Starting Points

Jun 4, 2010

Letter From Karachi

The Facebook Fiasco and the Future of Free Speech in Pakistan

Madiha R. Tahir
MADIHA R. TAHIR is a freelance journalist based in Karachi, Pakistan. Her work has appeared in The National, Global Post, and Columbia Journalism Review.

More than 30 people have been murdered across Karachi this week in politically motivated violence between Mohajirs and Pashtuns, but it is Facebook -- or rather the controversy raging over its ban in Pakistan -- that draws a crowd. When Facebook hosted a page encouraging users to submit cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in mid-May, many Pakistanis reacted by denouncing the Web site as blasphemous on the grounds that Islam prohibits images of Muhammad as part of a wider edict against idolatry. Some have taken to the streets.

On May 20, my rickshaw puttered alongside a large rally organized by the religious party Jamaat-e-Islami. Hundreds of young male protesters moved in knots behind an overstuffed bus adorned with a banner reading: "To protect our Prophet against blasphemy, we will even sacrifice our lives!" In other times, these young men might have protested the countrywide ban on Facebook, which lasted from May 19 to 31, but last week they were marching resolutely in support of blocking the site. For them, Facebook had insulted their religion and community; for the country's leaders,the ban was political currency. Even as five bomb blasts shook Lahoreand U.S. drones attacked the Federally Administered Tribal Areas last week, Pakistan's Islamist organizations pressed ahead with demonstrations against Facebook.

The Jamaat-e-Islami rally came to a halt outside the gates of the Karachi Press Club. Inside, a press conference was getting rowdy. "Contempt of court!" shouted a rotund reporter interrupting Awab Alvi, a dentist known in the Pakistani blogosphere as Teeth Maestro. Alvi was one of four speakers attempting to reframe the debate about the ban as a question of free speech rather than of blasphemy, but the reporters shouted him down.

At first, the Pakistani journalists who fought mightily during Pervez Musharraf's presidency against curtailments of press freedom seemed the likeliest group to reject the Facebook ban. In late 2007, they had marched in the streets and were physically beaten; many of those who reject the Facebook ban today marched with them. But late this month, the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists announced its support for the ban, leaving its former allies feeling betrayed. "Freedom of speech doesn't give anyone a right to play with religious and sacred feelings of others, or to play with the societal norms," PFUJ declared in its press statement.

The journalists assembled at the Karachi Press Club on May 20 did not seem to mind that there had been irregularities in the legal process, such as petitioners misleading the judge to believe that Facebook, rather than its users, had created the competition and that other Muslim countries had also blocked the Web site. They were much more concerned with what they perceived as Facebook's insult to the Muslim community. "Pakistani sentiments are involved, and you're saying that you're siding with them!" bellowed one in Urdu. Alvi's arguments about free speech seemed to confirm what they already believed: anti-ban activists are elitists who care more about poking their friends on Facebook than protecting the honor of their fellow Pakistani Muslims.

Although only a fraction of Pakistan's 170 million people have regular access to the Internet, the ban -- which was repealed here on May 31 -- has exposed the broader battle over how to define the fraught relationship between religion and citizenship in Pakistan. It is a fight that the defenders of individual rights are losing.

The Facebook controversy is no longer a laughing matter, but it actually began as a joke. For its milestone 200th episode on April 14, 2010, Comedy Central's South Park depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a cartoon character. A few days later, the New York-based group Revolution Muslim -- which was founded by an American Jew who converted to Islam after attending rabbinical school in Israel -- published threats against South Park's creators on its Web site. In response, Comedy Central quickly removed all Muhammad references in the sequel. The Seattle artist Molly Norris reacted to the network's move by drawing a Muhammad cartoon dedicated to the co-creators of South Park and declaring May 20 "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day." Following her announcement, Facebook user Jon Wellington created a fan page where users began submitting content.

On May 19, the Lahore High Court instituted a blanket ban on Facebook until the end of the month. Government telecommunications regulators took the ban further, widening the censorship to include other social networking sites such as Flickr, Twitter, Wikipedia, and Youtube; even Gmail and Google suffered sporadic blocks. Nearly one thousand sites were banned throughout Pakistan until yesterday, when Judge Ejaz Ahmed Chaudhry, who was responsible for ordering the ban, asked authorities to lift it. Yet, at the same time, Chaudhry urged the government to institute a "mechanism" for banning blasphemous material in the future, effectively lending further legal cover to government censorship. Mudassir Hussain, the director of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, reportedly volunteered to continue blocking links to blasphemous content associated with the "Draw Muhammad Day" contest.

The issue has pitted those who speak the language of individual rights against those who use religious rhetoric to air community grievances. Pakistan's largest demographic -- the young, urban middle class born during the Islamization campaigns of former General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq's U.S.-backed dictatorship -- has in recent years adopted the second narrative. They are bound together by a sense of membership in an aggrieved Muslim community that they feel is under attack from both the West (in the form of drone strikes, the broader U.S. war on terror, and Washington's efforts to influence Pakistani political and military decision-making) and from the militant Islamists who regularly bomb their fellow Pakistanis.

These frustrated youth are not Taliban-style Islamists who want to do battle with the state. They are nationalists with grandiose visions of Pakistan as a potential leader among Muslim nations if it could only be saved from the extreme forces trying to destroy it. This national narrative has found eager supporters, from celebrities such as the televangelist Zaid Hamid to the fashion designer Maria B., who imagine the Pakistani nation not as a community of individuals with inalienable rights and autonomous choices but one that is based on an ideal: Islam. As in France, which banned the burka in the name of French secular republican values, Pakistani critics of Facebook sought to block the site in the name of defending community ideals.

Meanwhile, those who speak about individual rights find themselves dismissed as unpatriotic Pakistanis. It does not help their message that the most prominent faces in the anti-ban camp belong to the largely English-speaking, upper class that appears to be more culturally tied to the West than the Pakistani masses. As one exasperated journalist exclaimed at the May 20 press conference, "We are a roomful of intelligent people, and you can't even explain to us what you mean! How will you explain it to the court?"

The prevalence of a communal narrative that privileges Muslim identity and anti-ban activists' inability to clearly articulate their case in an idiom that the average Pakistani understands explains why none of the usual groups one might expect to reject the ban -- students, journalists, and lawyers -- actually opposes it.

In fact, it was a lawyers group that first invoked the notion of an aggrieved community to demand the ban in court, asserting that Facebook was "insult[ing] the emotions and feelings of Muslims." Shifting between religious justifications and constitutional reasoning, the Islamic Lawyers Movement petition protested "unlawful activities towards the constitution and Islamic injunctions and values."

The Islamic Lawyers' ambiguity is partly the legacy of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a secularist who nevertheless rewrote the constitution in 1973 to appease Islamists. As in Israel, the only other country intended as a secular homeland for a religious group, it is unclear in Pakistan whether the state acts in the name of its citizens or the global Muslim community. The Islamic Lawyers' petition refers repeatedly to "Muslims of the world," on whose behalf they claim to act. "The role of religion in the state and the relationship of Islam with law has never been debated in this country," says the lawyer and newspaper columnist Babar Sattar. "Consequently, the only people speaking in the name of religion are those belonging to the religious right."

And the religious right has been speaking the language of the masses: Urdu. Although opinion in the English-language press has decried the incendiary nature of the "Draw Muhammad" campaign, it opposed the ban for its violation of individual rights. Comments in the Urdu press -- which outstrips English circulation by about seven to one -- have reinforced the idea of an Islamic community expressed in terms of kinship. Aamir Liaquat Hussain, a former minister of religious affairs, a televangelist, and a columnist for the largest Urdu daily, Jang, has employed familial analogies to argue for the ban. If children are expected to make sacrifices on behalf of their parents, he asked in a column, then how can Pakistanis as a community "be unwilling to give up Facebook for our beloved Prophet who taught us how important family is in the first place?" Ban supporters such as Hussain have deftly painted those arguing against censorship as hopelessly self-interested and a threat to the larger Muslim "family."

For their part, political parties have either steered clear of the controversy or openly supported the ban. The secular Muttahida Qaumi Movement, which governs Karachi, faulted the Web site but remained silent about the ban; the party of the former cricket superstar Imran Khan, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which tends to attract younger idealists, supported it; and President Asif Ali Zardari's Pakistan People's Party has allowed government regulators to widen censorship beyond the court order. This suggests that the government is interested in tamping down social networking sites, which have been effective organizing tools in the past.

On May 31, the court provided further legal cover to do just that. Even as it struck down the ban, Judge Chaudhry declared that telecommunications authorities could be charged with contempt of court if they do not block blasphemous material in the future, a handy excuse for overeager regulators who have already interpreted the Facebook ban in broad terms. Chaudhry did not institute any judicial oversight or procedural safeguards to govern such censorship, and he legitimized his stance in the name of public opinion. "It is the government's job to take care of such things, which spark resentment among the people and bring them onto the streets," the judge said. "They should take steps to block any blasphemous content on the Internet." Chaudrhy's statement is essentially a bow to the religious right -- the group that has been on the streets in droves -- and consequently, an endorsement of their view that the honor of their imagined Muslim community comes before individual freedoms.

And the legal battle is not over: a second petition has now been filed in court demanding Internet censorship based on Pakistan's blasphemy laws. The Lahore High Court is expected to hear the case on June 15.

The anti-censorship movement has an uphill struggle in Pakistan, and those in the West who claim to believe in individual rights and free speech are not helping. The "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" Facebook page was set up in defense of "freedom of speech," but it misconstrued a concept that refers to government curtailments, not to the actions of private corporations such as Comedy Central, which constantly make editorial judgments for various reasons. The page also quickly became a forum for extremist comments. "There was a lot of calling Muslims 'vermin' and 'savages,'" says Arsalan Khan, a doctoral candidate, who debated with commenters on the site. After attracting more than 85,000 users and precipitating an actual free speech battle in Pakistan, the page was voluntarily shut down by its administrators. Facebook, which, according to one of the page's own administrators had received complaints "like 100,000 times" from users across the globe, did nothing.

Another "Draw Muhammad" page has since surfaced with even more derogatory content; some of its users have cautioned commenters to keep the page clean, "[u]nless of course we want this page to disappear and give Islam another victory?" Like the defenders of the ban in Pakistan, many in the West also imagine a monolithic Islamic community. Incendiary Facebook pages, the French burka ban, and the anti-Islam advertisements placed on New York City buses by the right-wing blogger Pamela Geller and the Stop the Islamization of America campaign are just some of the West's reactions to that community. All of this -- combined with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and drone attacks in Pakistan -- has led many young Pakistanis to understand that they are being attacked because they are Muslims.

"If we do something they don't like, they kill us. Look what they did in Iraq, look at Pakistani deaths," said a shy teenager who had joined the May 20 Jamaat-e-Islami rally outside the Karachi Press Club. "And you're saying we can't ban them?"

Why the Vietnamese Don't Want to Go to Rehab

Image by mkandlez via Flickr

Drug treatment in Southeast Asia is brutal, exploitative, and practically worthless

Joseph Amon, Health and Human Rights Director

Published in:

Foreign Policy

May 28, 2010

This month, nearly 600 drug addicts broke out of a rehabilitation center in the northern Vietnamese city of Haiphong. The addicts overpowered guards at the state-run treatment facility and made a break for it. "We were completely overwhelmed," a security guard told the Associated Press. "Forty of us were not able to prevent them, many with canes and bricks, from escaping." Videos on the Internet show crowds of escapees marching through city streets.

Why were hundreds of patients fleeing treatment? Because in Vietnam, "treatment" looks a lot more like forced labor, complete with beatings and years of involuntary detention. Like neighboring Cambodia, China, Laos, Malaysia, and Thailand, the government of Vietnam has adopted a "get-tough" approach to drug treatment rather than evidence-based treatment. In Vietnam, more than 100 government-run facilities detain between 35,000 to 45,000 people for extrajudicial sentences of up to four years.

Vietnamese in these treatment centers are engaged in what the government calls "therapeutic labor": long hours at menial jobs for below-market wages -- whatever's left, that is, after the centers deduct for the cost of their meager food and Spartan lodging. Those who fail to meet work quotas are beaten. Patients who violate center rules can be locked in solitary confinement. "[T]hey beat people up, kicked the face, kicked the chest," a former resident of a rehab center near Hanoi told the BBC in 2008. "Later, people were made to work very hard. They said work to forget the addiction, work is therapeutic."

Opium cultivation and smoking are not new phenomena in Vietnam. But with economic liberalization and increased migration since the 1980s has come greater economic polarization and drug abuse. It is estimated that there are more than 100,000 injecting drug users in the country today, and nearly one in three is HIV infected.

Drug treatment hasn't kept pace with increasing abuse, and aside from some small-scale programs, allowed by the government but largely funded by other donors, effective treatment is virtually nonexistent. Instead, the government emphasizes compulsory, institutionalized treatment that isn't just inhumane, but also next to useless. Government reports have said that 70 to 80 percent of those who spend time in a center return to drug use. Other estimates put the rate closer to 90 percent -- and when drug users do relapse, they have no place to go, especially not to a compulsory "treatment" center. According to a study published this spring in the Journal of Urban Health, drug users in Vietnam who have been in rehab centers are more likely to be infected with hepatitis C than those who have not. Another study found that detention and fear of police led to greater risk of HIV infection among Vietnamese users.

In fact, Haiphong's escapees probably stand a better chance on the outside, if they can stay there: The city is one of three in Vietnam that is piloting the use of methadone to manage opiate addiction, the preferred approach in most developed countries. Indeed, trials of methadone maintenance therapy were already successfully conducted in Hanoi in the mid-1990s. So why not increase the number of slots in the Haiphong methadone clinic and offer the escapees voluntary enrollment? The U.S. government could help ensure that those who escaped can access services by redirecting its funding, which currently goes to HIV-treatment programs inside these abusive centers (though not the centers themselves), to programs based in the community.

Indeed, were Haiphong to expand access to the community-based drug treatment services it already offers and add counseling, employment prospects, and housing assistance, the city could become a model of humane and sustainable treatment. Those who were only occasional drug users -- and who don't need drug addiction treatment in the first place -- are more likely to find meaningful work and social support networks in the community to avoid becoming addicted. Serious addicts and casual users alike are likely to find better HIV prevention programs and services in the community.

Drug rehabilitation should provide drug users with a chance to regain control of their lives, repair broken relationships, and overcome destructive addictions. Rehab in Vietnam ruptures the lives of drug users, severs social support, and pretty much guarantees a return to drug use after years of abuse. No wonder drug users are escaping.

Jun 2, 2010

The collateral damage from Israel's raid

Image by wallyg via Flickr

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, June 2, 2010; A15

For American Jews, Israel's catastrophic misadventure on the high seas this weekend has only deepened the chasm that increasingly splits them into two camps. On the Web site of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which represents this nation's aging Jewish establishment, the story on the deadly encounter is headlined "Radical Hamas Supporters Beat, Stab Israeli Soldiers." The deaths of nine people protesting Israel's blockade of Gaza don't even rate a sub-headline.

By contrast, the Web site of J Street, the American Jewish group that actively supports a two-state solution for the Middle East and that criticizes Israeli and Palestinian efforts to thwart such a solution, reflects a far different sensibility. The calamity, J Street writes, "is in part a consequence of the ongoing counterproductive Israeli blockade of Gaza." And on the Web site of Americans for Peace Now, another liberal Zionist group allied with the Israeli peace movement, the Israeli naval action is termed "a new low point in the way [Israel] chose to contend with its domestic and external policy dissidents."

Israel's leaders, says Debra DeLee, president of Americans for Peace Now, increasingly characterize dissent as terrorism. "We hear terms like 'economic terrorism' used to describe a Palestinian Authority effort to boycott products made in Israeli settlements, 'popular terror' to describe nonviolent protest and 'cultural terror' to describe pressure on international artists to cancel appearances in Israel."

These opposing perspectives reflect a genuine rift within the American Jewish community -- or, perhaps, between American Jewry's two increasingly distinct communities. On one side are the venerable Jewish organizations unwilling to criticize the Israeli government for its increasing elevation of ethnocentricity over democracy; Orthodox Jews for whom such ethnocentricity is often central to their lives; and the small, hardy band of neoconservatives for whom this fight over Israel's character is just one more front in their ongoing war against fellow Jews whose liberalism drives them batty.

On the other side are a growing number of those Jewish liberals and a clear majority of younger American Jews. Former New Republic editor Peter Beinart published an important essay on this generational rift in the June 10 issue of the New York Review of Books. He begins with an account of focus groups that Republican pollster Frank Luntz held with American Jewish college students in 2003, in which it became quickly apparent that their thoughts, even as they discussed their Jewishness, seldom if ever turned to Israel. The only Zionism that the students could support, writes Beinart, was one "that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs." They held, in short, the abiding beliefs of liberal American Jews in human rights, multiculturalism and skepticism toward military solutions, "and in their innocence," writes Beinart, "they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel."

These college students, however, are not the only young American Jews. A 2006 poll sponsored by the American Jewish Committee showed that while 60 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews under 40 backed a Palestinian state, just 25 percent of their Orthodox counterparts did. "Particularly in the younger generations," Beinart concludes, "fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal."

The roots of American Jewish Zionism, of course, are almost entirely liberal. Consider the career of David Ginsburg, the Washington attorney who died May 23 at age 98 with one of the most stellar liberal résumés of the 20th century. A young New Deal lawyer who clerked for Justice William O. Douglas, Ginsburg helped found Americans for Democratic Action, authored the Kerner Commission report calling for far greater attention to the needs of black America -- and as counsel for the Jewish Agency (which represented the mainstream Jewish organizations in pre-1948 Palestine) played a key role in securing U.S. recognition for the new Israeli state.

The David Ginsburgs of today, however, have feelings toward Israel that are understandably more conflicted. For the past 43 years, Israel has occupied the Palestinian West Bank, building settlements there that reduce the Palestinian sphere to a series of Bantustans. As the settlers, the Orthodox and Russian immigrants have backed policies that have marginalized Palestinians within and outside of Israel, the democratic character of this once democratic socialist nation has diminished. A nation that bans Noam Chomsky at the border, lest he lecture on Palestinian rights, is no longer one that Louis Brandeis -- a leading figure in both American liberalism and American Zionism for the first half of the last century -- would necessarily embrace. And with each passing day, his heirs -- with good reason -- grow ever more estranged.

meyersonh@washpost.com

Smaller euro nations trail Germany's 'locomotive'

Image by net_efekt via Flickr

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2010; A10

BAD MUNSTER-EBERNBERG, GERMANY -- Buy a bottle of champagne and it puts money in the pocket of Schneider and Co., a family-owned manufacturer that from a remote perch in the German countryside has created a global monopoly on the wire cages that secure the corks on sparkling wine.

Obscure in a country of marquee exporters such as Mercedes-Benz and Siemens, the company's international focus is common among small and often family-owned firms in Germany.

Schneider's highly automated plants here and in Italy, Spain and Brazil churn out 2 billion of the devices a year. Its dominant market share -- amassed over 30 years -- helps explain Germany's complex and controversial role in the European economy.

The nation's $200 billion annual trade surplus has been blamed as one cause of the current crisis -- Germany is cast as an industrial powerhouse drawing wealth from economically weaker nations like Greece with which it shares a currency. But conversations with economists and business people and an analysis of trade statistics paint a more complex picture of trade patterns that predate the euro by decades, and they show a German business culture organized around selling outside its borders.

German companies "follow a very conservative approach," said Thomas Kraus, Schneider's chief executive. "We are happy to have a small profit, but a sustainable profit, a long-term profit. We have to go outside because the domestic market is limited."

Calls have grown for Germany to "rebalance" -- to buy more from struggling European neighbors so they can keep more money at home. German officials including Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble have been adamant that it is better to be Europe's "locomotive" than its open-wallet patron.

Euro anxiety

Germany's export success may in fact be difficult to replicate or -- in the case of eurozone nations like Greece -- reverse in the near term.

"If you look at the volumes of exports and imports over the years, it has intensified," said Helge Berger, deputy chief of the division in charge of European policy at the International Monetary Fund. "But it is a very old pattern. The euro is a continuation rather than a structural break."

As Greece stumbled toward a possible default on its government debt, the structure of the eurozone was cited as putting the country at a disadvantage. It has also sparked anxiety of a renewed global crisis. Without a national currency, Greece as well as larger debt-ridden economies such as Spain lack an important tool -- the ability to devalue their money and make their goods cheaper and more competitive. Germany is seen as the flip side of that equation -- the industrial powerhouse that profits by drawing money from European countries caught in the orbit of the common currency.

But eurozone countries like Greece and Spain have run trade deficits with Germany since at least 1980 -- 20 years before the euro was established -- while a handful, like Ireland and the Netherlands, have trade surpluses with Germany. In one case, the countries serve as a large internal market for German manufactured goods and automobiles; in the other, they have profited by attracting German capital and business.

Global strategy

Talk to German businessmen and the conversation inevitably turns global -- a treatise into what supplies come from which countries, where finished products end up, and how niche manufacturing can support an industry.

On the factory line at Nord Micro, workers take material from the United States, Mexico and Israel to make parts for the climate-control systems that go into Boeing and Airbus passenger jets, said Bjorn Kranz, a purchasing agent for the company. The drop in the value of the euro might make him look in eurozone countries for parts, he said, but his real focus is whether factories in Poland can make some of the more-advanced pieces he needs.

"It is going more towards Eastern Europe because of the prices," he said.

According to IMF statistics, since the introduction of the euro in 1999, Germany's trade surplus with the rest of the world has grown faster than its surplus with the other eurozone countries -- and faster still with European nations that have not adopted the euro.

Some of Germany's most dramatic trade growth has been with the East European nations, like Poland, that opened themselves to market capitalism after the fall of the Berlin Wall -- a development that Germans were well positioned to exploit.

Trade between Germany and the former Czechoslovakia, for example, was a few billion dollars annually before the country was dissolved in 1992. Trade between Germany and the Czech Republic grew to more than $80 billion in 2008. Trade with Slovakia, which recently adopted the euro, is around $20 billion and last year provided Germany with a $1 billion surplus. The Czech Republic and Slovakia both joined the European Union in 2004.

In the United States, increasing exports -- a way to generate jobs from another country's cash -- is among the Obama administration's top economic priorities. It is encouraging smaller companies to look outside the domestic market -- or move beyond exporting to a single supplier in a single country, a practice U.S. trade officials say they have noticed among American firms.

For Axel Schramm, who has helped turn the upholstery and saddle-making shop created by his grandfather into a luxury mattress and bedding company, exports account for about 40 percent of his business. Most of those sales are to European countries, though the company is testing markets in Hong Kong, Japan and elsewhere for made-to-order, hand-assembled mattresses that start at around $5,000.

Unlike U.S. companies, Schramm said, German firms don't have a continent-size domestic market for their goods. So they have created one abroad, working the trade fairs and interior design shows and carefully picking sales agents.

"We don't have the power of a big company to start in a new country," he said at the showroom attached to the Schramm factory, where 100 employees produce about 7,000 mattresses a year, hand-fitting the metal springs into sleeves and sewing on the high-end coverings. "You have to work to find people in the right markets in the right place."

Iranian authorities step up arrests of women for 'immodest' dress

Image by Hamed Saber via Flickr

By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post staff writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2010; A07

TEHRAN -- Iranian authorities have begun police patrols in the capital to arrest women wearing clothes deemed improper. The campaign against loose-fitting veils and other signs of modernism comes as government opponents are calling for rallies to mark the anniversary of the disputed presidential election, and critics of the crackdown say it is stoking feelings of discontent.

But hard-liners say that improper veiling is a "security issue" and that "loose morality" threatens the core of the Islamic republic.

Iran's interior minister has promised a "chastity plan" to promote the proper covering "from kindergarten to families," though the details are unclear. Tehran police have been arresting women for wearing short coats or improper veils and even for being too suntanned. Witnesses report fines up to $800 for dress considered immodest.

Some here say the new measures are part of a government campaign of intimidation ahead of the election anniversary this month. The hard-liners have grown more influential since the vote, which led to months of anti-government demonstrations that leaders saw as the biggest threat to the Islamic system in decades.

Iranian women are obliged by law to cover their hair and wear long coats in public. The Islamic veil protects the purity of women, preventing men from viewing them as sex symbols, clerics here say. But the law is imprecise, and interpretations vary.

On a recent day, two young women wearing bright pink lipstick and identical thigh-hugging beige coats strolled down Tehran's affluent Bahonar Street. Their peroxide-blond hair, emphasized by delicately positioned brown scarves, spilled onto their shoulders.

When seminary student Fatemeh Delvari, 24, moved to Tehran from a provincial town eight months ago, she was shocked to see how some women dressed.

"My own veil oppresses my feminine side, so I can be free and active," she said of her black chador, a garment that covers the entire body except the face and hands. "But some women seem to be only interested in looking beautiful."

"They are trampling on social boundaries," Delvari said. "Violence is not good, but they should be punished."

Delvari, a leading member of the Students Justice-Seeking Movement, which aims to revive the values of the Islamic revolution, said authorities should also restrict makeup sales, prohibit jewelry and force women to "spend some nights from their families" in order to counter improper dress.

"Our Islamic system is like a ship; we can't allow some of the passengers to make holes in the hull," she said.

During the reign of Iran's Western-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, bikinis and miniskirts were not uncommon here. But in the first years after the 1979 Islamic revolution, groups of Islamists armed with batons would beat women who were not veiled, shouting such slogans as "Cover up or feel the stick."

In 2006, a year after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power, special moral "guidance" teams attempted to enforce dress codes in what was the most ambitious operation in recent memory. Hundreds of teams patrolled shopping centers and popular squares, stopping and sometimes arresting women they thought were poorly veiled.

Today some say the repetition of such punishments for a few women will have little effect in Tehran, a city of 12 million people.

"My white coat was three inches too short on the sleeves," said Nadia, 15, a high school student who was arrested Tuesday. "It was impounded. The guidance police called my dad to pick me up and gave me a chador to wear on the way home," she said.

"Such patrols come and go," her father said. "But they leave mental scars of intimidation."

Mohammad Hadi Ayyazi, deputy mayor of Tehran and former police commander, said the problem should not be exaggerated. "This is a cultural problem, not something the police can solve," he said in an interview.

Some who tried years ago to get women to uphold the veil now say that force will not work.

"For some women, a different form of wearing the veil is also a protest against those that want them to only wear the chador," Fatemeh Rakaee, a former lawmaker and former Islamic revolutionary, said in an interview. "Violence and patriarchy will never reach any results."

Supreme Court: Suspects must invoke right to remain silent in interrogations

Image via Wikipedia

By Robert Barnes
Wednesday, June 2, 2010; A05

Criminal suspects should speak up if they want to preserve their right to remain silent, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. Conservative justices ruled for police in the latest test of the court's famous Miranda rule and shifted the burden to suspects to invoke their right to refuse questioning.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that a Michigan defendant who incriminated himself in a fatal shooting by saying one word after nearly three hours of questioning had given up his right to silence, and that the statement could be used against him at trial.

"Where the prosecution shows that a Miranda warning was given and that it was understood by the accused, an accused's uncoerced statement establishes an implied waiver of the right to remain silent," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority.

The decision prompted the most vigorous dissent of new Justice Sonia Sotomayor's young career at the court.

"Today's decision turns Miranda upside down," wrote Sotomayor, who accused the majority of casting aside judicial restraint. "Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent -- which, counter-intuitively, requires them to speak. At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so."

Thanks to television cop shows and movies, the Miranda warning may be one of the court's best-known creations. But ever since the 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona, the court has been defining how the right to remain silent and to counsel protects a suspect, and limits prosecutors' use of anything said during interrogation. Most recently, it has provoked controversy about whether terrorism suspects should be afforded such rights.

In the case before the court, suspect Van Chester Thompkins was read his rights and, at police request, repeated some of them out loud. But he did not sign an offered waiver of the right, and he did not acknowledge that he was willing to talk. Nor did he say that he wanted the questioning to stop.

Detectives persisted in what one called mostly a "monologue" for about two hours and 45 minutes, until one asked Thompkins whether he believed in God. At a follow-up question -- "Do you pray to God to forgive you for shooting that boy down?" -- Thompkins answered "Yes" and looked away.

The statement was used against him, along with other testimony, and Thompkins was convicted of killing Samuel Morris outside a strip mall in Southfield, Mich.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit said that Thompkins's prolonged silence "offered a clear and unequivocal message to the officers: Thompkins did not wish to waive his rights."

But Kennedy said it was not clear enough. "If Thompkins wanted to remain silent, he could have said nothing in response to [the detective's] questions, or he could have unambiguously involved his Miranda rights and ended the interrogation," wrote Kennedy, who was joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

"The fact that Thompkins made a statement about three hours after receiving a Miranda warning does not overcome the fact that he engaged in a course of conduct indicating waiver."

Kennedy said the court's new rule -- in the case of Berghuis v. Thompkins -- was an extension of the logic in a previous case that said a suspect must affirmatively assert his right to counsel. The court essentially agreed with the position of the government against Thompkins, advanced by Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama's pending nominee to the Supreme Court.

But Sotomayor, a former prosecutor who some had speculated might be less protective of the rights of suspects than other liberals on the court, called the decision "a substantial retreat from the protection against compelled self-incrimination." She was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

It is unclear how often such situations arise. But Jonathan Abram, a Washington lawyer who filed a brief with the court on behalf of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, called the ruling "significant."

"Until now, suspects walked into interrogation rooms with their rights intact," Abram wrote in an e-mail. "If the police thought a person had waived those rights, they had to prove waiver . . . Miranda has been eroded. Again."

Kent Scheidegger of the California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation said the court recognized the "practical realities that the police face in dealing with suspects" and placed reasonable limits on an "artificial rule."

"The rule that really is in the Constitution, that no person may be compelled to be a witness against himself, is not changed by today's decision," Scheidegger said in a written statement.

Money intended to help candidates often ends up funding PACs themselves

Image by pjchmiel via Flickr

By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 2, 2010; A03

Minority Leader John A. Boehner has collected more than $1.4 million from business interests this election cycle for a committee he says he created to help fellow Republican lawmakers. But Boehner's committee has spent only about a third of its money helping other candidates.

About two-thirds of its expenditures have gone instead to costs the committee describes as necessary to raise money, including fine meals and trips to luxurious resorts where the congressman mingles with corporate-directed groups and lobbyists. Boehner (Ohio) has spent more than $182,000 through the committee on frequent travel with donors to Florida and similar vacation spots, according to Federal Election Commission records, including $70,403 at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples and more than $30,000 at Disney Resort Destinations.

As it turns out, Boehner's use of funds collected for others by his "leadership PAC," or political action committee, is more the rule than the exception among Republican and Democratic lawmakers. Most leadership PACs have given away less than 40 percent of their expenditures this cycle, even though they typically say they are collecting and bundling donations for others, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics at the request of The Washington Post.

Offering perks

Instead, the PACs spend the bulk of their money funding their own operations, spending sizeable sums on fundraisers that also offer sweet perquisites for members and their aides. The PACs have financed distant resort stays and expensive meals for members in New York, Miami, Beverly Hills and elsewhere and paid for private jets, liquor, flowers, limousines, ski lift and baseball tickets, and even horse track visits, according to tallies submitted monthly to the FEC.

Lawmakers say luxurious settings and donor perks add to the appeal of fundraising events, and Boehner spokesman Don Seymour said the congressman's resort trips were all "overhead costs for fundraisers that ultimately benefit Republican campaigns."

The committee's contributors in January 2009, when Boehner pulled in $223,000 at a Naples golfing fundraiser, were from the insurance, tobacco, pesticide, health-care and investment industries, among others.

Last year, the six-member FEC unanimously questioned the unbridled use of such funds. Lawmakers are generally barred from converting campaign donations to personal use, but leadership PAC receipts effectively have no such prohibition.

Since 1978, when Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) and his supporters gained FEC approval for the first leadership PAC, 405 current lawmakers have followed suit. Their collective revenues have risen 13-fold over two decades, reaching $46 million in the 2008 cycle.

Resorts

Many leadership PACs spend heavily on Washington-based consultants, accountants and lawyers. But fundraisers held at beach and ski resorts are among the most common winter expenditures. This cycle, House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) has spent $52,700 on travel with donors to resorts; his committee also spent $9,800 on entertainment tickets and a limousine company. Less than half of its expenditures went to other candidates, the center's tally shows.

House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.), whose leadership PAC raised $2.1 million, more than any other on Capitol Hill, has spent $1.9 million this cycle, including $136,000 on golf events, baseball tickets, skiing, resorts and related restaurant meals. The committee's expenditures on popcorn, candy, cookies and chocolates totaled $13,400.

Overall, just 44 percent of Cantor's expenditures have gone to other campaigns, and in November his leadership PAC split the bills for a $60,000 Beverly Hills fundraising event with a separate committee that Cantor created explicitly to finance his reelection. That decision demonstrates the blurred lines between the money flow for a lawmaker's reelection and what the official collects for colleagues.

Hoyer spokeswoman Stephanie Lundberg said he holds fundraisers at resorts to ensure "that contributions are as high as possible" and noted that his contributions to others have been above average. If a serious proposal is made to strengthen the spending rules, she added, "Mr. Hoyer would certainly look at it."

Justin Kitsch, a spokesman for Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.), said the lawmaker considers his expenditures of $2,094 for ski lift tickets "reasonable" because the event raised 10 times more than it cost; he also said Dorgan's contributions to others will increase as the election approaches. Cantor spokesman Brad Dayspring declined comment.

Leadership PACs were initially created by lawmakers seeking leadership spots who disbursed cash to colleagues to win their votes. Meredith McGehee, policy director at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center, which supports campaign finance regulation, says that by itself, that is "a very questionable purpose."

Then undeclared presidential candidates -- including, in 2006, Sens. John McCain, Evan Bayh, Joseph R. Biden and Hillary Rodham Clinton -- used proceeds to finance early travel to primary states. But the PACs also have evolved into a way "to fund your personal lifestyle, so you don't really have to pay for anything yourself," McGehee said. "It's where this special-interest money flows," to three-quarters of the entire Congress.

From other groups

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, more than half of the funds now come not from individuals but from other PACs, which typically have well-formed legislative goals. Top donors this cycle have been, in order, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, AT&T, Honeywell International, FedEx and United Parcel Service, followed by insurance, banking, real estate and defense firms, according to Doug Weber, the center's senior researcher.

Last year, the FEC recommended including such PACs in the prohibition on personal use of campaign funds. It told Congress that the commission had "seen a substantial number of instances where individuals with access to the funds received by political committees have used such funds to make unauthorized disbursements" for their expenses.

But interest in change has been scant, with all 23 House and Senate party leaders tapping into such funds. When Congress rewrote its ethics laws last year, House members demanded that the first legal definition of leadership PACs be drawn as narrowly as possible and barred only their use for corporate jet flights. All other expenditures in practice are permitted, said Paul S. Ryan, the campaign center's associate legal counsel.

Brendan Daly, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who oversaw the rewrite, said that "as we consider further reform, we will examine updating those regulations." Pelosi's committee -- PAC to the Future -- passed along $519,000 to others, reported no trips and financed a single catered event, costing $1,125, FEC records show.

But at the other end of the spectrum, 30 Democrats and 17 Republicans have collected $1.07 million without spending a dime on other candidates, the data shows.

A committee created by Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), called Restore Our Democracy, collected nearly $100,000 this cycle and spent nearly two-thirds to finance his participation with donors or friends in two Mardi Gras balls, FEC records show. Alexander's committee has not used any funds directly for an election campaign.

One of the largest contributors to Alexander's group was the political action committee of the Adams and Reese law firm, registered to lobby the House on behalf of Louisiana State University and its biomedical research center. The law firm took in $120,000 from those clients, and Alexander, a member of three House appropriations subcommittees, sponsored federal earmarks totaling $8.15 million for them, according to records compiled by Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Alexander's chief of staff, Adam Terry, did not respond to e-mailed and telephoned questions. Rep. Paul E. Kanjorski (D-Pa.), chairman of a key financial regulatory subcommittee, has collected since 2004 virtually all of his Citizens for Action leadership committee funds from insurance, lending and investment firms. He's paid about a fifth -- more than $112,000 -- in consulting fees to his 45-year-old nephew Peter Kanjorski.

Ed Mitchell, a spokesman for Kanjorski's campaign, said that Peter Kanjorski's hiring was based on his ability and trustworthiness.

Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Inexpensive Wi-Fi That Travels With You

Image by Global X via Flickr

By THOMAS J. FITZGERALD

Wi-Fi is everywhere.

Or so it seems until you really need it and there is no coffee house with a free hot spot. Or when you don’t want to pay a fee to connect at the airport or a hotel for an hour.

Our pockets and bags are filling with Web-connected devices: laptops, smartphones, netbooks, tablets, e-readers and even cameras. But to connect one when Wi-Fi is not available means using a cellphone network, and that usually requires buying a new data plan for each device.

The cost-cutting solution might be to create your own personal Wi-Fi hot spot, a cloud of Internet connectivity to keep with you wherever you go. Not only can a personal hot spot provide a single point of access for all of your devices, it can be shared with friends.

The options are growing. You can buy a simple, slim unit that fits in a pocket or ones that can shift from 3G to speedier 4G networks. You can convert some cellphones into hot spots, while a few new phones now come with hot spots included. I tried several such options while traveling and in my daily routine to see what they offered.

The Novatel MiFi 2200, available from Verizon Wireless ($29.99 with a two-year contract) or Sprint (free after $50 rebate and with a two-year contract), is a Wi-Fi hot spot small enough to slip into a shirt pocket. It is a mysterious-looking object with no screen and a single button.

It wirelessly connects to a 3G cellular network just like a phone, but it also broadcasts a Wi-Fi signal to the surrounding area. Devices within a 30-foot range can connect. I used the MiFi while traveling by car from Boston to New York. Having the coverage brought peace of mind when using Google Maps on my iPod Touch and my laptop to guide me around Brooklyn.

Still, 3G speeds can be slower than what is available at land-based hot spots. Back at home, downloading my daughter’s favorite videos was faster on our home wireless network.

Verizon’s monthly data plans for the MiFi are $39.99 for 250 megabytes of data, or $59.99 for 5 gigabytes, with extra charges for exceeding those limits. Sprint charges $59.99 for 5 gigabytes and extra for exceeding limits. Another pocket-size option, the Overdrive 3G/4G Mobile Hotspot, from Sprint ($49.99 with a two-year contract), is slightly thicker than the MiFi but comes with more features. The first is speed. It can connect not only to Sprint’s 3G network, but also its new and speedier 4G network. The 4G network is not yet available nationally, but if you are in one of the 33 cities covered, including Seattle, Atlanta and Houston, speeds are fast. (Sorry, New York is not included.)

Another feature that was useful: a bright screen that displays information like remaining battery life, signal strength, the hot spot’s name and password and number of connected devices. The monthly data plan is $59.99, with unlimited 4G usage and a 5 gigabyte cap on 3G and extra charges for exceeding it.

The Clear Spot, from Clearwire, is another 4G option. In fact, it uses the same 4G network as Sprint (Sprint is the majority owner of Clearwire.) The Clear Spot is bigger than the Overdrive and probably not ideal to keep in your pocket during use; it requires a U.S.B. modem, with pricing from $69.99 to $224.99 depending on features. But if your goal is 4G speeds, the Clear Spot delivers.

Not all areas of each city are covered by the network so reviewing the company’s coverage map beforehand is helpful. The Clear Spot costs $49.99 and supports up to eight devices within a range up to 150 feet. Service plans with unlimited access start at $40 a month and a U.S.B. modem can also be leased for $3.99 a month. A plan offering 3G speeds in areas outside the 4G network is also available.

The CradlePoint PHS300 ($99.99 at Amazon), works with dozens of phones and also U.S.B. modems. Depending on your carrier, it may work with your phone’s existing data plan or require one that allows tethering. I used one with a BlackBerry Storm; after powering on the PHS300 and connecting it to the BlackBerry, I was viewing Web pages on my laptop in just under a minute and the battery lasted two hours and 20 minutes. The PHS300, from CradlePoint Technology, based in Boise, Idaho, is the same size as the Clear Spot.

The latest way to create a mobile hot spot is with cellphones. This can eliminate the clutter of carrying and charging an extra device. Through Verizon, the Palm Pre Plus ($49.99 with two-year contract) and Pixi Plus (free with a two-year contract) include this option.

Using a Pre Plus with an iPad, I was online and viewing Web pages in about 15 to 30 seconds after waking the iPad from power-save mode. Also useful, the phone chimed when the iPad connected, letting me know I was ready to surf.

Using the phone as a hot spot quickly drained the phone’s battery, even with light surfing. Verizon is now waiving its $40 monthly fee for the hot spot feature. Monthly data plans for unlimited access start at $29.99, which could be an alternative for iPad owners. Starting Monday, Apple will no longer offer its unlimited data plan for the iPad 3G.

More phones with personal hot spots are on the way. Sprint’s HTC EVO 4G, which can run on Sprint’s 4G network, is expected Friday ($199.99 with a contract and rebate; plans for both calling and data begin at $69.99 plus a $10 premium data fee and $29.99 a month for the hot spot feature).

Google’s recently updated Android operating system, version 2.2, includes a hot spot feature and is expected to be made available soon. But not all Android phones will support that function.

Software can turn many new and older phones into hot spots, too. WMWifiRouter, from Morose Media, based in the Netherlands, works on a variety of phones. I used it on an HTC Touch Pro2, which runs the Windows Mobile operating system. The software ($19.99 at wmwifirouter.com) can be downloaded directly to the phone.

JoikuSpot (joikushop.com) supports the Symbian operating system, including many phones from Nokia and Samsung. Depending on your tolerance for risk, some phones like the iPhone and some Android phones, can be hacked to work as hot spots. Steps for hacking are posted across the Internet, but you risk voiding a phone’s warranty.

There was no one solution that was best for all users in all situations. It depends on the cellphone service you have, the devices you own and where you live or travel. With a laptop, an iPod Touch and maybe an iPad in the future, I like the idea of not carrying around yet another device.

After all, without having to depend on coffee shops for Internet access, I may also be carrying around my coffee.

Study Finds Blacks Blocked From Southern Juries

Dale Gerstenslager/Winona Times, via Associated Press

Curtis Flowers at his capital trial in 2004. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed his first conviction after prosecutors used all of their peremptory strikes against blacks in the jury pool.

By SHAILA DEWAN

In late April in a courthouse in Madison County, Ala., a prosecutor was asked to explain why he had struck 11 of 14 black potential jurors in a capital murder case.

The district attorney, Robert Broussard, said one had seemed “arrogant” and “pretty vocal.” In another woman, he said he “detected hostility.”

Mr. Broussard also questioned the “sophistication” of a former Army sergeant, a forklift operator with three years of college, a cafeteria manager, an assembly-line worker and a retired Department of Defense program analyst.

The analyst, he said, “did not appear to be sophisticated to us in her questionnaire, in that she spelled Wal-Mart, as one of her previous employers, as Wal-marts.”

Arguments like these were used for years to keep blacks off juries in the segregationist South, systematically denying justice to black defendants and victims. But today, the practice of excluding blacks and other minorities from Southern juries remains widespread and, according to defense lawyers and a new study by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit human rights and legal services organization in Montgomery, Ala., largely unchecked.

In the Madison County case, the defendant, Jason M. Sharp, a white man, was sentenced to death after a trial by a jury of 11 whites and one black. The April hearing was the result of a challenge by defense lawyers who argued that jury selection was tainted by racial discrimination — a claim that is difficult to prove because prosecutors can claim any race-neutral reason, no matter how implausible, for dismissing a juror.

While jury makeup varies widely by jurisdiction, the organization, which studied eight Southern states — Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee — found areas in all of them where significant problems persist. In Alabama, courts have found racially discriminatory jury selection in 25 death penalty cases since 1987, and there are counties where more than 75 percent of black jury pool members have been struck in death penalty cases.

An analysis of Jefferson Parish, La., by the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center found that from 1999 to 2007, blacks were struck from juries at more than three times the rate of whites.

In North Carolina, at least 26 current death row defendants were sentenced by all-white juries. In South Carolina, a prosecutor said he struck a black potential juror because he “shucked and jived” when he walked.

Studies have shown that racially diverse juries deliberate longer, consider a wider variety of perspectives and make fewer factual errors than all-white juries, and that predominantly black juries are less likely to impose the death penalty.

Excluding jurors based on race has been illegal since 1875, but after Reconstruction, all-white juries remained the norm in the South.

“It really made lynching and the Ku Klux Klan possible,” said Christopher Waldrep, a historian at San Francisco State University and the author of a forthcoming book about a lawyer who was able, in a rare case, to prove jury discrimination in Mississippi in 1906. “If you’d had a lot of black grand jurors investigating crimes, it would have made lynching impossible.”

Back then, judges and prosecutors often argued that blacks lacked the intelligence or education to serve. That such claims persist is evidence, said Bryan A. Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, that jury selection remains largely unscrutinized.

“There’s just this tolerance, there’s indifference to excluding people on the basis of race, and prosecutors are doing it with impunity,” Mr. Stevenson said. “Unless you’re in the courtroom, unless you’re a lawyer working on these issues, you’re not going to know whether your local prosecutor consistently bars people of color.”

In jury selection, potential jurors are first dismissed for cause — reasons like scheduling conflicts or opposition to the death penalty. Then, both sides can ask questions and take turns dismissing jurors using what are called peremptory strikes (the number of strikes varies by state, but it is often enough for one side to eliminate all qualified minorities).

In a 1986 case, Batson v. Kentucky, the Supreme Court ruled that if a pattern of discrimination emerged during peremptory strikes, lawyers must provide nonracial reasons for their strikes. The reason does not have to be “persuasive, or even plausible,” the Supreme Court ruled in a later case in which a prosecutor said he dismissed one black juror because he had long hair, and another because he had a goatee, saying, “I don’t like the way they looked.” It is up to the judge to decide if there was deliberate discrimination.

That is a high bar, defense lawyers say — so high that in Tennessee and North Carolina, there has never been a successful reversal based on Batson.

“Anybody with any sense at all can think up any race-neutral reason and get away with it,” said Stephen B. Bright, a capital defense lawyer in Atlanta.

Prosecutors have claimed to strike jurors because they live in high-crime neighborhoods, are unemployed or are single parents. In one Louisiana case, a judge allowed a black juror to be dismissed because the prosecutor said he “looked like a drug dealer.”

Often, a defense lawyer’s challenge is based on showing that white jurors who answered questions the same way or had the same characteristics were not struck. For example, in the Sharp case, Mr. Broussard said that because one juror was studying to be a minister, she “was not the kind of juror we were looking for.” But a white man who was a minister was allowed to serve.

Mr. Broussard did not respond to requests for comment, but Stephen Wimberly, the first assistant district attorney in Jefferson Parish, said that of more than 2,000 jury trials since 1997, only two had been reversed because of discrimination. “The legal standard is not representation of any race or gender, but the fairness and impartiality of each respective juror,” Mr. Wimberly said.

In one Mississippi case, a black man, Curtis Flowers, was sentenced to death in 2004 for killing four furniture store employees. The jury was made up of 11 whites and one black after prosecutors used all 15 of their peremptory strikes on black jurors. Montgomery County, where the crime occurred, is 45 percent black. The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed the case, noting that “racially motivated jury selection is still prevalent 20 years after Batson.”

At a retrial, in which prosecutors did not seek the death penalty, the jury of seven whites and five blacks was split along racial lines, resulting in a hung jury. At the second retrial, prosecutors sought the death penalty, which eliminated more blacks from the pool of qualified jurors. The jury, nine whites and three blacks, hung again when one black member declined to convict, said Andre De Gruy, the director of the state’s Office of Capital Defense Counsel.

The Equal Justice Initiative study argues that jury diversity “is especially critical because the other decision-making roles in the criminal justice system are held mostly by people who are white.” In the eight Southern states the study examined, more than 93 percent of the district attorneys are white. In Arkansas and Tennessee, all of them are white.

Thai Parliament Reflects Nation’s Anger

Narong Sangnak/European Pressphoto Agency

Sathaporn Maneerat, an opposition legislator, showed his solidarity with the red shirts in Parliament on Tuesday in Bangkok.

By SETH MYDANS

BANGKOK — Thailand’s conflict moved from the streets of Bangkok to the chamber of Parliament this week, as angry and irreconcilable as ever, with members from both sides trading accusations late into the night.

Interspersed with video clips that brought the sound and horror of battle into the chamber, the debate revived unanswered questions about snipers, arsonists, killings at a Buddhist temple and mysterious assassins dressed in black.

Framed as a parliamentary no-confidence motion against the government, the session on Monday and Tuesday provided the first public forum to debate the violence during a two-month demonstration by an antigovernment movement known as the red shirts that ended when the military moved in on the protesters’ encampment on May 19. A total of 88 people were killed and more than 1,800 wounded during the protests and crackdown.

The no-confidence motion was defeated on Wednesday in a 246-to-186 vote, The Associated Press reported. But no possible outcome seemed likely to ease the intensifying polarization of the nation, in which the rural heartland seems increasingly disconnected from the more comfortable life of the capital.

During the sessions, opposition members accused the government of shooting unarmed demonstrators as well as medical workers, and of placing snipers on an elevated railway track to fire at protesters taking shelter in a temple.

The government blames the protesters for instigating the violence, going so far as to suggest that black-shirted gunmen among them killed their own people to frame the government.

For nearly two months, mostly poor protesters occupied parts of Bangkok, particularly the commercial core of the city, demanding that the government step down and hold a new election. By the time Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva offered to hold an election in November, it appeared that compromise was no longer possible, and the violent eviction followed.

In Parliament, the opposition accused the government of unprovoked massacre, echoing the position of its figurehead, the fugitive former prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, who had hired an expert on war crimes to bring international charges against the government.

The government has in turn brought terrorism charges against Mr. Thaksin, accusing him of being behind the violence. He remains abroad, evading jail time for a corruption conviction.

Mr. Abhisit said the government had never ordered the killing of protesters, and the finance minister, Korn Chatikavanij, suggested in an interview that the killings had been staged by the protesters as provocations.

“There have been certain incidents in which the paramilitary arm of the red-shirt movement were quite willing to shoot their own to place the blame on the government,” Mr. Korn said.

In addition to the killings and the burning of more than 30 buildings on the final day of conflict, the police said Tuesday that during the crackdown there were 62 bomb attacks, 39 cases of arson, 18 cases of manslaughter and attempted killing, and 34 cases of robbery and looting.

Suthep Thaugsuban, the deputy prime minister in charge of security, denied that snipers had fired at a Buddhist temple, Wat Pathum Wanaram, a haven that became a trap for thousands of people taking refuge in the core of the protest area. But Mr. Abhisit conceded that many such questions remained to be investigated by an impartial panel he had promised.

Though the parliamentary session was unlikely to sway opinions, it gave opposition politicians a chance to put forward their views at a time of strict censorship. Citing the crisis, the government has shut down thousands of Web sites and pages, as well as opposition radio stations, prompting condemnation from within and outside Parliament.