Profile of Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the First Muslim Elected to Congress

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 16, 2009

Keith Ellison is what he is -- the first Muslim elected to Congress, the first African American to represent Minnesota -- while trying not to be too much of what he is. But not too little, either.

Quietly devout, he unrolls his prayer rug in the privacy of his office in the Longworth House Office Building, facing the corner beyond which lies Mecca -- but that is still too Muslim for some.

Antiwar, he once voted for an Iraq war-funding bill because it had a timetable for withdrawal -- but that was not dovish enough for some protesters who subsequently held a sit-in at his Minneapolis office.

More than two years after he came to Washington, the idea of Keith Ellison, the symbol of Keith Ellison, remains potently useful to various agendas. President Obama seized on it last month, during his address from Cairo University to the world Muslim community. In the president's list of examples of how "Islam has always been a part of America's story," he alluded to Ellison, though not by name. Ellison's name might may be the least important part of his identity. Obama said: "When the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers -- Thomas Jefferson -- kept in his personal library."

Without trying too hard, just by being who he is, Ellison has multiple publics. To Arabs overseas, he is evidence that Americans can embrace Islam. To Muslim Americans, he is a role model for political engagement.

To the voters in the urban liberal Minneapolis precincts who actually elect him, well, they seem to like his politics, which he sums up as peace, working-class prosperity, environmental sustainability, civil rights. He won 71 percent of the ballots cast in November for his election to a second term. His district is about 77 percent white, 13 percent black, 5 percent Asian, with Muslims making up an estimated 3 percent. Members of labor unions and people who have Arab surnames are among his more reliable campaign contributors.

His identity is the sum and distillation of all this -- as subtly constructed as a three-cushion bank shot, a high-wire act in which wobbles to the left or right might be forgiven, but overcompensation in any direction is fatal.

At 45, he's crossed treacherous canyons on that high wire. What's his secret? A legion of puzzled, disoriented, frightened, ambitious people in the new America could use some of his moves.

"I'm an African American Muslim, and how do I get elected by mostly Lutheran whites in my district?" Ellison rephrases the question.

Yes, exactly.

The full answer is the story of his life.

The short answer is delivered with a no-big-deal shrug. "I don't really have any calculated plan," he says. "I'm just doing me."

Obama's use of Ellison for international diplomacy was only a little subtler than that of George W. Bush's State Department, which published no fewer than four interviews with Ellison for dissemination to foreign audiences, to demonstrate this country's diversity and religious freedom.

"I wasn't particularly flattered or gratified," Ellison says of the unexpected shout-out from Obama. "I just thought: Well, hey, if something I did can help you open a door with the Muslim world, then I'm happy to have done that."

He patiently indulges the fascination with his standing as the first Muslim elected to Congress. (Now there are two: André Carson, a Democrat from Indianapolis, was elected to the House last year.) The curse of being first is that it can swallow your identity. When people compare him to Jackie Robinson, Ellison says he expects Robinson mainly wanted to play good baseball. Obama and Sonia Sotomayor, if she is confirmed to the Supreme Court, face similar challenges.

"I don't get tired of talking about it," Ellison says. "But my struggle is to maintain a certain amount of breadth. I don't want to be pigeonholed as only understanding Muslim things, all things Islamic."

All the same, he adds: "But look, here's the fact: Eight years after 9/11, so much of the conflict America faces concerns things occurring in the Muslim world. If my knowledge of the faith and sensitivity to the issues concerning the faith helps make friends for America and shortens gaps between us, why wouldn't I use that?"

* * *

Raised Catholic in Detroit, the son of a psychiatrist and a social worker, he converted to Islam at 19 while a student at Wayne State University. Nothing specific precipitated his conversion, he says. He is a Sunni Muslim. He does not eat pork or drink alcohol. He prays five times a day. He is not a member of a mosque in Washington, but if he's in town for Friday prayers, he joins Muslim Hill staffers in a room in the Capitol.

He and his wife, Kim, have four children.

He got his law degree from the University of Minnesota, but after three years at a firm in a Minneapolis skyscraper, "I was called to do social justice," he says.

In his early years as a community activist, he viewed politicians as interchangeable objects upon which activists had to act to create change. The example of Paul Wellstone, the late liberal senator from Minnesota, made him reconsider. "You needed people in office who really did vibrate sympathetically with what the people needed," Ellison says. "Paul Wellstone helped me see somebody in action trying to make the world better for working people, people of color, everybody who's in the so-called out crowd."

After two terms in the state legislature, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party -- Minnesota's Democratic Party -- endorsed him for an open House seat. But there followed revelations from his past of late filings of income taxes and campaign finance reports, unpaid moving violations and parking tickets. Most damaging were claims that he was associated with Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam.

Ellison said he had never been a member but had spent 18 months organizing a Minnesota contingent to the 1995 Million Man March. He wrote a letter of apology to the Jewish community for failing to "adequately scrutinize" some positions of the Nation of Islam. "They were and are anti-Semitic, and I should have come to that conclusion earlier than I did." Many in the Jewish community accepted the apology, and he was endorsed by a Jewish weekly paper.

Ellison's frank owning up to past mistakes, and hammering key issues -- including calling for quick withdrawal from Iraq -- helped avert electoral disaster. He says he might not have prevailed had he not been running in a city and a state with a progressive tradition forged by the likes of Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy and Wellstone.

"His core values are very reflective of the people he represents," says Donna Cassutt, associate chairman of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. "They are applicable to a variety of faith traditions."

"There are certainly more people of the far left persuasion in Minneapolis" than other parts of the state, says Ron Carey, chairman of the state Republican Party. But the GOP's core argument against Ellison is that he is outside the mainstream for even Minneapolis.

"He's just been a cheerleader for President Obama's move toward socialistic positions," Carey says. On Iraq: "If we had listened to Keith Ellison . . . we would have exited Iraq before we could have achieved that hope of a stable democracy." On Ellison's activism: "I was appalled in late April when he got arrested protesting actions in Darfur." Ellison was one of five members of Congress who staged a civil disobedience action outside the Sudanese Embassy in Washington. "We're all opposed to genocide," Carey says. "I thought it was unbecoming a member of Congress."

Carey attributes Ellison's large victory margin in the last election to voters' reflexive support of whoever's the Democrat on the ballot. "I never say never," he says, about a Republican win in the district in the future. "We're going to have to find that special candidate in a year when the Republican brand is in vogue."

* * *

One recent evening, Ellison is on the floor of the House. He is conservatively dressed, studious in little spectacles, low-key and friendly, not fiery. He's got an easel for a prop, and a loose-leaf notebook stuffed with facts.

His subject: The energy bill. Sample rhetorical zinger: "Let me talk about the renewable energy standard in the bill."

The nation's first Muslim in Congress does a lot of the prosaic spade-work assigned to a relatively junior member. It rarely has anything to do with his faith. Of course.

Despite the public profile available to him as the first Muslim, he is trying to work his way up in the House the old-fashioned way. It's as if his identity has two sets of muscles: one already overdeveloped and one that needs bulking up.

Back in his office, the Minnesota soybean processors are calling. Ellison is beginning to have small-scale nonsectarian legislative successes. His proposal to stop credit card companies from raising rates on people with unrelated debt problems was included in the credit card bill Obama signed. His initiative to give tenants some leeway before they can be evicted from foreclosed properties was added to the mortgage reform act also signed by Obama.

On a Saturday morning in a Washington hotel ballroom, he brings the same low-key, empirical style to a convention of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee. "You should not look at Obama's speech as 'Happy day!' " Ellison says of the Cairo address. "You should look at it as, 'Wow, I guess we have a lot of work to do.' "

The crowd of nearly 200 applauds. He has a busy calendar of addresses before Muslim and Arab American groups, not to mention more casual encounters with Boy Scout troops, college students, young activists. When the formal programs are over, he has to tarry for an hour or more, obliging people who want to meet him, get a picture, an autograph, a bit of advice from this political pioneer.

"He has been an inspiration to Muslims in general but in particular to young people who have been disheartened by the politics of division and alienation and exclusion after 9/11," says Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "He serves as a good example of what America is and can be."

Presumably, Ellison could adorn his suit with some subtle pin or chain or tie pattern that would signify his religion, but he doesn't. Muslims do not necessarily want a charismatic spokesman who wears his faith on his sleeve.

"His brand of Islam, the way he has conducted himself, really resonates with the majority of Muslim Americans and Arab Americans," says Hassan Jaber, executive director of ACCESS, a Detroit-based national network of Arab American community organizations. "That's exactly the way Muslim Americans want to be judged, not as being Muslims but by their contributions to their communities as Americans."

* * *

He need not call attention to himself, because attention will be paid, not always welcome attention.

Ellison's decision to use the Koran during his ceremonial swearing-in caused a stir before Obama described it to the world. (No book is part of the official congressional oath; any book, or none at all, may be enlisted during the ceremonial photo-op.) Then-Rep. Virgil Goode Jr., a Virginia Republican, wrote to constituents: "The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district, and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."

During the presidential campaign, Ellison was an early Obama supporter. He planned to speak at a mosque in Iowa on Obama's behalf. But the campaign staff asked him not to. The explanation, Ellison recalls, was: "We have a very tightly wrapped message."

"I've just taken it in stride," Ellison says. "In some cases, being a person of my faith will sometimes even open a door. Other times it will shut a door. You just deal with it."

In February, Ellison was one of the first members of Congress to visit Gaza after Israel's attacks to weaken Hamas. He took a video camera, and he showed the devastation wrought by Israeli bombs. "Here's a bomb site," he says on the video. "Someone's home, flattened." He comforts a man whose parents were killed. "You lose your family, brother? I'm very sorry."

Next he crosses the border to an Israeli city where the rockets of Hamas have been raining down for years and a majority of the children are said to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. He focuses his camera on a playground that also contains a bomb shelter, brightly painted in primary colors.

"It reminded me of Gaza, where there are so many children," he says behind the camera, balancing on that tightrope. "It's an awful situation for both."

Staff researcher Madonna A. Lebling contributed to this report.

Inmates at U.S. Facility in Bagram Protest Indefinite Detention

By Greg Jaffe and Julie Tate
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, July 16, 2009

The prisoners at the largest U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan have refused to leave their cells for at least the past two weeks to protest their indefinite imprisonment, according to lawyers and the families of detainees.

The prison-wide protest, which has been going on since at least July 1, offers a rare glimpse inside a facility that is even more closed off to the public than the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Information about the protest came to light when the International Committee of the Red Cross informed the families of several detainees that scheduled video teleconferences and family visits were being canceled.

Representatives of the ICRC, which monitors the treatment of detainees and arranges the calls, last visited the Bagram prison on July 5, but inmates were unwilling to meet with them.

"We have suspended our video telephone conference and family visit programs because the detainees have informed us they do not wish to participate in the programs for the time being," said Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the organization.

Although the prisoners are refusing to leave their cells to shower or exercise, they are not engaging in hunger strikes or violence. Ramzi Kassem, an attorney for Yemeni national Amin al-Bakri, said detainees are protesting being held indefinitely without trial or legal recourse.

"We don't want to hold detainees longer than necessary," said a U.S. military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We engage in regular releases and transfers when we feel a detainee's threat can be sufficiently mitigated to warrant being released or transferred. Of course, there will continue to be some detainees whose high threat level can only be successfully mitigated via detention, but we review their status regularly to assess whether other options are available."

Unlike at Guantanamo Bay, where detainees have access to lawyers, the 620 prisoners at Bagram are not permitted to visit with their attorneys. Afghan government representatives are generally not allowed to visit or inspect the Bagram facility.

President Obama signed an executive order in January to review detention policy options. The Justice Department is leading an interagency task force examining the issue and is set to deliver a report to the president on Tuesday.

In recent years, Bagram became the destination for many terrorism suspects as Guantanamo Bay came under more scrutiny through legal challenges. The last significant group transfer from the battlefield to the prison in Cuba occurred in September 2004, when 10 detainees were moved there; in September 2006, 14 high-value detainees were transferred to Guantanamo Bay from secret CIA prisons. Since then, six detainees have been moved there.

The Bagram prison population, meanwhile, has ballooned. U.S. officials are building a bigger facility there that will hold nearly 1,000.

The Bagram facility includes inmates from Afghanistan as well as those arrested by U.S. authorities in other countries as part of counterterrorism efforts. The prison now holds close to 40 detainees who are not Afghan citizens, many of whom were not captured in Afghanistan.

In April, a D.C. district judge ruled that the Supreme Court decision that extended habeas corpus rights to detainees at Guantanamo Bay also applied to a certain set of detainees held at Bagram -- those who were not arrested in Afghanistan and who are not Afghan citizens. The Justice Department has appealed the decision.

The indefinite detention of Afghan prisoners also has been a source of anger among Afghan citizens, human rights advocates say. "U.S. detention policy is destroying the trust and confidence that many Afghans had in U.S. forces when they first arrived in the country," said Jonathan Horowitz, a consultant at the Open Society Institute, which seeks to promote democracy around the world. Horowitz is in Afghanistan interviewing the relatives of Bagram detainees, as well as former Bagram prisoners.

Recession Worsens South Africa's Chronic Unemployment

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 16, 2009

KGOTSONG, South Africa -- The economic crisis is causing South Africa, like many countries, to hemorrhage jobs. But its far deeper unemployment problem is represented not by pink slips but by the many people in this dusty rural township who do not work and never have.

One recent weekday, Fikile Present, 25, was doing little more than hanging out inside the shack he shares with his mother, because he had no job to go to. Neither did the neighbor sweeping her dirt yard, the guy biking through town, the women waiting for work on the corner and the ragged crew sifting through garbage at the dump.

Places like Kgotsong exist all over South Africa, where it often seems joblessness, now at more than 23 percent, is a way of life. The nation that is Africa's economic engine has long had one of the world's highest rates of unemployment, an intractable legacy of apartheid that economists deem the root of South Africa's stubborn poverty and inequality. It is also a prime illustration of the failure of democratic governments to extend economic freedom to a black majority that won liberation 15 years ago but remains South Africa's most out-of-work group.

"I dreamed about myself being a technician or working in an engineering office," said Present, adding that he regularly seeks work. "That is all in the past. Now what I'm looking for is a job. Any job."

There is little consensus on a solution. But experts agree that joblessness is costly to South Africa, which helps support nearly one-quarter of the population with the developing world's biggest welfare program. Some warn that chronic unemployment is a tinderbox for instability of the sort that flared last year, when poor South Africans unleashed a wave of violence against foreigners they accused of taking their jobs.

"Worst of all, unemployment is a terrible waste of human potential," said Ann Bernstein, executive director of the Center for Development and Enterprise in Johannesburg. "Almost every unemployed person could and should be doing productive work that would improve their lives and develop the country."

President Jacob Zuma, a populist elected a few months ago on promises of spreading wealth, has pledged to create half a million jobs this year and 3.5 million more by 2014. But the promised jobs are temporary public works positions that might not lead to true employment gains. And with South Africa now in recession after years of steady growth, economists say the government will have a hard enough time saving jobs, much less creating them.

The Shadow of Apartheid

In Kgotsong, an arid grid of shacks and low-slung houses in South Africa's corn belt, the promises inspire scant hope. According to the most recent data, more than 41 percent of people here are unemployed. Present said most people he knows survive on state grants. He is among them: With no skills to market, he is largely supported by his mother's monthly $120 old-age grant.

Present is just one job-seeker in a pool that is massive by almost any standard. Across impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, the unemployment rate is about 8 percent, according to a recent International Labor Organization report, though a majority of the employed have informal jobs and make less than $2 a day. In middle-income countries more comparable with South Africa, such as Chile and Malaysia, the rate is typically less than half of South Africa's.

But economists warn that it is unwise to compare South Africa's labor market with others because its problem is rooted in a history unlike any other nation's.

Under apartheid, a white supremacist government isolated blacks in crowded townships and desolate rural areas with weak transportation links to urban areas and schools designed to keep them under-educated. Blacks' opportunities to start businesses were limited, stunting the entrepreneurial knowledge that fuels informal economies in many other developing nations.

"Employment is about one thing leading to another. And that's a historical process," said Miriam Altman, executive director of the Center of Poverty, Employment and Growth at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria. "Here in South Africa, they specifically excluded the majority of the population -- from employment and from living in the right places."

When apartheid ended in 1994, a glut of unskilled black workers entered the labor market. But once-powerful agriculture and mining industries, which provided most of the jobs in places such as Kgotsong, have shrunk and become mechanized, shifting the economy toward one favoring skilled workers.

Many apartheid-era problems remain. The townships where many blacks live still have poor transportation and abysmal schools that do not prepare students for the job market: As of 2007, the high school pass rate for blacks, who make up 80 percent of the population, was slightly more than half that for the 10 percent who are white.

"Learners are being promoted out of the school system, and the situation is just doom in front of them," said Mlungisi Nyamane, a former high school principal in Kgotsong who described schools there as "terrible." He recently began advising jobless residents on launching businesses -- something he said they "never dreamed" of during apartheid -- but most have no money, speak little English and know nothing about writing business plans.

A Need for Low-Skill Jobs

From the perspective of those in Kgotsong, joblessness is a complex equation of penury and connections both geographical and political.

Day jobs can be found at the industrial zone in the nearby town, Present said, but usually there are many more seekers than work, and the three-mile minibus trip costs 70 cents. He gets occasional construction gigs, but employers want a certificate of expertise. There is farm work, but it pays $5 a day, lunch eats some of that pay and extreme conditions spur sickness, he said, concluding that "it's better to do nothing."

On a recent morning, Present and two jobless friends walked under a blazing sun toward the computer lab at the tiny library to check on résumés they had posted to a Web site called Jobmail. Outside, they ran into Master Medupe, smiling on his bicycle.

"I'm 37. I've never had a permanent job," Medupe said by way of introduction. He said he was volunteering for a politician he hoped would reward him with work. "To survive, you have to meet the relevant people."

Inside, under dangling posters of Garfield the cat, young men paged through newspapers advertising work for tailors and drivers with experience. The three computers were not working, as is often the case.

How to create large numbers of low-skill jobs is the subject of vigorous debate, in part because there has been little assessment of the many job-creation programs the government has launched over the years.

Some researchers suggest attracting investors with special economic zones or boosting vocational education. Many say South Africa crucially needs to loosen labor regulations that make hiring and firing difficult and keep wages for unskilled workers significantly higher than in comparable economies.

"At this point, the urgency is for creating jobs at the skill level you have," said Sandeep Mahajan, the World Bank's lead economist here. "Given the low levels, it comes back to manufacturing, perhaps the informal sector and agriculture. . . . That's the dilemma this government faces."

But liberalized labor laws are anathema to the powerful unions that support the ruling African National Congress and helped propel Zuma to power. In recent weeks, the unions have been pressuring the Reserve Bank to lower interest rates to invigorate the business climate and generate jobs.

There was hope in Kgotsong for mass employment two years ago, as plans developed for a corn-based biofuels plant that was expected to create 10,000 jobs. Government officials halted the project over concerns about food security.

On a recent afternoon inside a bar, Momgezi Sebotho lamented the turn of events.

"I say to the people, let's go to the mountain. . . . The mountain will never come to you," said Sebotho, 42, who works at a nearby water plant. "Let's help the government to be able to create jobs."

How? "It's difficult," he said, shaking his head.

Who Will Succeed Kim Jong Il?

By Andrew Higgins
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, July 16, 2009

LIEBEFELD, Switzerland -- In August 1998, as famine reached a terrible climax in North Korea, the destitute Asian nation enrolled a shy teenager in a Swiss state school. He arrived with a fake name, a collection of genuine, top-of-the-line Nike sneakers and a passion for American basketball.

"We only dreamed about having such shoes. He was wearing them," recalled Nikola Kovacevic, a former schoolmate of the curiously well-heeled North Korean. Each pair, estimates Kovacevic, cost more than $200 -- at least four times the average monthly salary in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, where perhaps 1 million people died as a result of food shortages in the mid- and late 1990s.

Today, the student -- who vanished from this sleepy Swiss district as mysteriously as he appeared -- is a key figure in a puzzle that U.S. and Asian intelligence services are scrambling to solve: Who will lead nuclear-armed North Korea -- and where to -- once its gravely ill leader, Kim Jong Il, passes from the scene?

The answer is of vital importance to Washington, which has about 25,000 troops in South Korea, on guard against any resumption of a conflict frozen -- but never formally ended -- by a Korean War armistice accord in 1953. Who rules North Korea will decide whether Seoul, Tokyo and perhaps even Hawaii risk attack from a nation that has tested two nuclear devices, the most recent in May, and built up an arsenal of missiles and long-range artillery. The Pentagon has sent missile-defense systems to Hawaii just in case. North Korea marked July 4 this year by test-firing seven more rockets.

North Korea shrouds the biographies of its rulers and their offspring in a fog of fiction and silence. "It is pretty amazing how very little real information we have," said Victor Cha, who served as a Korea expert on the National Security Council in the Bush administration.

A rare insight into this sealed world is offered by Swiss recollections of the young North Korean who, from 1998 until late 2000, lived here in Liebefeld at No. 10 Kirchstrasse, a sedate suburban street with two pizza joints, a Credit Suisse bank and a Coop supermarket. He was around 17 when he abruptly left in the middle of the school year, apparently to return to Pyongyang.

There are many signs that he may now be the next leader of North Korea -- 26-year-old Kim Jong Un, the third and youngest son of Kim Jong Il.

Known as "Pak Un" to his teachers at Liebefeld-Steinhölzli Schule, a German-speaking state school, he was registered with Swiss authorities as the son of an employee at North Korea's embassy in the nearby city of Bern, Switzerland's capital, according to Ueli Studer, director of education in the local administration.

Throughout Pak Un's time in Liebefeld, however, neither friends nor teachers ever met the parents. "I never saw his father or mother," said the school's principal, Peter Burri, recalling how they repeatedly failed to show up for parents' night. Attending in their place, Burri said, were assorted North Koreans who apologized for the parents' absence and said this was due to their inability to speak German.

A more likely reason: The boy's father didn't work in Bern at the embassy but was more than 5,000 miles away in Pyongyang.

Maria Micaelo, the mother of one of Pak Un's closest school friends, said the North Korean teenager once confided to her son, Joao, that his father was the leader of North Korea. She recalled that she dismissed the claim as a fanciful teenage boast, but had second thoughts when her son saw pictures of Kim Jong Il on television and told her that he'd seen the same man in a photograph with Pak Un. Joao Micaelo, now a cook in Vienna, did not respond to repeated e-mail messages seeking comment.

Kongdan Oh Hassig, an expert on North Korea at the Alexandria-based Institute for Defense Analyses, which does research for the Pentagon, says Pak Un certainly appears to be Kim Jong Il's third son, Kim Jong Un, adding that members of North Korea's elite usually use bogus names outside their homeland. Pak is a very common Korean surname akin to Smith.

When reports of a Pyongyang succession plan began to leak out of North Korea this year, heir apparent Kim Jong Un was widely reported to have attended the International School of Berne, a private, English-speaking establishment near the North Korean Embassy in the Swiss capital.

But, North Korea watchers say, that student -- who went by the name "Pak Chol" -- was most likely Kim Jong Un's older brother, Kim Jong Chol. Both were born to Kim Jong Il's third wife, a former dancer who died in 2004. The North Korean leader has another son, his oldest, by another wife. He also has four daughters. The oldest son, Kim Jong Nam, also studied for a time in Switzerland under an alias, as well as in the Soviet Union.

Swiss authorities say they don't monitor North Korean students and so can't say if they have identities other than those they provide. "We don't know if a son of Kim Jong Il has been in Switzerland," said Sebastian Hueber, spokesman for the Federal Department of Defense, Civil Protection and Sport, which controls Switzerland's domestic and foreign intelligence agencies. Only foreign residents who pose a "direct threat" to Switzerland are scrutinized by security services, said Hueber: "We are not a dictatorship."

'Question of Culture'

The Swiss education of North Korea's apparent future leader raises a tantalizing question: Did it open his horizons beyond the narrow, xenophobic worldview of his homeland, where schools bombard pupils with the evils of "U.S. imperialism" and instill unquestioning obedience to a highly centralized state headed by a leader-for-life? This is in stark contrast to Switzerland, a democratic federal state in which power is widely diffused, where all laws can be challenged by citizens through referendum, and where the presidency is a rotating position that changes every year.

"There is a big difference between attending a school in a free country and a school where everyone has to salute," said Studer, the local education director. Schooling, he added, is a "question of culture," and a North Korean schooled in Liebefeld "will take something away that will have an effect on his life." Pak Un, along with fellow students, had three classes a week on Swiss history from 1291 and the evolution of the country's modern system of governance known as "direct democracy," as well as current events, which in 2000 included the U.S. election campaign.

The North Korean Embassy in Bern, housed in an elegant villa festooned with geraniums in the capital's most expensive neighborhood, declined to comment. Some analysts in South Korea have expressed uncertainty about whether Kim Jong Un has definitely been selected as successor, noting that no official announcement has yet been made by Pyongyang.

A propaganda display on the embassy's ivy-covered wall obliquely addresses the issue of succession, stressing the reinvigorating vitality of youth, a frequent theme of North Korean propaganda in recent months as the regime prepares for a transfer of power. Featuring photographs of young soldiers, young athletes and Youth League zealots, it shows Kim Jong Il as he "hands over the torch of revolution to young vanguards of Juche," the regime's idiosyncratic state ideology.

Since North Korea's founding in 1945, power has passed exclusively from father to son. A hereditary dynasty, it mixes communist cant with Confucian emphasis on the primacy of family ties. Its founder, Kim Il Sung, known as the Great Leader, fabricated a patriotic lineage stretching back to the mid-19th century. After his death in 1994, power passed to his eldest son, the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il, who, according to his own falsified biography, was born on a Mount Paektu, a sacred mountain. He was really born in the Soviet Union, where he was known as Yuri.

With Kim Jong Il, 67, now ailing, North Korea is preparing to hand the baton to the third generation -- and gearing up for a new round of hagiography and mythmaking. A South Korean cable television channel, YTN, reported Monday that Kim Jong Il is suffering from pancreatic cancer, but the report offered no details.

Last month, according to Open Radio for North Korea, a Seoul-based group with extensive contacts in North Korea, Pyongyang began holding lectures for selected audiences to trumpet the "greatness" of Kim Jong Un, the heir apparent. He was celebrated as a "genius of literary arts" and tireless patriot who "is working without sleep or rest" to promote North Korea as a nuclear superpower, according to the organization's account of the sessions. Among his purported feats: He so inspired North Korea's national soccer squad that it recently qualified for the World Cup finals, the first time the team has done so since 1966.

A confidential report prepared in May by the Open Source Center, a U.S. agency that monitors foreign media outlets, said North Korea began to prepare the way for a hereditary successor to Kim Jong Il in 2001 with an essay in a party newspaper titled "A Brilliant Succession." It didn't name anyone but defined father-son succession as a "pure" tradition, and warned that any revolution that doesn't follow tradition is "dead."

This subtle campaign accelerated sharply, according to the report, after Kim Jong Il fell seriously ill, possibly suffering a stroke, last August and vanished for months. U.S. analysts, seeking clues in mountains of North Korean propaganda, noted increasingly frequent mentions of the importance of "bloodlines" and detected veiled endorsements of Kim Jong Un.

Kim Jong Il's eldest son, Jong Nam, was for a time viewed as a likely heir but apparently bungled his chances in 2001 by trying to sneak into Japan under a fake Chinese name on a bogus Dominican Republic passport. He told Japanese immigration officials he wanted to visit Tokyo Disneyland. Interviewed briefly last month in the Chinese gambling enclave of Macau by Japanese television, Jong Nam said he had heard reports that his younger brother, Jong Un, had been chosen as successor but couldn't comment because that "is a very sensitive question."

Focused and Competitive

Kim Jong Un has not been seen in public since his apparent time in Switzerland. Neither his name nor his photograph has ever appeared in North Korean media. After leaving Europe, he is reported to have attended Pyongyang's Kim Il Sung Military University, an officer training school, but virtually nothing else is known about him.

A senior U.S. official says he appears to have "the same interests as most 26-year-olds," noting that these do not generally involve nuclear strategy.

If Liebefeld's former student Pak Un is indeed Kim Jong Un, the memories of his former friends and teachers here offer a sketch of his character. He first started school after the summer holidays in 1998, a time when it looked as if North Korea might soon collapse. At about the same time, Kim Jong Il launched a secret program to produce highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb.

During his first few months in Liebefeld, Pak Un attended a remedial language course for foreign students with poor German. A swift learner, he soon switched to a regular class, said Studer, the education official, who described the boy as "well-integrated, diligent and ambitious." Friends recalled that Pak Un spoke fluent, if sometimes ungrammatical, German but struggled with the Swiss dialect. He also knew English.

A video of a school music class he attended shows a lithe, intense-looking Asian boy wearing black sweat pants, Nike Air Jordan shoes and a long-sleeved black sports shirt. He sways uncomfortably while classmates pound African drums and beat tambourines. Though generally quiet in class and sometimes awkward, particularly around girls, Pak Un showed a different personality on the basketball court, former friends recalled. He fell in with a group of mostly immigrant kids who shared his love of the National Basketball Association. Kovacevic, who shot hoops with the North Korean most days, said Pak Un was a fiercely competitive player.

"He was very explosive. He could make things happen. He was the playmaker," said Kovacevic, who now works as a tech specialist in the Swiss army. "If I wasn't sure I could make a shot, I always knew he could."

Marco Imhof, another Swiss basketball buddy, said the Korean was tough and fast, good at both shooting and dribbling. "He hated to lose. Winning was very important," recalled Imhof. Pak Un also liked action films featuring hand-to-hand fighting, particularly those starring the Hong Kong kung fu star Jackie Chan, and played combat games on a Sony PlayStation.

This picture of a focused, competitive young man matches what until now has been the only firsthand account of Kim Jong Un. That was provided by a Japanese sushi chef who claims to have worked in Pyongyang as a cook for the Kim family. The chef, who wrote a book on his experiences in Japanese under the pseudonym Kenji Fujimoto, described the boy as strong-willed, proud and "boss-like."

During his time in Liebefeld, friends remembered, Pak Un showed scant interest in politics and never vented publicly against Americans. Instead, he worshiped American basketball stars. He spent hours doing meticulous pencil drawings of Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan.

At his spacious apartment on Kirchstrasse, said one friend who visited, Pak Un had a room filled with American basketball paraphernalia. He proudly showed off photographs of himself standing with Toni Kukoc of the Chicago Bulls and Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers. It is unclear where the pictures were taken. On at least one occasion, a car from the North Korean Embassy drove Pak Un to Paris to watch an NBA exhibition game.

With no parents in sight, Pak Un was watched over and waited on by North Koreans who appeared to combine the duties of servants, guardians and guards. A pair of Korean women, says Imhof, often observed him playing basketball and sometimes videotaped the action. A Korean-speaking man frequently hovered nearby. "It was a bit strange," Imhof said. But he figured this was just "a Korean thing."

Pak Un's ultimate guardian in Switzerland was Ri Tcheul, North Korea 's veteran ambassador in Bern. Ri has served in the Swiss capital for 21 years, making him the city's longest-serving foreign envoy. Over the years, he has turned the embassy into the nerve center for Pyongyang's sometimes furtive contacts with businessmen, bankers, officials and aid workers from across Europe.

Studer, the local education official, said school authorities never had reason to question whether Pak Un really was the son of an embassy employee. Now that he's gone, he added, "there is no need to go into the matter."

Pak Un's former friends are more curious and say they'd like to know the real identity of the teenager they used to hang out with. They last saw him in 2000, when he suddenly vanished. He left no address and didn't tell anyone where he was going.

"We thought he was ill or something and would soon be back. He never came to school again. He totally disappeared," said Kovacevic, his former friend. He and others asked teachers what had happened. They had no idea either. "We were just playing basketball -- now he is going to be a dictator," said Kovacevic. "I hope he is a good leader, but dictators are usually not that good."

The Courage of Natalya Estemirova

by Katrina vanden Heuvel on 07/15/2009

In October 2007, Russian human rights activist Natalya Estemirova wrote for us about the assassination of the crusading investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Today, Estemirova was assassinated.
Her body, dumped near the capital city of Ingushetia, was discovered with two close-range bullet wounds in the head.

A woman who courageously investigated kidnappings, killings and other rights abuses in Chechnya, a single mother in her early 40s, a leading member of the esteemed human rights group Memorial, Estemirova received the first annual award from the international human rights group RAW in WAR (Reach all Women in War) in October 2007.

She understood, as she wrote in her harrowing story about Anna Politkovskaya's confrontation in Chechnya with a notorious police official responsible for the imprisonment, torture and murder of Chechen civilians that: "There are those with a vested interest in keeping the Russian Abu Ghraib forgotten--so that they can once again kidnap and torture. Our task, however, is to uncover their deeds and to fight them. Anna was at the forefront of this work for many years."

Natalya Estemirova was also at the forefront of that dangerous work, never ceasing to expose human rights abuses committed by the brutal leadership in Chechnya, where she lived and worked. Members of Memorial are now saying what they feared to say before, out of concern for Natalya's safety. They are accusing the 32-year old leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, of involvement in her assassination.

"Ramzan Kadyrov is personally responsible, not only because he leads Chechnya," said Oleg Orlov, Memorial's chairman. But, because "he personally threatened Natalya, told her that her hands would be covered in blood and that he destroys bad people." Kadyrov leveled these threats, according to Orlov, when he dismissed Estemirova as head of the Grozny Human Rights Public Council last year. Kadyrov has not replied to accusations that he was involved. What is clear is that the two bloody wars Moscow has fought with Chechnya, (from 1994 to 1996 and starting again in 1999) to halt the Muslim republic from seceding in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, have led to tens of thousands of civilian deaths, mass disappearances and killings, and rampant corruption. Putin installed Kadyrov as the republic's president in 1994 and his regime has been notorious for its corruption and human rights abuses.

For journalists, Russia has become --according to the International Union of Journalists--one of the most dangerous countries to work in. More than thirty journalists have been murdered for their work or have died under suspicious circumstances since Boris Yeltsin came to power; the pattern continues under Vladimir Putin and Dmitrii Medvedev. In only one case have the killers been convicted.

After learning of Estemirova's killing, President Medvedev issued a statement condemning the murder and ordered Russia's Investigative Committee to conduct a thorough probe. Kadyrov released a statement on Wednesday night saying he would "spare no expense: to find her killers.

The leading opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta has paid the heaviest price for its crusading investigations into high-level corruption, human rights violations, and brutality in Chechnya. Three of its leading reporters, including Anna Politkovskaya, have been murdered for their unflinching investigations. Most recently, 25-year old freelance reporter for Novaya, Anastasiya Baburova -- who was covering the rise of race-motivated crimes and Neo-Nazi groups -- was gunned down on a Moscow street. (There is no progress to report in her case.) And Estemirova was a frequent contributor to Noyava, reporting on extrajudicial killings, abductions and punitive arsons; after a wave of threats from the Chechen authorities, she wrote under a pseudonym. Despite the physical threats, assaults, and financial and political pressures, the newspaper's reporters and editors have continued to remain independent and publish crusading investigative reporting.

The issue of impunity for violent crimes against journalists is a matter of international importance. Deadly violence against journalists in Russia -- and in all countries, has led to self-censorship, leaving issues of global significance under reported or entirely uncovered.

Today we honor the courage of Natalya Estemirova. She tenaciously exposed human rights abuses and was a powerful voice for justice in her country.

Those who have so brutally stifled her voice must be brought to justice.

Obama in Africa: A Major Disappointment

By Gerald Caplan

July 13, 2009

This article is based on a piece which originally ran on The Globe and Mail.

As expected, President Obama used his twenty-four-hour trip to Ghana to send messages about his thinking and his priorities for Africa. This was a moment that progressives involved in Africa have been waiting for, hoping for some clear thinking about Africa's many challenges and the American role in addressing them. On the basis of his interviews and speeches, they will be sorely disappointed. Once we get beneath the eloquence and style, it's hard to point to anything in any of his remarks that couldn't have been said, however inarticulately, by George Bush.

In one interview, Obama, with no false humility, stated that "I'm probably as knowledgeable about African history as anybody who's occupied my office". No question that's true. Still, the bar in that particular competition was not exactly set very high. And as his various comments demonstrated, he's not nearly as knowledgeable as he thinks he is. Much of what he believes about Africa and how it can meet its many challenges is simply wrong.

At every opportunity, the President emphasized internal African causes for the continent's woes, highlighting especially the need for good governance and ending corruption. So he argued, for example, that "you're not going to get investment without good governance." That's just wrong. For decades most foreign investment in Africa has gone to South Africa first, even under apartheid, and then to such oil-rich nations as Angola and Nigeria. First and foremost, western companies, backed energetically by their embassies, are after Africa's resources--oil, gas and to a lesser extent minerals. These are the very sectors where we find vast corruption, environmental degradation, the vicious exploitation of African labor, and, often enough, Africa's wars. In no case does good governance play a role in investment decisions. Often enough venal leaders are precisely what investors look for.

Similarly, Obama insisted that business won't invest where "government officials are asking for 10, 15, 25 percent off the top." That's an illogical assertion. If foreign businessmen weren't only too eager to play the bribery game, those African officials couldn't get away with demanding a cut off the top. Nigeria, Angola, South Africa, Kenya, Cameroon, Congo--everyone knows how to get a contract in these and other countries. Which also should remind us that high-level corruption in Africa could not and does not happen without intimate western collaboration.

Obama's repeated insistence on this theme of good governance and corruption is somewhere between ironic and farcical, given the eight African leaders who were invited to last week's G-8 summit. Five were from sub-Saharan Africa, three from North Africa. Every one of them is ranked poorly or abysmally in Transparency International's 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index. Seven of the eight are considered only partly free or not free by Freedom House in 2009; only one (South Africa, led by the deeply corrupt Jacob Zuma) is deemed free. It was an important if inadvertent lesson: Corruption and poor governance are indeed widespread, if not quite ubiquitous, across Africa, and the west cheerfully plays footsies with all those governments.

Obama says there is "a direct correlation between governance and prosperity." That's why he chose democratic Ghana for his first official state visit, rather than his father's country, Kenya. Heaven knows that the ruling parties in Kenya are brazenly corrupt and dedicated to little beyond enriching themselves and their supporters. Ghana, on the other hand, after years of bad governments following the CIA-backed coup that overthrew its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, can now be said to be fairly stable and democratic (though hardly free of corruption). Obama knows lots of interesting things. When his father left Kenya in the early 1960s to study in the USA, he noted, the GDP of Kenya was higher than that of South Korea; today, Korea is one of the world's great economic success stories, while Kenya languishes.

The UN's Human Development Index backs this up. In 2008, of 179 countries listed, Korea was ranked an impressive twenty-fifth while Kenya was 144. But the President should look at these ratings more closely. Despite good governance, and though some real progress is being made, Ghana was ranked 142, virtually tied with Kenya among the bottom 20 percent of the world's nations. Something else must be going on here that accounts for this depressing situation because Obama's analysis can't.

Here's the heart of his diagnosis,: While the international community "has not always been as strategic as it should have been [regarding Africa]...ultimately I'm a big believer that Africans are responsible for Africa...for many years we've made excuses about corruption or poor governance, that this was somehow the consequence of neocolonialism, or the West has been oppressive, or racist. I'm not a believer in excuses."

This is really a startling argument for the head of a country whose great political battles still rage around the meaning of its Constitution, adopted in 1787 while the slave trade still raged, and whose personal inspiration comes from a predecessor who was murdered in 1865, twenty years before formal colonialism began in Africa. To dismiss the slave trade and a century or more of colonial rule, to minimize the impact of neocolonialism by France and the US, to ignore the incalculable decades-long damage done to Africa as a pawn in the cold war--all of this seems to requite willful blindness in order to peddle a particular agenda.

Of course Obama's obsession about appalling governance is not wrong; I share it completely. Africans have for decades been betrayed by a veritable pageant of monstrous leaders, one more egregious than the other. But another truth is that the United States actively backed almost all of them, and if the US didn't, France did; that's part of the neocolonial record. The west also supplied many of the arms that were used in the appalling internal conflicts that have roiled Africa for so long. Even today, the US, Britain and France continue to remain close to many African leaders whose democratic credentials leave much to be desired, as the G-8 meeting underlined.

The President raised Zimbabwe to make his case. The West, he is not responsible for the destruction caused by Robert Mugabe and his government. The destruction is only too true. The West's innocence is not.

Had Britain fulfilled its clear obligations and ended white minority rule in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe in a timely fashion, fifteen years of vicious civil war would have been avoided. Instead, the final African victory left the country in the hands of an embittered, vengeful Mugabe. America and Britain were collaborating with the apartheid regime in South Africa at the very moment it was actively working worked to sabotage Mugabe's new government. The IMF forced structural adjustment programs on an unwilling Zimbabwean government, helping to undermine its economy. All this is well known. So is the fact that for the first twenty years of his reign, "Good old Bob" Mugabe was one of the west's favorite "Big Men", blithely ignoring his ferocious oppression of his opponents. Not until he began expropriating the vast holdings of white farmers ten years ago--all of whose land was stolen from Africans during the twentieth century (though not necessarily by the current owners)--did western media and western governments decide he was Enemy Number One. Can Obama know nothing of this record?

"Development depends on good governance," Obama lectured Ghana's Parliament. "That is the change that can unlock Africa's potential." With all due respect to the President, this is malarkey. The reality, which surely Obama grasps, is that for centuries, year in and year out, far more of Africa's wealth and resources pour out of the continent to the rich world than the west provides Africa through all sources, from aid to investment to trade. Good governance will not end this perverse truth.

Beyond that, even if every African country was led by a saint, they could do nothing about the severe environmental and economic damage that global warming--for which Africa has no responsibility whatever--is inflicting across the continent. Obama actually mentioned this in his speech, yet ignores it with his obsessive fixation on Africa's sole responsibility for its problems.

Even the most exemplary African leaders could do nothing about the destructive impact on African development of the present worldwide economic crisis, for which Africa has no responsibility whatever.

No African leader has the slightest influence on the drastic increase in food prices that is causing such suffering, including outright starvation, to millions of Africans.

Even a continent of Mandelas couldn't change the massive subsidies that western governments provide to their agribusinesses. When they're in Ghana, the Obamas should do some comparison shopping. They may be taken aback to find that it costs more to buy a locally-bred chicken than a subsidized one that's been shipped frozen all the way from Europe. To this, Obama reassured his Ghanaian hosts, "America can do more to promote trade and investment."

And nothing can be done about the enormous damage already done to Africa by the destructive neoliberal policies that were imposed on African governments by the World Bank and IMF over the past thirty years. Even today, while their rhetoric has changed, these institutions, deeply American-influenced, continue to insist on discredited policies that have failed to promote growth while vastly increasing inequality.

None of this was tackled by Obama. For him, the relationship between Africa and the rich world is a one-way street. Africans are screwing up, and if they want more American aid, they've got to get their act together. This is the Obama analysis--simplistic, myopic, patronizing, implicitly threatening, just what we expected and got from George Bush. Like Bush, evidence based-reality takes a back seat to whatever reality a president chooses to concoct.

For the past decade, it's been widely agreed that the US has three overriding interests in Africa: exploiting natural resources, above all oil and gas; fighting Islamists; and competing with China. In all cases, Africa is merely a pawn, something to be used to pursue America's interests, not Africa's. African development and everything related to it are secondary matters. Substantively, nothing Obama has committed himself to alters these priorities, especially his strong endorsement of the suspiciously vague new US military command structure for Africa, called AFRICOM. But the Americans have been unable to persuade a single African country except ever-cooperative Liberia to host the base for this structure, all fearing the increasing militarization of US-African relations. Given that they're a gang of corrupt leaders who govern poorly, this should surely send Obama a pretty clear message.

I documented the case against the Obama analysis of Africa in a book published last year, The Betrayal of Africa. It demonstrates the twin burdens that actually account for Africa's condition--their own wretched leaders combined with destructive western policies and practices. I know the President is a pretty busy guy, but it's a short book and he clearly enjoys reading and learning. Unless he learns what's really going on in Africa, his administration will become yet another in an endless line that has caused Africa more grief than good. Hard to credit, but yes it can.

About Gerald Caplan

Gerald Caplan, a Toronto-based researcher-writer and activist with a Ph.D. in African history, is the author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide and The Betrayal of Africa.

Thousands Remember Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II

Tens of thousa

Bosnian Muslim women weep amidst coffins of Srebrenica victims during a funeral ceremony at the Memorial center of Potocari, near Srebrenica

nds of Bosnian Muslims have prayed and remembered the dead in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica on Saturday, the 14th anniversary of Europe's worst massacre since World War II. They also re-buried hundreds of victims recently recovered from mass graves. Saturday's ceremony came amid international concerns over remaining ethnic tensions in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

It took 14 long years to find and identify them. But on Saturday, at an emotionally charged ceremony, family members finally laid to rest 534 victims into pits next to the nearly 3,300 graves at the Srebrenica-Potocari memorial center.

The victims, including 44 teenagers, were among more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys who were killed when Serbian forces overran the Bosnian town of Srebrenica during the Balkan wars in July of 1995.

Bosnian Muslims had fled to Srebrenica as it was declared a United Nations "protected safe area for civilians." But the outnumbered U.N. troops never fired a shot as they were overrun by Serbian forces. Instead, they stood by as Serbian troops rounded up the population, separating males for execution.

On Saturday, thousands of people prayed and remembered Europe's worst massacre since World War Two. One elderly woman was close to tears when she explains that she is sad that the victims could not live to see this day.

A middle aged woman was overheard telling a reporter that she saw her young son during prayers in a mosque. Another family member said she has been hallucinating for the last 14 years.

The wounds of history have not yet healed. Serbian deputies in the Bosnian parliament have blocked an initiative to declare July 11 the "Srebrenica Genocide Remembrance Day" in the former Yugoslav republic.

Earlier the European Parliament proclaimed July 11 a day of commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide. Bosnia's inter-ethnic war cost thousands of lives and left the country split into two highly autonomous entities - the Muslim-Croat Federation and the Serbs' Republika Srpska.

European Union officials, including Germany's Deputy Foreign Minister Peter Ammon, warn that these divisions will hold up Bosnia's attempt to join NATO and the EU. "In this regard we are concerned about the developments in Bosnia Herzegovina, the reform process there has almost come to a stand-still. And allow to be frank: Only Bosnia Herzegovina as a whole enjoys the European prospective, not its parts of entities. NATO and EU accession are a major step towards stabilization of the whole region," he said.

He spoke at a summit on Southeastern Europe in neighboring Croatia. Saturday's commemoration for the victims of Srebrenica was also attended by a United States congressional delegation that put a wreath near what is known as the Memorial Stone.

In a statement,U.S. Ambassador to Bosnia Charles English said U.S. President Barack Obama has called the Srebrenica slaughter "a stain in our collective consciousness," and that the world has to ask itself how this genocide could have happened.

Last year Bosnian Serbian President Radovan Karadzic was captured and transferred to the United Nations Tribunal in The Hague. However another key suspect, former Bosnian Serbian commander, General Ratko Mladic, remains at large.

Demolition Specialists: The Supreme Court's 2008/2009 Term

By Bill Yeomans, AFJ Legal Director

In Ricci v. DeStefano, the five conservatives on the Supreme Court struck a blow against this nation's most effective weapon for eliminating discrimination from our workplaces: the disparate impact standard of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Over the strong dissent of four justices, the conservative majority held that New Haven, CT engaged in intentional discrimination against white firefighters when it rejected the results of tests for firefighter promotions because they disproportionately excluded African American and Hispanic candidates.

In 1971, in Griggs v. Duke Power Co., a unanimous Supreme Court held that Title VII prohibited employment practices that had a disparate impact on minorities and were not necessary for the job. In Chief Justice Burger's words, Title VII prohibited 'employment procedures or testing mechanisms that operate as 'built-in headwinds' for minority groups...' Some tests were intentional devices to exclude minorities and women, while others were the result of sloppy employment practices. After Griggs, it was no longer necessary to prove that employers intended to discriminate. The focus was on whether hiring and promotion criteria tested for skills that were necessary to perform the job; no calculus tests for sanitation workers or strength tests for accountants. Griggs launched a generation of progress that uprooted entrenched discrimination and desegregated many of our nation's major police and fire departments.

Private plaintiffs, public interest litigators and the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division broke down barriers to minority employment by pursuing litigation and negotiating consent decrees against dozens of states and localities, many of which hired on the basis of legacy, subjective criteria, or flawed employment tests that excluded qualified minority applicants. The result was more professional police and fire departments whose effectiveness increased because they looked more like the communities they served. Chicago, which operated segregated fire houses in 1974, increased African American representation in its fire department from 4% to 20% by 1995. In Los Angeles, the fire department went from 96% white in 1974 to more than 50% nonwhite by 2002, while in Boston minority representation in the firefighting ranks increased from 1% in 1974 to almost 40% by 2000.

Don't let these numbers fool you, however. As New Haven's own situation attests, discrimination and lack of minority representation on fire and police squads is still a very real problem. Though New Haven's population is more than 50% nonwhite, minorities only have an 18% representation in leadership roles within the fire department. Only one of 21 fire captains is African American. This disparity is what New Haven was trying to address.

Opponents of civil rights enforcement, however, are not concerned with these inequalities and fought from the start to eliminate disparate impact enforcement. They contended falsely that it led to quotas. They won a Pyrrhic victory when the Supreme Court, including Ricci author Justice Anthony Kennedy, severely curtailed the effectiveness of disparate impact lawsuits in Wards Cove Packing Co. v. Atonio. The groundwork for this assault on Title VII was laid in Ronald Reagan's Department of Justice by young anti-civil rights activists, including John Roberts and Samuel Alito. Fortunately, Congress responded by passing the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which incorporated the disparate impact standard into the text of Title VII.

The Court's ruling in Ricci is the latest chapter in the efforts of right wing ideologues to subvert the disparate impact standard. The Court created a new standard, stating that the New Haven needed a "substantial basis in evidence" before it could reject the results of a test that had the overwhelming effect of excluding African Americans and Hispanics from promotion as firefighters. In effect, the Court said that the City would have to prove the case against itself and establish that it had committed a disparate impact violation before it could withdraw the test and start over by searching for a less discriminatory alternative. While the obligations of Title VII remain in full effect, the Court's decision is bound to prove to be a disincentive to employers who want to comply voluntarily with Title VII, but don't want to prove that they have violated Title VII.

In a striking departure from principles that govern appellate review, the Court reversed the case outright, rather than following its usual practice of sending the case back to the lower courts to apply the facts to the new standard in the first instance. The Court's eagerness to impose its judgment was unseemly.

It now falls to the executive branch—through the Department of Justice, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Department of Labor—to craft new guidance that will minimize the damage inflicted by the Court's ruling and ensure that Title VII's protections remain robust. Should those efforts come up short, Congress may have to consider whether it must step forward yet again to give force to Chief Justice Burger's simple statement in Griggs that, "[t]he objective of Congress in the enactment of Title VII is plain from the language of the statute. It was to achieve equality of employment opportunities and remove barriers that have operated in the past to favor an identifiable group of white employees over other employees."

For more analysis of this term and the impact Sonia Sotomayor could have upon the Supreme Court, please take a look at our in-depth end of term review.

Can the DPJ Bring Democracy to Japan?

by Tobias Harris and Colum Murphy

Posted July 3, 2009

On a sweltering afternoon in June, the rice fields outside the small town of Omagari in Japan's northern Akita prefecture are eerily deserted. Only the voice of Kimiko Kyono belting out from the speakers atop her orange Nissan breaks the silence. "Konnichiwa!" she exclaims to the open fields. "This is Kimiko Kyono of the Democratic Party of Japan!" Finally she spots a farmer: "Over there!" A campaign aide drives the car through the field in hot pursuit of the lone voter.

Ms. Kyono, one of the DPJ's potential candidates in parliamentary elections likely to be called at the beginning of August, has an unenviable task. She is trying to win over risk-averse voters person by person to the opposition party formed in 1998. Yet this youthful looking mother of four is not fazed. "Last time I lost by 30,000 votes," she says. "This time I hope to win or at least close the gap."

A confluence of factors means Ms. Kyono might get her wish. While Kazuyasu Kurokawa, the 52-year-old farmer she managed to corner, is noncommittal about his voting plans, others are forthrightly supportive. Teruko Sasaki, 70, is fed up with the status quo. "Things have not gotten better around here," she says. "I think it is time for a change."

The incumbent Liberal Democratic Party has been in power for almost six decades, apart from a 10-month period in the early 1990s, and discontent with its performance is at an all-time high. Chronic disillusionment with LDP's ineptitude and the increasingly severe economic conditions of recent years mean that, even here in the conservative heartland and LDP stronghold, more voters like Ms. Sasaki are contemplating giving the DPJ a shot at ruling the country.

The DPJ under current leader Yukio Hatoyama promises that it would use an election mandate to bring sweeping changes to Japan. The party has devised a set of policies aimed at cushioning citizens from harsh economic realities. Of greater long-term significance, the DPJ has ambitions to overhaul the country's governing structure, which under the LDP has rested on opaque internal party decision-making processes and underhanded cooperation between the party and the bureaucracy. Instead, the DPJ promises government that is more efficient, transparent and accountable. In short, policy making in Asia's oldest democracy would finally move out of the proverbial smoke-filled back rooms.

Political transformation is already underway. Japan now has, for the first time in decades, a viable opposition party in the DPJ, which earned the trust of the public when it became the largest party in the upper house in 2007. A strong mandate at the polls could bring an end to the political paralysis that has hampered the revitalization of Japan's economy and society.

Down and Out

Ms. Kyono's home prefecture, Akita, is in many ways at the front line of Japan's decline, a microcosm of many of the problems that bedevil the country. It is an appropriate laboratory for DPJ's policies related to demographic issues, including the elderly and farmers. Across a host of indicators, the prefecture—together with neighboring Aomori prefecture and the southern island prefecture of Okinawa—finds itself at the bottom of the rankings. Michael Lacktorin, professor of economics at Akita International University, says the No. 1 problem facing the prefecture is demographics. There are around 1.1 million people in Akita, but this is declining by 12,000 people, or around 1%, per year. Half of the decline is from death, half from "social movement" by job seekers.

Japan's aging society is on full display in Akita. On a recent morning in June, most customers at a large supermarket in Omagari were elderly. In October 2007, 28% of Akita's population was over the age of 65, close to six percentage points higher than the national average. Average per capita income in the prefecture for fiscal year 2005 was around 2.3 million yen ($24,100), well below the national level of 3 million yen. Agriculture plays an important role in the prefecture's economy, and here, as in other parts of Japan, farmers are struggling. The percentage of those engaged in full-time farming is dwindling, and more and more rural dwellers are relying on the government sector for employment.

Of course, the latest economic crisis has exacerbated these long-standing social problems. While there are some signs of a recovery, demand for Japanese exports fell sharply in late 2008 and in the first quarter of 2009, causing a sharp economic contraction—gdp fell 3.5% in the fiscal year that ended March 31, a record fall since records began in 1955. The contraction has put pressure on the Japanese workforce, as unemployment rose to 5.2% in May. There are few signs that foreign demand will recover quickly, reinforcing the need for measures to stimulate domestic demand, despite having already budgeted roughly 2% of Japan's gdp for economic stimulus since autumn 2008. Meanwhile, Japan's colossal national debt continues to grow and the goal of a balanced budget pushed back due to the Aso government's antirecession stimulus measures, while social-security spending is soaring as the population ages.

In short, the economic crisis has exposed just how illusory the Koizumi boom years were, based as they were on healthy demand for Japanese goods in the United States and China and on the growing use of temporary and other irregular workers by Japanese businesses. The challenge for Japan's government remains finding the right balance between public demands for social protection, and the need for structural reform and fiscal restraint. The DPJ believes it can strike that balance.

Exit LDP, Enter DPJ

The litany of problems facing Japan has given the DPJ plenty of fodder for devising policies with a clear appeal to the much suffering Japanese, and even given some of the most diehard supporters of the LDP cause to stop and reconsider. That said, it is hard to differentiate between the LDP and the DPJ on the basis of policies alone, especially since many measures seem to pander to the same constituencies, for example the farmers. Perhaps this should not surprise us— Mr. Hatoyama and former party leader and party founder Ichiro Ozawa are both former LDP members.

Even so, the DPJ has done a better job at shaping its policies into a somewhat coherent "manifesto." At the party's modest headquarters in Tokyo's Nagatacho district, former DPJ policy chief Yukio Edano explained that the most important goal of the party is to expand Japan's social-safety net, and many of these policies are specifically aimed at alleviating the two main problems facing the rural areas—the aging population and declining agriculture. That includes addressing Japan's faulty pensions system—antiquated in its management, Byzantine in its organization, and underfunded given growing liabilities—by creating a model based on Sweden's and supported by the whole of consumption-tax revenue at the current rate of 5%. Mr. Edano says the DPJ also plans to increase spending on health and nursing care. The party plans to introduce an individual household income-support system to make Japanese farmers feel more secure about engaging in agriculture. Another sweetener is the launch of a per capita child allowance of 26,000 yen per child per month.

This is an expensive shopping list, but can be financed partially by the DPJ's plan to eliminate wasteful government spending, says Mr. Edano. The party has identified savings of around $104 billion that it plans to redirect to other areas, including into the country's pension system. An increase in consumption tax from the current 5% will happen, but not for "another five or 10 years," says Mr. Edano.

When it comes to economic policies, however, details are vague. While there are references to revitalizing small- and medium-sized enterprises through a "SME Charter," the party falls short on specifics. It, like the LDP, has been unable to outline a plan to fix Japan's finances and it seems that it doesn't quite know how to revitalize regional economies such as Akita's. The DPJ's manifesto contains a lot of little ideas animated by the vision of a "secure society," but nothing terribly concrete on how to restore corporate Japan back to its former glory. By appealing to anxiety about the country's mismanaged pension schemes and inadequate health-care system for the elderly, especially in remote areas, the DPJ is hoping to expand its support base. But it could still botch the campaign. "If a golfer reaches the green, then he should be able to putt his shot," Mr. Edano says. "But the DPJ is still at the tee and is using a driver. At this stage, even top professionals can hit a shot out of bounds."

Should the DPJ manage to come to power, it will not be on the strength of its policies alone. The party's success so far is clearly due to the LDP's unpopularity. The ruling party has been on the decline ever since it won a historic victory in the 2005 general election. Under the leadership of then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, the LDP, with the help of Komeito, its coalition partner, secured an unprecedented supermajority in Japan's House of Representatives on the basis of Mr. Koizumi's personal popularity and his campaign to privatize Japan Post.

The 2005 election seemed like a turning point for Japanese politics, the apotheosis of Mr. Koizumi's crusade to destroy the "old" LDP, smash the bureaucracy and institute reforms to liberalize the economy. But within a year Mr. Koizumi was out of office and his successor, Shinzo Abe, was less interested in economic reform than pursuing his dream of making Japan a "normal" country through revision of the Constitution and reform of education curricula—issues that did not resonate with the public.

What followed is all too familiar: the readmission of ousted postal rebels to the LDP, the Abe government's mishandling of the 2007 pensions crisis followed by the DPJ's victory in that year's upper house elections, the substitution of Yasuo Fukuda for Mr. Abe, and then a year later, the substitution of the incumbent Prime Minister Taro Aso for Mr. Fukuda. It has been four years of scandals, of policy decisions avoided, of reforms watered down or scrapped entirely—and of persistently low public approval numbers. Add the failures of the past four years to the LDP's record over its nearly unbroken run of 55 years in power and it seems reasonable that the upcoming general election will result in a historic defeat for the LDP and the birth of a DPJ-led government.

Of course until the election is held it is possible that the LDP—with a history of pulling out miraculous victories—will survive. A scandal involving former DPJ leader Mr. Ozawa in the spring led to a slight uptick in the Aso government's approval ratings, but Mr. Ozawa's resignation halted the DPJ's decline and has effectively triggered a terminal crisis in the LDP.

As of early July, Mr. Aso continues to face plummeting poll results, open calls for his resignation, and demands that he move up the party leadership election scheduled for September to give the party a chance to choose a new leader in advance of the general election. Meanwhile, Mr. Ozawa is still a driving force in the DPJ. "If the election were held today, we would win," a party strategist said in an interview with the review in June. The polls, though frequently unreliable, point to DPJ carrying the day. "Barring some cataclysmic event" the DPJ should win a plurality in the coming election, says political analyst Jun Okumura.

Consolidating Power

Getting elected is only the beginning of the party's challenges. If it is going to deliver on its promises, the DPJ will need to redefine how government works in Japan. If a change of government is to have lasting significance, the DPJ must revolutionize Japanese democracy. If the DPJ merely replicates the LDP's bad practices, not only will it be ineffective as a ruling party but it will likely deepen the public's disillusionment with the political system. A DPJ government's task will be to transform what academic Aurelia George Mulgan has called Japan's "Un-Westminster" system into a proper Westminster parliamentary democracy, with power concentrated in the cabinet.

LDP rule has long been characterized by a sharp division between cabinet and ruling party, with the LDP's formal and informal policy-making organs having an established role in the policy-making process that enable LDP politicians outside government to wield a veto over the sitting government's agenda. At the same time, the bureaucracy has had an outsized role in policy making and as a whole wields political power unmatched among developed democracies. It has been a full-fledged player in a "triangular" struggle for power with the LDP and the cabinet.

The result of this ongoing struggle has been paralysis, particularly after the bursting of the economic "bubble" in the early 1990s, as politicians and bureaucrats struggled to defend their prerogatives and budget shares while various prime ministers attempted to use a newly empowered cabinet office to undermine both LDP and bureaucracy and impose a vision for governing. The Koizumi government was at once a high water mark for this struggle and for the strength of the prime minister and the cabinet in the conflict; the three years since Mr. Koizumi left office have witnessed a steady decline in the ability of the prime minister to corral party members and bureaucrats. Rather than building a Westminster system, Mr. Koizumi strengthened the position of the cabinet within the tripartite governing system without fundamentally transforming the system.

The DPJ seems aware that in order to implement policy it must transform the policy-making process. Naoto Kan, the DPJ's acting president, visited the United Kingdom in early June to study the relationships between cabinet and ruling party and cabinet and bureaucracy in the British system of government. After meeting with senior Labour and Conservative politicians, Mr. Kan returned to Japan impressed by how Britain has enforced the political neutrality of the bureaucracy, ensuring the supremacy of cabinet over ruling party and civil service. In an article in the July issue of the monthly Chuo Koron, Mr. Kan outlines a model for what the DPJ hopes to achieve in constructing a "parliamentary cabinet system" (in contrast to the LDP's "bureaucratic cabinet system").

Describing LDP rule, Mr. Kan argues that the LDP, due to the perpetual gap between cabinet and party, delegated far too much to the bureaucracy, and as a result the government has struggled to resolve the cluster of social and economic problems that have ensnared Japan. According to Mr. Kan, the DPJ will unify ruling party and government to avoid the acrimony that has often characterized the relationship between the LDP and LDP-supported cabinets. To prevent party leaders from being in a position to undermine the government, the DPJ plans to include the party's secretary-general and policy research council chair in the cabinet, with the former responsible for legislative affairs and the latter assuming the critical post of chief cabinet secretary. The DPJ will prevent backbenchers from sidestepping the cabinet to work with bureaucrats through the ruling party's policy research council to draft legislation, and will deny the party's senior leaders outside of government a veto over policy, a right currently possessed by the LDP's general council, which has the power to decide whether a policy will go to a cabinet vote. Indeed, the DPJ abandoned the model of a general council early in its existence and replaced it with a shadow cabinet.

Second, the DPJ aims to strip the bureaucracy of its budgeting authority. Mieko Nakabayashi, a DPJ candidate from Kanagawa prefecture, says Japan's current opaque budgeting process is "undemocratic." "You cannot hide Japan's budget and economic situation forever," says Ms. Nakabayashi, who worked for an extended period in the U.S. Senate Budget Committee. "Hiding things from people has reached saturation point." Here too, the DPJ will not be starting from scratch: A round of administrative reforms early in the decade created the Council for Economic and Fiscal Policy, an advisory council attached to the cabinet that has played an important role in macrobudgeting. But as with many reforms undertaken under LDP rule, the creation of the council was inadequate for shifting responsibility for budgeting from the finance ministry's budget bureau, and the requesting bureaus in the government's ministries and agencies, to elected cabinet officials.

In effect, the DPJ aspires to restore the Japanese Constitution, which designates the cabinet as the supreme executive body responsible for administering the law and preparing budgets, and the Diet as the "sole law-making organ." The goal of these proposals is to create a policy-making process that starts at the top, with the prime minister and the cabinet, and flows down to line bureaucrats. The government, supported by its parliamentary majority, will establish policy-making priorities and compile budgets, the Diet in cooperation with the cabinet will prepare and pass legislation, and the bureaucracy will implement the decisions of its political masters.

Staying in Power

This model is clearly an ideal type: The degree to which a DPJ-led government realizes it will depend on the political abilities of the prime minister and his cabinet ministers. Whether the DPJ's leaders are sufficiently capable remains to be seen.

One factor working in the party's favor is that it should have a mandate for political reform. A poll conducted in March by the Yomiuri Shimbun, Japan's largest daily, found that 74% of respondents did not trust bureaucrats in Tokyo, suggesting that the DPJ will have the public on its side in implementing its plans. At the same time, however, the DPJ must not allow populist, antibureaucrat enthusiasm lead it to promise more reform than it can deliver. Already some of its policies smack of populism. The party's policies for protecting farmer income, for example, will do nothing to promote competitiveness of the sector against foreign producers.

The DPJ will be operating in an environment shaped by an active news media, a public quick to voice its disapproval, an opposition party that will use every tool at its disposal to stymie the government and a bureaucracy reluctant to surrender its privileges. These obstacles do not mean reform is impossible, but they mean the DPJ must pick its battles carefully, seek allies wherever possible and moderate its rhetoric in order to maximize its freedom of action.

The DPJ may already be backing away from more extreme criticism of the bureaucracy, with Mr. Kan's acknowledging that there are many talented bureaucrats and that the party recognizes it will need their cooperation if it is to govern effectively. "The DPJ is unlikely to depart from dependence on the bureaucracy," Takao Toshikawa, editor-in-chief of the biweekly Tokyo Insideline, says, describing the party's plan to appoint 100 political appointees as "unrealistic." "The DPJ has no such manpower." Given these constraints, the DPJ is right to focus on how to concentrate power in the cabinet. Such reforms will require less in the way of legislation and allow more effective use of power by the DPJ's leaders.

More challenging will be the DPJ's desire to redistribute power from Tokyo to prefectures and localities. In his article, Mr. Kan lists decentralizing Japan as the complement to consolidating power in the cabinet, but it is unclear what decentralization means to the DPJ and how it will go about achieving it. There is more than an echo of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair's push for devolution to Scotland and Wales during his first term. Whatever form devolution Japanese-style takes, expect a protracted fight among prefectural and local governments, the ruling and opposition parties in Tokyo, the bureaucracy (which is the target of decentralization), interest groups, and at some level the public at large. In an interview, Aomori governor Shingo Mimura told the review that, in his view, any decentralization of political power must be accompanied with decentralization of budgeting power.

Considering that any sort of radical decentralization can only proceed after the DPJ has effectively concentrated power in the cabinet, stressing decentralization offers more than any government could achieve for the foreseeable future. And given the policy challenges that will face the new government, it is questionable that the first thing that it should do upon realizing administrative centralization is transfer power and money to local governments.

If the DPJ can implement its plans for administrative reform—and it's a big if—it could succeed in regime change. It will have created a "normal" parliamentary system, having transformed Japanese governance from what political scientist Jun Iio has called the LDP's "purposeless" government to a government that can set clear policy goals and be judged by its success in achieving those goals. But regime change will have little meaning for the Japanese people until the government uses its new authority to fix economic and social problems. And that will ultimately depend on the ability of the leaders of the DPJ to make hard decisions about how to fix the budget while putting society and economy on sounder footing, decisions that the LDP has been unable to make. If the new government fails to deliver despite administrative reform, it will have no excuses for inaction-and will risk falling from power.

Another element influencing the longevity of a DPJ-led government is the degree of unity the party exhibits. Critics say the party is deeply divided in many policy areas, for example foreign policy, causing some to predict the DPJ eventually will crumble. In its place, a new party that combines elements of DPJ and LDP could form. "In four or five years, you could get a reconstituted one-party system," says Malcolm Cook, program director for East Asia at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. In the meantime, Mr. Cook expects to see even more "political paralysis" in Japan. "It's not an optimistic view."

As Japan's general election approaches, it is increasingly clear that the public is willing to take a chance on the DPJ. Shigeji Sasaki, a 58-year-old hotel worker in Omagari, Akita, says he plans to change his vote to the DPJ from the LDP so that power can be transferred over smoothly "like the American system." He says he has many demands he would like to see the DPJ government fulfill. "But in general," he said, "I want a party that can lead Japan."

The LDP has progressively lost the ability to govern its own members, has made far too little progress addressing public-policy concerns, and has failed to provide even an outline of a policy vision. If the 2009 election is a referendum on LDP rule, the LDP will be toppled. Even if the LDP wins, however, it will still be a monumental election, because an LDP government would be even more ineffective than before the election, as it would likely be deprived of the supermajority in the lower house that is its trump card in battle with the DPJ-controlled upper house. A LDP victory would likely lead to a grand coalition or a political realignment, significant outcomes in their own right.

The long-term importance of the 2009 general election will be whether a DPJ victory marks the beginning of a new parliamentary democracy in Japan and whether DPJ politicians such as Ms. Kyono and Ms. Nakabayashi—if elected—can build a new system of power that lays the foundations for future prosperity.

This article is the cover story of the REVIEW's upcoming July/August issue.

Tobias Harris is a doctoral candidate in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of Observing Japan (www.observingjapan.com), a blog on Japanese politics. Colum Murphy is deputy editor of the REVIEW.

The Uyghur Hitch in Sino-Turkish Relations

by Yitzhak Shichor

Policy Studies, No. 53

Publisher: Honolulu: East-West Center
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN: 978-1-932728-80-4
Binding: paper
Pages: xii, 72
Price: $10.00


Free Download: PDF

Abstract

Beginning in 1949, China responded to so-called Uyghur separatism and the quest for Eastern Turkestan (Xinjiang) independence as a domestic problem. Since the mid-1990s, however, when it became aware of the international aspects of this problem, Beijing has begun to pressure Turkey to limit its support for Uyghur activism. Aimed not only at cultural preservation but also at Eastern Turkestan independence, Uyghur activism remained unnoticed until the 1990s, despite the establishment in 1971 of Sino-Turkish diplomatic relations. It has gathered momentum as a result of China's post-Mao opening, the Soviet disintegration, increased Uyghur migration, the growing Western concern for human rights, and the widespread use of the Internet. Until the mid-1990s Turkey's leaders managed to defy Chinese pressure because they sympathized with the Uyghurs, were personally committed to their leader Isa Yusuf Alptekin, and hoped to restore Turkish influence in Central Asia. By late 1995, however, both that hope and Alptekin were dead, and China was becoming an influential, self-confident economic power. At this time Ankara chose to comply with Beijing's demands, which were backed by increased trade, growing military collaboration, and China's veiled threats of support for Kurdish nationalism. Consequently, Turkish Uyghurs suffered a serious blow, and some of their organizations had to relocate abroad, outside Beijing's reach. Nonetheless, Uyghur activism continues in Turkey and has become even more pronounced worldwide. Possibly less concerned about the Uyghur "threat" than it suggests, Beijing may simply be using the Uyghurs to intimidate and manipulate Turkey and other governments, primarily those in Central Asia.

Unclassified Report on the President’s Surveillance System

(PDF; 2.6 MB)

Source: Inspector Generals of the Justice Department, the Defense Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (via NY Times)

From New York Times story (U.S. Wiretapping of Limited Value, Officials Report):

While the Bush administration had defended its program of wiretapping without warrants as a vital tool that saved lives, a new government review released Friday said the program’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism was unclear.

The report, mandated by Congress last year and produced by the inspectors general of five federal agencies, found that other intelligence tools used in assessing security threats posed by terrorists provided more timely and detailed information.

Most intelligence officials interviewed “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program contributed to successes against terrorists, the report said.

While the program obtained information that “had value in some counterterrorism investigations, it generally played a limited role in the F.B.I.’s overall counterterro"