States have been outfitted with a bio-chemical threat detection system, its installation isn’t presently supported by DHS funding or transit authority budgets, Global Security Newswire notes — as The Infrastructurist concludes that “there’s still an elephant in the room when it comes to adapting sophisticated technologies on a large scale: cost.” The Arizona rancher killing, meantime, has drawn fresh scrutiny to the patchwork of fencing along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, FOX Newsspotlights.
Cyberia: The European Union is funding research aimed at detecting suspicious behavior on board aircraft using “a combination of cameras, microphones, explosives detectors and a sophisticated computer system,” The Daily Telegraph relates. “For Israel’s chief of military intelligence, ‘cyberspace has become the fifth dimension of warfare, following land, sea, air and space,’” Aviation Week leads. “Over the next three years, the DHS is slated to hire 1,000 cybersecurity professionals and has extended offers to roughly 200 individuals so far,” eWeek updates — while U.S. Newsruns a point-counterpoint debate on the question: “Should the U.S. be prepared for offensive cyberwarfare?” See a sidebar, as well, on six vulnerable potential terrorist targets.
Terror Tech: “The most extensive and sophisticated video surveillance system in the United States . . . is transforming what it means to be in public in Chicago,” AP spotlights. The EPA is working with a Pentagon agency on anthrax sporicides, the deputy director of its National Homeland Security Research Center writes in Armed With Science in regards to interagency collaboration on bioterror R&D. Homeland Security Watch ponders “What Zombies Can Teach About Homeland Security,” drawing on the (actually serious) Canadian academic paper, “Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection.” In Afghanistan, meanwhile, “evidence shows that while drone strikes wear down the will of insurgents, they also give policymakers the illusion of quick, seemingly costless success,” Asia Timesassesses.
Over There: Monday’s attack on the U.S. consulate in Peshawar marked “the first most-coordinated and well-planned direct strike on a U.S. interest in Pakistan,” Foreign Policyessays. Obama administration plans to train a covert Indonesian army counterterror unit could violate the Leahy Amendment, the Los Angeles Times hears human rights advocates fretting. According to Canada’s Tourism Commission, visits from Americans dropped by 9 percent in 2009 and increased U.S. ID hassles at the border would seem to be the cause, The Bangor Daily News notes. The Canadian lawyer who forced the U.S. government to admit that Abu Zubaydah is not an al Qaeda terrorist says the revelation could seriously jeopardize Ottawa’s case against Mohamed Harkat, the Citizen says.
Courts and Rights: The Supremes have declined to take the case of a Saudi defendant in Colorado whose lawyer was barred from questioning a prospective juror about a likely bias against Muslims, The Christian Science Monitor mentions. A Philadelphia man who threatened Rep. Eric Cantor and his family via YouTube has been found incompetent to stand trial, the Inquirer informs — as The Seattle Times sees a Washington State man charged with threatening to kill Sen. Patty Murray over her support for the health care overhaul. A migrant aid agency says two Uighur brothers resettled in Switzerland from Guantanamo Bay are studying French and settling in, AP reports — while Agence France-Presse learns that some Gitmo detainees are setting aside food as a donation to Haiti’s earthquake victims. Justice included non-terrorists on a list backing up administration claims that hundreds of terrorists have been convicted in criminal courts, Cybercast News Service contends.
Patriot Ponies: “A Christian militia, made up entirely of horses, was arrested today for planning a stampede through the middle of Main Street, USA, on July 4th,” The Spoof (a bit inexplicably) spoofs. “The leader of the herd, known only as Star, has confessed his organization was intent on creating anarchy by going to a series of 4th of July parades around the U.S. and causing a few flighty horses to break. Then, the group of militant mustangs would follow through with a general equine panic culminating in chaos throughout the country causing widespread property damage. The alleged co-conspirators and their ages are Duke 5, Bandit 7, Doc 9, Ollie 12, and Red 8. All those arrested could face punishments ranging from 15 years to life in a maximum security pen surrounded by electrical fencing.”
BANGKOK — Prime MinisterAbhisit Vejjajiva of Thailand declared a state of emergency in the Bangkok area on Wednesday after antigovernment demonstrators broke into the Parliament building, forcing government ministers to flee by helicopter.
The televised announcement came after nearly a month of street demonstrations by the red-shirted protesters, who have paralyzed the city’s commercial district and paraded through the city in defiance of government restrictions. They are demanding that Mr. Abhisit dissolve Parliament and call new elections.
The declaration of a state of emergency gives the military the power to suspend certain civil liberties and ban public gatherings of more than five people. It creates a Crisis Solution Center under joint civilian and military control.
“We need to plan and implement everything to the last detail and with thorough care,” Mr. Abhisit said. “The last thing we want is for the situation to spiral out of control.”
He added, “We do this not with the intention of cracking down on innocent people but to sanctify the law.”
The brief invasion of Parliament earlier Wednesday, the failure of security forces to stop it and the hasty retreat by government officials had added to a growing sense in Bangkok that the government is not in control of the situation.
At a rally shortly the invasion a protest leader, Jatuporn Prompan, was defiant. “If you want to kill us, come on in,” he said. “But if you consider us your brothers and sisters, put your weapons down.”
The ministers, in their dark, tailored suits, could be seen on television clambering over a back wall of the Parliament building and then boarding a Black Hawk helicopter under armed guard.
At the front of the building, red-shirted protesters and their black-uniformed enforcers shoved and wrestled with Parliamentary guards, pushing back security officers with riot shields.
“The Red Shirts were very crazy and yelling,” said Sgt. Paisan Chumanee of the police. “We didn’t know whether they would use violence. To avoid provoking more anger, we used the helicopter.”
The move on the Parliament building came shortly after the conclusion of a cabinet meeting at which ministers extended the Internal Security Act, said Panitan Wattanayagorn, the government spokesman, who was one of those evacuated from the Parliament building.
Mr. Panitan defended the ministers’ hasty retreat, saying they would not have been able to leave on their own “without confrontation.”
Deputy Prime Minister Suthep Thangsuban, who is in charge of security for the government, was one of those evacuated to a military headquarters after the protesters wrestled with his security guard, seized the guard’s weapon and emptied out the ammunition.
“This is the Parliament! Why are you carrying a gun?” an opposition lawmaker shouted at the guard.
Mr. Abhisit, a target of the protesters, had departed a few minutes earlier to the military headquarters, where he has been based during the protests. He later announced that he had canceled a planned trip to the United States for a nuclear security summit meeting next week because of the continuing unrest.
The protesters, known as the Red Shirts, are the latest front in a social and political struggle between the rural and urban poor and the ruling elite that saw its pre-eminence challenged by former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a coup in 2006.
Mr. Thaksin is abroad now, fleeing a corruption conviction, but he is believed to be financing and coordinating much of the protests.
The protesters are demanding the dissolution of the government, which came to power in December 2008 through a parliamentary vote, and new elections. Mr. Thaksin’s supporters form an electoral majority, and it is widely believed that they would win a nationwide vote.
Mr. Abhisit’s term in office runs until the end of 2011. In recent unsuccessful negotiations, protesters demanded that he step down within 15 days, and he offered the possibility of a new election within nine months. The talks broke down in an impasse but could be revived.
In defiance of government orders, thousands kept up a blockade of the main commercial district, where they have forced shopping malls, hotels and banks to stay closed since Saturday. In a show of impunity on Tuesday, convoys of red-shirted protesters roamed the city freely, pushing through military and police blockades with little resistance.
One commentator, Tulsathit Taptim of the daily newspaper Nation, called it “arguably the best day so far for the red shirts and definitely the worst for Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva.”
He added: “Bangkokians’ frustration was palpable — and so was the red shirts’ renewed confidence. Also, for the first time, the prime minister must have started questioning the loyalty of some in the military.”
In a telephone interview, Mr. Panitan, the government spokesman, denied reports in the Thai news media that military commanders were refusing orders to use force against the protesters.
“We gave the military clear guidelines,” he said. “They cannot use force or weapons against the people.”
He added: “We are required to solve the situation positively. That’s the job of the prime minister.”
MOSCOW — The authorities in Kyrgyzstan declared a national state of emergency on Wednesday after large-scale antigovernment protests broke out around the country and riot police officers fired on crowds in the capital, killing at least 17 people.
The country’s president, Kurmanbek Bakiyev, was said to have fled the capital, Bishkek, on the presidential plane, and it increasingly seemed that the opposition was gaining the upper hand.
The police used bullets, tear gas and stun grenades against a crowd of thousands massing in front of the presidential office in Bishkek, according to witness accounts. At least 17 people were killed and others were wounded, officials.
Opposition leaders said the toll was as high as 100 people, but that figure could not be confirmed.
The upheaval threatened an American ally, since Kyrgyzstan is home to an important American air base that operates in support of the NATO mission in nearby Afghanistan. American officials said that as of Wednesday evening the base was functioning normally.
The Obama administration has sought to cultivate ties with Mr. Bakiyev after he vowed to close the American base on the outskirts of Bishkek last year, then reversed his decision after the American side agreed to concessions, including higher rent.
Tensions have been growing in Kyrgyzstan over what human rights groups contend are the increasingly repressive policies of President Bakiyev.
Mr. Bakiyev made no public comment on Wednesday, and an official at the airport in Bishkek said in a telephone interview that Mr. Bakiyev took off from the airport on the presidential plane in the early evening. The airport official said Mr. Bakiyev was flying to Osh, a major city in the southern part of the country, but that could not be confirmed.
On Wednesday afternoon, fighting continued in the streets of Bishkek and other provincial centers. Video shot by protesters and uploaded to the Internet showed scenes of people clashing with and in some cases pushing back heavily armed riot police.
Reports from Bishkek said crowds of opposition members tried to enter the presidential offices as well as those of the national television channels.
Dmitri Kabak, director of a local human rights group in Bishkek, said in a telephone interview that he was monitoring the protest on the central square when riot police officers started shooting. He said he had the sense that the officers had panicked and were not being supervised.
“When people started marching toward the presidential office, snipers on the roof of the office started to open fire, with live bullets,” Mr. Kabak said. “I saw several people who were killed right there on the square.”
The United States Embassy in Bishkek issued a statement saying that it was “deeply concerned about reports of civil disturbances.”
By late evening in Bishkek, it appeared that the opposition had succeeded in taking over the national television channels. In a speech to the nation, an opposition leader, Omurbek Tekebaev, a former speaker of Parliament, demanded the Mr. Bakiyev and the rest of his government resign.
Mr. Tekebaev was arrested earlier in the day along with some other opposition leaders, but later released.
Kyrgyzstan, with five million people in the mountains of Central Asia, is one of the poorest countries of the former Soviet Union, and has long been troubled by political conflict and corruption.
The opposition has complained about what is asserts are Mr. Bakiyev’s autocratic policies, but it appears that the immediate catalyst for the violence was anger over a sharp increase in prices for utilities.
On Wednesday, the Kyrgyz government accused the opposition of provoking violence. “Their goal is to create instability and confrontation in society,” the Kyrgyz Parliament said in a statement.
The government said it would deal severely with the protesters, but they did not appear to be deterred. The first unrest occurred on Tuesday in the provincial center of Talas, when opposition members stormed government offices.
Russia, which also has military facilities in Kyrgyzstan and a close relationship with the government, appealed for calm.
“We believe that it is important that under the circumstances, all current issues should be resolved in a lawful manner,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said.
Mr. Bakiyev easily won another term as president as president last year over Mr. Atambaev in an election that independent monitors said was tainted by massive fraud.
Mr. Bakiyev first took office in 2005 after the Tulip Revolution, the third in what was seen at the time as a series of so-called color revolutions that offered hope of more democratic governments in former Soviet republics.
But since then, he has consolidated power, cracking down on the opposition and independent news outlets.
PDF | 
View Online | 
Mobile Device (PDA, Pocket PC, Mobile, etc) 
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_u5fkMyGOxht5F9hT0Si5kn1hje3NsPjiHNNu7ub9CmeS4s_VGM_IoezFOXF4q5mNBmmaolmnj3jqMtkIRvKzcyeiBkIZIj8s44GSCZuFcSbuMJLWXq76BeUDMCLI-u49GKep986muHGEE82vGvTYU=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uOVlmhIU1o9vY0PJSi3Sm_o8n4tXPXs9HTbFkbGxY7RiLQOS0BtCcbKuDZSEnLyyCNXFqmVQah1bU1DNO_w_6NGmqxaefTTnWxBJQl-QwjQ3bl80JHcqhnCx5E-I7_TI0xxKJOCIOykTny-rl4qQSH=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vFKGJhw5ChvN3UDFUMv_ZlVSJ3R9RqYNLu-GzrZ4Szz1Gev0cnnQ_TD12qUuY1bojVS-LEdJygbXivo8ExO5GZPhuyfQngLO62LfwZ98sP3On30SOriHuBRETmTk281384IC-sC5QBwbbCshJQ2Y8=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uU6I6O91zutH7wmcrXNCoojLdAcl-XxtjCbkdk1LTbNkTSB2N-oXrT9iusl6UlTdzJG9tu3NrCz-J6JzUUqaoaOR9HPLiv0jrcWOi9pq_szXDI2U1lJv9kacjH1OXvGGHYCAhB6QC1d4FNxubqFjK_=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vRltKCuxrMvnufbr-Tfc1xPIT27fP3iHRwGWNEtfRVkG6tdwmBXd6GXwjqTgQNrK_1Cy0S5ZY03F0_OCMUtr4rU-s-AFQFGFQ-TJhuVtqyBIUSoiNINwAQ6S7VxBPCZ3CvPps9VlumpVALpjNF7JPQ=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tDhXvIidIA49fCHShBBwOruTKVolxz8ITh3yMfWP366pJPGZ9kQ1SeBN6n85txjCKjc-G6xUPLzXvBgkBfNxTgp3Cn9vvhMhuqA26otj0CIyDZjOe8FCdztHWwgkj3LDHIVOU7t_OhaGlEdfGY8yTP=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sBpHfGDwd8Yd5_YYf95ZyaITPwz4RwVB2hPZQBt65SsL1cLi9bhxI7ohIfRGAIUXtkYN4EhM2A2foiG7N74JNlZonoxvvLAMa12Vex30JPLiJ2Dv2YoEq67wCMDp4aH6TpudBacU1hAVOaVX5QO80M=s0-d)