Cambodian Monarch Pardons Thai Held as Spy

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By CARLOS H. CONDE

Two things may help to explain the violent power politics in this impoverished part of the southern Philippines: the red-roofed and high-walled mansions that have long dominated the center of this town, and the men in uniform carrying automatic weapons who guarded them.

The opulent mansions, the only ones here in the capital of Maguindanao Province, are owned by the family of Andal Ampatuan Sr., the patriarch of the political dynasty that has ruled this part of the island of Mindanao for much of this decade.

Today, the mansions are surrounded by soldiers and police officers, while family members face multiple charges of murder for alleged involvement in a massacre that shocked a country seemingly inured to political violence.

On Nov. 23, a convoy of vehicles — carrying the wife, three sisters and an aunt of Esmael Mangudadatu, the vice mayor of a small town nearby, as well as supporters, journalists and lawyers — was stopped by dozens of armed men at a checkpoint outside Shariff Aguak. At gunpoint, the vehicles, along with another car that had happened to be behind them, were forced down a dirt road to a windblown hilltop.

The armed men — who the authorities say were working for the Ampatuans — then shot and hacked 57 people to death. Some of the women, investigators say, were raped and sexually mutilated.

“They were so confident with their power that they carried out something like this and believed they could get away with it,” said Kim Bagundang, a Maguindanao resident and president of the Liguasan Youth Association for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit organization.

The reason for the massacre was clear, the authorities said. Mr. Mangudadatu’s relatives and supporters had been on their way to file his candidacy papers for governor of Maguindanao in elections next year — a direct challenge to the Ampatuans, who have ruled virtually unchallenged.

The Ampatuans’ control of Maguindanao is almost absolute. Most of the province’s 36 towns are run by mayors and deputy mayors who are either sons, grandsons, cousins, nephews, in-laws or close allies of the senior Mr. Ampatuan, according to a study by the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism.

Since he became governor in 1998, Mr. Ampatuan has carved out at least eight towns from existing ones and named all of them after his sons and other relatives. The entire Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, which is composed of five predominantly Muslim provinces, including Maguindanao, is run by Governor Zaldy Ampatuan, one of his sons.

The Ampatuans’ control of Maguindanao was enforced with guns and a culture of fear in towns governed by the family, residents and the authorities said. Many residents are afraid to talk at all about the Ampatuans. “No, no, no,” a resident in the town of Datu Unsay said when asked to comment on the massacre.

“People here live in fear,” a driver who lives in nearby Cotabato City, said of Shariff Aguak. “No one will dare go against the Ampatuans.”

One factor in what experts have called the “culture of impunity” that the Ampatuans have enjoyed in Maguindanao may be suggested by the enormous billboards erected at infrastructure projects around the province lauding the accomplishments of the family. Almost all of them also thank President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for her help in making the projects possible — highlighting the political connection between the Ampatuans and the central government in Manila.

“The Ampatuan family dynasty has backed President Arroyo since 2001, and its rise to power is likewise attributed to Mrs. Arroyo’s support,” said Bobby Tuazon, an analyst at the Center for People Empowerment in Governance, a Manila nonprofit organization that has studied the political dynamics of the provinces. The Ampatuans, he said, were “an extension of Arroyo’s political base.”

In the 2004 elections, Mrs. Arroyo won resounding victories in Maguindanao; in at least three towns, her opponent, the late actor Fernando Poe Jr., got no votes at all, according to the official results. An independent election monitor found widespread fraud in the election that year.

For the Ampatuans, as well as for the chiefs of other impoverished provinces, there are very lucrative reasons for chasing political patronage in Manila.

Maguindanao is the second-poorest province in the Philippines, according to government statistics. It is mainly agricultural and has no industry to speak of. What it does have, however, is a lot of voters who can be delivered to national candidates in return for tax revenues and political patronage that can keep local politicians firmly in power.

Francisco Lara, at the Development Studies Institute of the London School of Economics, says the potential for making money from politics has given rise to a class of “ruthless political entrepreneurs” in the Philippines.

“Political office has become more attractive due to the billions of pesos in I.R.A. remittances that electoral victory provides,” Mr. Lara said, referring to the internal revenue allotment, the share of national taxes for local governments. “The ‘winner-takes-all’ nature of local electoral struggles in Muslim Mindanao also means that competition is costlier and bloodier.”

And often more corrupt, according to Mr. Tuazon and other experts.

Figures from the Department of Budget and Management show that Maguindanao’s overall revenue in 2006 was 603 million pesos, or about $13 million — of which 570 million pesos came from national taxes. At least a third of these funds went to personnel and operating expenses. According to the Philippine Center of Investigative Journalism, which has closely examined the issue, such funds are a major source of corruption within the Philippine bureaucracy.

The Commission on Audit’s annual reports on Maguindanao have consistently highlighted deficiencies in bookkeeping. For instance, in its 2008 audit report, the commission found that it could not ascertain the validity of the provincial accountant’s claim that the province had more than 107 million pesos deposited in banks. It also could not verify the existence of properties and assets worth 345 million pesos that the province said it had.

In 2006, the position of the Ampatuans was strengthened by Mrs. Arroyo’s decision to allow local government chiefs to set up armed militias to support the police and the military in their fight against criminals and insurgents.

Abhoud Syed Lingga, executive director of the Institute for Bangsamoro Studies in Cotabato City, who has studied the rise of the militias, said local chiefs across the country had used the order to create their own private armies.

The Ampatuans, he said, did so with more enthusiasm than anyone else. The police and military estimate that the Ampatuans employ between 400 and 600 of these armed men.

Up to now, the military has been supportive of the Ampatuans, Mr. Lingga said, because the clan actively fought the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the insurgent rebels fighting for a Muslim homeland in Mindanao.

All that changed on Nov. 23, when the armed men who the authorities say were working for the Ampatuans — among them police officers and militiamen — killed the 57 people on the hillside.

When soldiers, who had been alerted about the abduction, arrived at the mass graves — at a site overlooking the town of Ampatuan — several bodies remained unburied. Some were still in vehicles; in one van the driver was slumped, dead, on the steering wheel.

The backhoe used to dig the graves, its claw stuck in the ground, was still running — a “mute witness to this atrocity,” as Felicisimo Khu, the police superintendent who oversaw the recovery of the bodies, put it. Printed in black ink on the side of the backhoe, as on most of the equipment at infrastructure projects around Maguindanao, was the name of Andal Ampatuan Sr.

According to Chief Superintendent Leonardo Espina of the Manila police, who serves as spokesman for the investigation, the primary suspect in the massacre, Andal Ampatuan Jr., was present when the armed men stopped the convoy. According to the Justice Department, he ordered his men to carry out the slaughter. He did this, investigators said, in full view of witnesses, some of whom have agreed to testify.

Mr. Ampatuan Jr., who is in custody and has been charged with 25 counts of murder, has denied the allegations. This week, the authorities said they had filed rebellion charges against more members of the Ampatuans, days after the government put the whole of Maguindanao Province under martial law. Raids have been conducted by the police and the military in which at least 1,500 firearms and more than half a million rounds of ammunition have been found. On Wednesday, the police said they had named 161 suspects in the massacre.

Andal Ampatuan Sr., his family members and lawyers for the family did not respond to requests for interviews.

With the Ampatuans on the ropes, power in this province appears likely to shift to the family of Mr. Mangudadatu, the Buluan mayor — which has controlled the neighboring province of Sultan Kudarat for years.

Mr. Mangudadatu, 41, has brothers and uncles and cousins holding local positions in Maguindanao and in Sultan Kudarat Province. Unlike Andal Ampatuan Sr., however, not one of his eight children is in power, Mr. Mangudadatu said in an interview.

That may change next year. “I want my eldest son,” he said, “to run as vice mayor to replace me.”

Just days after the massacre, Mr. Mangudadatu filed his candidacy papers for Maguindanao governor and said that only death could stop him from running. At this point, he seems certain to win.

On the day he filed his papers, he was accompanied by Gilberto Teodoro, who will be Mrs. Arroyo’s candidate for president in the election next year. Mr. Mangudadatu will run as a candidate of Mrs. Arroyo’s party, Lakas-Kampi, the same party that helped nurture the Ampatuans for years.

Philippine troops moved in on the southern strongholds of about 4,000 government-armed militiamen loyal to the Ampatuans, the military said Thursday, The Associated Press reported from Manila.

Lt. Col. Romeo Brawner, a spokesman for the armed forces, said the possibility of clashes with the militiamen had risen since a deadline for them to surrender passed and troops headed to their hide-outs in at least seven townships of southern Maguindanao Province.

“We have started moving in and positioning our troops, but there is no actual firefight yet,” Colonel Brawner said, adding that the operation was meant to pressure the militiamen to surrender.

The operation was started after the militiamen failed to heed the warning on thousands of leaflets dropped by helicopters Tuesday for them to surrender in 24 hours.

More leaflets were dropped Thursday, Colonel Brawner said.

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Blackwater Guards Tied to Secret C.I.A. Raids

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By JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.

The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.

Several former Blackwater guards said that their involvement in the operations became so routine that the lines supposedly dividing the Central Intelligence Agency, the military and Blackwater became blurred. Instead of simply providing security for C.I.A. officers, they say, Blackwater personnel at times became partners in missions to capture or kill militants in Iraq and Afghanistan, a practice that raises questions about the use of guns for hire on the battlefield.

Separately, former Blackwater employees said they helped provide security on some C.I.A. flights transporting detainees in the years after the 2001 terror attacks in the United States.

The secret missions illuminate a far deeper relationship between the spy agency and the private security company than government officials had acknowledged. Blackwater’s partnership with the C.I.A. has been enormously profitable for the North Carolina-based company, and became even closer after several top agency officials joined Blackwater.

“It became a very brotherly relationship,” said one former top C.I.A. officer. “There was a feeling that Blackwater eventually became an extension of the agency.”

George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, would not comment on Blackwater’s ties to the agency. But he said the C.I.A. employs contractors to “enhance the skills of our own work force, just as American law permits.”

“Contractors give you flexibility in shaping and managing your talent mix — especially in the short term — but the accountability’s still yours,” he said.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Blackwater, said Thursday that it was never under contract to participate in clandestine raids with the C.I.A. or with Special Operations personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else.

Blackwater’s role in the secret operations raises concerns about the extent to which private security companies, hired for defensive guard duty, have joined in offensive military and intelligence operations.

Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who is chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, said in an interview that “the use of contractors in intelligence and paramilitary operations is a scandal waiting to be examined.” While he declined to comment on specific operations, Mr. Holt said that the use of contractors in such operations “got way out of hand.” He added, “It’s been very troubling to a lot of people.”

Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, has come under intense criticism for what Iraqis have described as reckless conduct by its security guards, and the company lost its lucrative State Department contract to provide diplomatic security for the United States Embassy in Baghdad earlier this year after a 2007 shooting that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead.

Blackwater’s ties to the C.I.A. have emerged in recent months, beginning with disclosures in The New York Times that the agency had hired the company as part of a program to assassinate leaders of Al Qaeda and to assist in the C.I.A.’s Predator drone program in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, recently initiated an internal review examining all Blackwater contracts with the agency to ensure that the company was performing no missions that were “operational in nature,” according to one government official.

Five former Blackwater employees and four current and former American intelligence officials interviewed for this article would speak only on condition of anonymity because Blackwater’s activities for the agency were secret and former employees feared repercussions from the company. The Blackwater employees said they participated in the raids or had direct knowledge of them.

Along with the former officials, they provided few details about the targets of the raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, although they said that many of the Iraq raids were directed against members of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. To corroborate the claims of the company’s involvement, a former Blackwater security guard provided photographs to The Times that he said he took during the raids. They showed detainees and armed men whom he and a former company official identified as Blackwater employees. The former intelligence officials said that Blackwater’s work with the C.I.A. in Iraq and Afghanistan had grown out of its early contracts with the spy agency to provide security for the C.I.A. stations in both countries.

In the spring of 2002, Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, offered to help the spy agency guard its makeshift Afghan station in the Ariana Hotel in Kabul. Not long after Mr. Prince signed the security contract with Alvin B. Krongard, then the C.I.A.’s third-ranking official, dozens of Blackwater personnel — many of them former members of units of the Navy Seals or Army Delta Force — were sent to provide perimeter security for the C.I.A. station.

But the company’s role soon changed as Blackwater operatives began accompanying C.I.A. case officers on missions, according to former employees and intelligence officials.

A similar progression happened in Iraq, where Blackwater was first hired for “static security” of the Baghdad station. In addition, Blackwater was charged with providing personal security for C.I.A. officers wherever they traveled in the two countries. That meant that Blackwater personnel accompanied the officers even on offensive operations sometimes begun in conjunction with Delta Force or Navy Seals teams.

A former senior C.I.A. official said that Blackwater’s role expanded in 2005 as the Iraqi insurgency intensified. Fearful of the death or capture of one of its officers, the agency banned officers from leaving the Green Zone in Baghdad without security escorts, the official said.

That gave Blackwater greater influence over C.I.A. clandestine operations, since company personnel helped decide the safest way to conduct the missions.

The former American intelligence officials said that Blackwater guards were supposed to only provide perimeter security during raids, leaving it up to C.I.A. officers and Special Operations military personnel to capture or kill suspected insurgents or other targets.

“They were supposed to be the outer layer of the onion, out on the perimeter,” said one former Blackwater official of the security guards. Instead, “they were the drivers and the gunslingers,” said one former intelligence official.

But in the chaos of the operations, the roles of Blackwater, C.I.A., and military personnel sometimes merged. Former C.I.A. officials said that Blackwater guards often appeared eager to get directly involved in the operations. Experts said that the C.I.A.’s use of contractors in clandestine operations falls into a legal gray area because of the vagueness of language laying out what tasks only government employees may perform.

P.W. Singer, an expert in contracting at the Brookings Institution, said that the types of jobs that have been outsourced in recent years make a mockery of regulations about “inherently governmental” functions.

“We keep finding functions that have been outsourced that common sense, let alone U.S. government policy, would argue should not have been handed over to a private company,” he said. “And yet we do it again, and again, and again.”

According to one former Blackwater manager, the company’s involvement with the C.I.A. raids was “widely known” by Blackwater executives. “It was virtually continuous, and hundreds of guys were involved, rotating in and out,” over a period of several years, the former Blackwater manager said.

One former Blackwater guard recalled a meeting in Baghdad in 2004 in which Erik Prince addressed a group of Blackwater guards working with the C.I.A. At the meeting in an air hangar used by Blackwater, the guard said, Mr. Prince encouraged the Blackwater personnel “to do whatever it takes” to help the C.I.A. with the intensifying insurgency, the former guard recalled.

But it is not clear whether top C.I.A. officials in Washington knew or approved of the involvement by Blackwater officials in raids or whether only lower-level officials in Baghdad were aware of what happened on the ground.

The new details of Blackwater’s involvement in Iraq come at a time when the House Intelligence Committee is investigating the company’s role in the C.I.A.’s assassination program, and a federal grand jury in North Carolina is investigating a wide range of allegations of illegal activity by Blackwater and its personnel, including gun running to Iraq.

Several former Blackwater personnel said that Blackwater guards involved in the C.I.A. raids used weapons, including sawed-off M-4 automatic weapons with silencers, that were not approved for use by private contractors. In separate interviews, former Blackwater security personnel also said they were handpicked by senior Blackwater officials on several occasions to participate in secret flights transporting detainees around war zones.

They said that during the flights, teams of about 10 Blackwater personnel provided security over the detainees.

“A group of individuals were selected who could manage detainees without the use of lethal force,” said one former Blackwater guard who participated in one of the flights.

Intelligence officials deny that the agency has ever used Blackwater to fly high-value detainees in and out of secret C.I.A. prisons that were shut down earlier this year. Mr. Corallo, the Blackwater spokesman, said that company personnel were never involved in C.I.A. “rendition flights,” which transferred terrorism suspects to other countries for interrogation.

Barclay Walsh contributed research.

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Last Chance for Justice in Malaysia

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By JON GORVETT

On the anniversary of the 1948 killing of 24 unarmed workers by British troops on a rubber plantation north of Kuala Lumpur, the victims’ families are once again calling for a full inquiry and compensation.

“We are calling for justice to finally be done,” said Quek Ngee Meng, a lawyer and coordinator of the Batang Kali Massacre Action Committee, a group representing the families. “It is very urgent that justice be done, too, as the survivors are getting old and frail. We are not looking for criminal prosecutions, either, as the survivors can forgive, although they cannot forget.”

The shootings on Dec. 12, 1948, at a settlement of plantation workers by the Batang Kali River, took place during the early days of the conflict known as the Malayan Emergency, when British and Commonwealth troops, along with their Malay allies, fought guerrillas from the Communist Party of Malaya.

The incident was at first praised by the British colonial authorities as a major military victory, with the plantation workers described as terrorists. British troops had been engaged in a weeklong operation in the area after receiving reports of Communist guerrilla activity there. The workers, like many of the Communist guerrillas, were ethnic Chinese, a community widely suspected of Communist sympathies by many in the security forces.

Even at the time, though, the account of a “victory” failed to ring true for many.

“I remember it very clearly when the report first came through that day at brigade intelligence,” said Anthony Short, who was a young soldier serving in Malaya at the time.

“I thought, ‘Christ, this is extraordinary.’ There was no report of prisoners taken or wounded, and no exchange of fire,” said Mr. Short, who later taught history at the University of Malaysia and was commissioned by the post-colonial government to write the official record of the Emergency (“The Communist Insurrection in Malaya, 1948-1960”).

A few weeks after the shootings, a brief inquiry was conducted under the supervision of the colonial attorney general, Sir Stafford Foster Sutton. It found that all the workers who were killed had been unarmed. Most were shot in the back. But it concluded that they had been shot while trying to escape.

Tham Yong remembers it differently, though. Now 78, she is one of the few surviving witnesses to what happened that day at Batang Kali.

“When the soldiers came that day,” she recalled in a recent interview at her home in Ulu Yam Bahru, “they were much more aggressive than we were used to, much more angry.”

When those soldiers left the village the following day, 24 of Tham Yong’s neighbors, family and friends — including her fiancé — lay dead. “I am still angry,” Ms. Tham Yong said. “Why shouldn’t I be? They killed these people. They killed them, and nothing was done.”

The men were separated from the women and children, and both groups were locked into different sides of a partitioned kongsi, or hut, for the night.

“The next day, the soldiers told the women to pack all their belongings and leave, because they were going to torch the village,” she said “They took us and placed us on a truck. Then I saw the men being led down from the other side of the kongsi and divided into three or four groups. The soldiers led them out toward the trees of the rubber plantation. Then I heard the gunshots from five different places. We knew they had all been killed.”

The revelations of U.S. military killings of unarmed Vietnamese civilians at My Lai in 1968 revived interest in Britain in similar episodes in their own earlier counterinsurgency campaign in Southeast Asia.

In 1970, Britain’s Scotland Yard opened another inquiry, after several of the soldiers who had been there that day — all members of the elite Scots Guards regiment — signed sworn testimonies that they had indeed killed unarmed villagers.

Their statements were printed in a now-defunct British tabloid, The People. “Once we started firing we seemed to go mad,” the People article quoted William Cootes, one of the soldiers, as saying in his testimony. “I remember the water turning red with their blood.”

Yet the commander of the patrol, Charles Douglas, a sergeant at the time, continued to deny that a massacre had taken place.

The 1970 inquiry ended, however, when the newly elected Conservative government said there was insufficient evidence to warrant further proceedings. A plan to send investigators to interview Malaysian witnesses was canceled.

Then, in 1992, a BBC TV documentary titled “In Cold Blood” re-examined the case, prompting the Malaysian authorities to open their own investigation.

This time, the Malaysian witnesses were interviewed, but the inquiry was also dropped before Malaysian detectives could travel to Britain to interview the surviving soldiers. The Malaysian attorney general’s office said that insufficient evidence had been found to charge anyone, and in 1997 the case was closed.

“What we want to do now is put the two halves of the puzzle together,” said Mr. Quek, the lawyer. “Half the inquiry has already been done in the U.K., and half in Malaysia.”

His group is petitioning the Malaysian authorities to release their files to Scotland Yard, and vice versa, creating sufficient evidence to warrant a new inquiry.

Rosalind Britton-Elliott, a spokeswoman for the British Ministry of Defense, said in an interview this month that the ministry stood by a statement it made to the families’ lawyers last August. The statement said that while the ministry recognized the seriousness of the allegations made by the Batang Kali Action Committee, “Very little documentary evidence survives and previous investigations identified concerns about the reliability of this evidence.”

The ministry statement said there were no plans to hold an inquiry, but it also noted that a final decision on whether any further action would be taken on the case had yet to be made. No date has been set for that decision, although lawyers for the victims’ families are planning to open legal proceedings in Britain, if the decision is not to their liking.

“There is no doubt in my mind that it was a massacre,” said Mr. Short. “It is also a disgrace that nothing has been done all these years.”

A frail Ms. Tham Yong — now using a wheelchair after a recent fall — agrees.

“I have been through a very difficult life,” she said. “We were not Communists. We didn’t even know what one was. All these people were killed, but we have never even had an apology.”

Image by Dr.S.Ali Wasif via Flickr

By JANE PERLEZ, SALMAN MASOOD and WAQAR GILLANI

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Investigators from the F.B.I. continued Friday to question five Muslim American men who were arrested in Pakistan earlier this week, but it remained unclear whether the men would be deported to the United States, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said.

“It all depends on the investigations, and things will be clear in a day or two,” said the spokesman, Rashid Mazari.

Officials say the men, from the suburbs of Washington, were en route to North Waziristan for training with the Taliban and al Qaeda to fight American troops in Afghanistan. The police arrested them on Wednesday in Sargodha, a major city in Punjab Province that has become a growing center of militancy.

The F.B.I. said in a statement on Thursday that it wanted the men returned to the United States. The five have not been charged under Pakistani law and it is not clear what they would be charged with in the United States, American officials said.

The minister of law in Punjab, Rana Sanaullah, said Friday the Pakistani authorities wanted to complete their investigation into the links between Pakistani extremist groups and the Americans before granting extradition.

The young men had told investigators they planned to meet near the border between Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, with a person who would then take them to their destination in the tribal areas where the Taliban and al Qaeda are based, Mr. Sanaullah said.

He added that it was important for the Pakistanis to understand which militant groups the young men were in touch with before letting them return to the United States. A United States consular officer was scheduled to see the men on Friday, an American Embassy spokesman said, and they would be asked if they wanted a lawyer to represent them.

The questioning by the American investigators of the five men, aged from their late teens to mid twenties, started early Friday as each of the men was called separately into a room at the Sargodha police headquarters, a local police official said. The senior Pakistani police officials from the city were killing time outside the headquarters building as the Americans conducted their investigation, the local police official said.

On Friday, the Pakistani police also released photographs taken of the men at the police station. According to the police, three are of Pakistani origin, one is of Ethiopian descent and another is of Eritrean background.

The Pakistani police said all five were American citizens, but the American Embassy official said one of the five did not hold an American passport.

The police said Khalid Farooq, the father of Umer, one of the young men, had been arrested and was also being questioned Friday on the grounds that he knew the young men were wanted by the F.B.I. but had not reported their whereabouts.

Mr. Farooq and his wife, who run a computer business in northern Virginia, were in Sargodha when the young men turned up there after landing in Karachi on Nov. 20, police said. Mr. Farooq immigrated to the United States 20 years ago and is an American citizen, the American embassy said. Whether the men acted on a lark or were recruited as part of a larger militant outfit, the case has renewed concerns that American citizens, some with ethnic ties to Pakistan and other Muslim countries, are increasingly at the center of terrorist plots against the United States and other nations.

The youths, from Virginia, may end up being at least the fourth case prosecuted this year in which Muslim Americans traveled to Pakistan to link up with what remains a sprawling network of militant groups in the country.

Earlier this week, an American citizen of Pakistani background, David Coleman Headley, was charged in Chicago with helping plot the 2008 rampage in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 160 people.

In September, F.B.I. agents and police detectives arrested Najibullah Zazi, a 24-year-old Denver airport shuttle bus driver and former coffee-cart vendor, who prosecutors say had traveled to Pakistan for explosives training with two friends from New York. In January, Bryant Neal Vinas, a convert to Islam with family roots in South America, pleaded guilty to receiving training from Al Qaeda after traveling to Pakistan in 2008.

The five men in the current group all said on their visa applications that they were going to a wedding in Karachi, and all five gave the same address in Karachi for their stay in Pakistan, a Pakistani official said.

Their militant contact booked them into a hotel in Lahore, the official said. But once they got there, their contact went to ground and they were stranded.

They then went to Sargodha, home to the central command of Pakistan’s air force, and a city known as a center for anti-India militant groups.

The men were arrested at a four-room home in a government housing complex belonging to an uncle of the eldest of the group, Umer Farooq, 25, according to Chief Anwar.

“We had tips from local people and work of field officers that some foreigners were residing in some area of the city,” the chief said. “We watched them for a day or so and then arrested them.”

Mr. Farooq’s parents were staying at the house at the time, and his father, Khalid, was arrested as well. The police chief said the elder Mr. Farooq knew that his son and the other men were being hunted by the F.B.I., but had failed to inform the authorities of their presence.

Umer Farooq’s mother, Sabria Farooq, who was wearing a traditional chador, was interviewed Thursday at the house. She said she and her husband emigrated to the United States 20 years ago from Sargodha and returned in September to start a computer business, similar to the one they have in the Virginia suburbs close to Washington.

The five men seemed to have plenty of money, according to the police. Mrs. Farooq said one of the men, Waqar Khan, had brought $25,000 from the United States for the trip. In Karachi, the men stayed in a “good local hotel” before moving to Hyderabad, Pakistan, to make contact with a religious school, the police said.

The police identified the others arrested in Sargodha as Ramy Zamzam, 22, a dental student of Egyptian background at Howard University, who was described as a sort of “ringleader”; Ahmed Abdullah Minni, 20, born in Eritrea; and Aman Hassan Yemer, 18, a native Ethiopian. Mr. Khan is of Pakistani background and was reported to have family connections in Karachi. The spellings of the men’s names in various documents and provided by various officials have varied.

The five men bonded together in the jihadi cause, watching jihadist video clips on YouTube that showed attacks by the Taliban on allied forces in Afghanistan, he said. The group also maintained a common e-mail address, Chief Anwar said, employing a technique widely used among militants.

Before they left the United States, the men appeared to have come to the attention of an Islamic militant, identified as Saifullah, through their YouTube activities, the police chief said. Saifullah, who has links to Al Qaeda, traced their e-mail addresses through YouTube, Chief Anwar said.

After establishing the Internet connection with the militant, the men planned their journey to Pakistan and into North Waziristan, where they intended to train near Miram Shah, a headquarters of the Afghan Taliban, the police said.

The men were carrying laptops and maps of Miram Shah, and also of Kohat and Hangu, two major towns in the North-West Frontier Province that serve as the gateway to the tribal areas, the police said.

Sargodha is increasingly well traveled by Pakistani militants from Punjab who head to the Waziristan region for training in explosives and weapons conducted by Taliban and Qaeda operatives.

In the past six months, 24 militants have been arrested in Sargodha, all with ties to the Taliban and Waziristan, the police said recently. “They want to hit America,” said one investigator, who requested anonymity while discussing security matters. “They were highly emotionally motivated.”

Waqar Gillani reported from Sargodha, and Jane Perlez from Islamabad. Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti from Washington. Sabrina Tavernise also contributed reporting.

Brazil: Curb Police Violence in Rio, São Paulo

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Extrajudicial Killings Undermine Public Security

December 8, 2009

(Rio de Janeiro) - Police officers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo routinely resort to lethal force, often committing extrajudicial executions and exacerbating violence in both states, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 122-page report, "Lethal Force: Police Violence and Public Security in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo," examined 51 cases in which police appeared to have executed alleged criminal suspects and then reported the victims had died in shootouts while resisting arrest.

Rio and São Paulo police together kill more than 1,000 people every year in such alleged confrontations. While some of these "resistance" killings by police are legitimate acts of self-defense, many others are extrajudicial executions, the report found.

"Extrajudicial killing of criminal suspects is not the answer to violent crime," said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "The residents of Rio and São Paulo need more effective policing, not more violence from the police."

Unlawful police killings undercut legitimate efforts in both states to curb criminal violence, much of which is carried out by heavily armed gangs. In Rio, these gangs are largely responsible for one of the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere. In São Paulo, despite a drop in homicides over the past decade, gang violence also poses a major threat.

Human Rights Watch obtained credible evidence in 51 "resistance" cases that contradicted police officers' claims that victims died in a shootout. For example, in 33 cases, forensic evidence was at odds with the official version of what took place - including 17 cases in which autopsy reports show that police shot their victims at point blank range. The 51 cases do not represent the totality of potential extrajudicial killings, but are indicative of a much broader problem, the report concluded.

The report also draws upon extensive interviews with more than 40 criminal justice officials, including top prosecutors who view extrajudicial executions by the police as a major problem in both states.

Official government statistics support the prosecutors' assessment that the problem is widespread:

• The Rio and São Paulo police have killed more than 11,000 people since 2003;

• The number of police killings in Rio state reached a record high of 1,330 in 2007 and in 2008, the number was third highest at 1,137;

• The number of police killings in São Paulo state, while less than in Rio, is also comparatively high: over the past five years, for example, there were more police killings in São Paulo state (2,176) than in all of South Africa (1,623), a country with a much higher homicide rate than São Paulo.

The high number of police killings is all the more dramatic when viewed alongside the comparatively low numbers of non-fatal injuries of civilians by police and of police fatalities.

• The São Paulo Shock Police Command killed 305 people from 2004 through 2008 yet left only 20 injured. In all of these alleged "shootouts," the police suffered one death;

• In Rio, police in 10 military policing zones were responsible for 825 "resistance" killings in 2008 while suffering a total of 12 police fatalities;

• Rio police arrested 23 people for every person they killed in 2008, and São Paulo police arrested 348 for every kill. By contrast, police in the United States arrested over 37,000 for every person they killed in alleged confrontations that year.

"Police officers are permitted to use lethal force as a last resort to protect themselves or others," Vivanco said. "But the notion that these police killings are committed in self-defense, or justified by high crime rates, does not hold up under scrutiny."

In addition to the many "resistance" killings each year by police on duty, officers kill hundreds more while off-duty, often when they are acting as members of militias in Rio and death squads in São Paulo.

Police officers responsible for unlawful killings in Rio and São Paulo are rarely brought to justice. The principal cause of this chronic failure to hold police to account for murder, the report found, is that the criminal justice systems in both states currently rely almost entirely on police investigators to resolve these cases.

Human Rights Watch found that police officers frequently take steps to cover up the true nature of "resistance" killings. And police investigators often fail to take necessary steps to determine what has taken place, helping to ensure that criminal responsibility cannot be established and that those responsible remain unaccountable.

"So long as they are left to police themselves these executions will continue unchecked, and legitimate efforts to curb violence in both states will suffer," Vivanco said.

The report provides recommendations to Rio and São Paulo authorities for curbing police violence and improving law enforcement. The central recommendation is the creation of specialized units within state prosecutors' offices to investigate "resistance" killings and ensure that officers responsible for extrajudicial executions are brought to justice.

The report also details measures that state and federal authorities should take to maximize the effectiveness of these special units. These include:

• Requiring police officers to notify prosecutors of "resistance" killings immediately after they take place;

• Establishing and strictly enforcing a crime scene protocol that deters police officers from engaging in false "rescues" and other cover-up techniques;

• Investigating potential police cover-up techniques, including false "rescues," and prosecuting officers who engage in them.

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Daily Presidential Tracking Poll

December 11, 2009

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows that 27% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-nine percent (39%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -12 (see trends).

Just 36% now believe that the president is doing a good or an excellent job handling the economy while 45% rate his performance in this area as poor. Seventy-one percent (71%) of Democrats say he’s doing a good or excellent job on the economy while 74% of Republicans say poor. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 52% give the President poor marks when it comes to the economy.

On national security matters, 39% rate the president’s performance as good or excellent while 36% say poor. Most voters nationwide lack confidence that NATO will do its part to help in Afghanistan.

In recent days, Rasmussen Reports has released updated polls on the 2010 Senate races in Colorado, Illinois, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Arkansas. Overall, the results confirm the conventional wisdom that the mid-term election season is off to a tough start for the Democrats. However, there is a long way to go until November.

The Presidential Approval Index is calculated by subtracting the number who Strongly Disapprove from the number who Strongly Approve. It is updated daily at 9:30 a.m. Eastern (sign up for free daily e-mail update). Updates are also available on Twitter and Facebook.

Overall, 47% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President's performance. Fifty-one percent (51%) disapprove.

These figures have been remarkably stable and the approval totals have stayed in a narrow range between 46% and 50% every day but one for more than two months. An analysis by Pollster.com partner Charles Franklin “found that despite identically sized three-day samples, the Rasmussen daily tracking poll is less variable than Gallup.” During Election 2008, the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll was the least volatile of all those tracking the race.

(More Below)

Forty-three percent (43%) favor urgent action on global warming while 43% say not so fast.

Seventy-six percent (76%) prefer a free market economy over a government-managed approach. Forty-eight percent (48%) of voters believe there are too many restrictions on the market in the U.S. today.

Scott Rasmussen has recently had several columns published in the Wall Street Journal addressing how President Obama is losing independent voters , health care reform, the President's approval ratings, and how Obama won the White House by campaigning like Ronald Reagan. If you'd like Scott Rasmussen to speak at your meeting, retreat, or conference, contact Premiere Speakers Bureau. You can also learn about Scott's favorite place on earth or his time working with hockey legend Gordie Howe.

It is important to remember that the Rasmussen Reports job approval ratings are based upon a sample of likely voters. Some other firms base their approval ratings on samples of all adults. President Obama's numbers are always several points higher in a poll of adults rather than likely voters. That's because some of the President's most enthusiastic supporters, such as young adults, are less likely to turn out to vote. It is also important to check the details of question wording when comparing approval ratings from different firms.

(More Below)

Rasmussen Reports has been a pioneer in the use of automated telephone polling techniques, but many other firms still utilize their own operator-assisted technology (see methodology).

Pollster.com founder Mark Blumenthal noted that “independent analyses from the National Council on Public Polls, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the Pew Research Center, the Wall Street Journal and FiveThirtyEight.com have all shown that the horse-race numbers produced by automated telephone surveys did at least as well as those from conventional live-interviewer surveys in predicting election outcomes.”

In the 2009 New Jersey Governor’s race, automated polls tended to be more accurate than operator-assisted polling techniques. On reviewing the state polling results from 2009, Mickey Kaus offered this assessment, “If you have a choice between Rasmussen and, say, the prestigious N.Y. Times, go with Rasmussen!”

During Election 2008, Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com said that the Rasmussen tracking poll “would probably be the one I'd want with me on a desert island."

A Fordham University professor rated the national pollsters on their record in Election 2008. We also have provided a summary of our results for your review. In 2008, Obama won 53%-46% and our final poll showed Obama winning 52% to 46%. While we were pleased with the final result, Rasmussen Reports was especially pleased with the stability of our results. On every single day for the last six weeks of the campaign, our daily tracking showed Obama with a stable and solid lead attracting more than 50% of the vote.

In 2004 George W. Bush received 50.7% of the vote while John Kerry earned 48.3%. Rasmussen Reports was the only firm to project both candidates’ totals within half a percentage point by projecting that Bush would win 50.2% to 48.5%. (see our 2004 results).

Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis. The margin of sampling error—for the full sample of 1,500 Likely Voters--is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Results are also compiled on a full-week basis and crosstabs for full-week results are available for Premium Members.

Like all polling firms, Rasmussen Reports weights its data to reflect the population at large (see methodology). Among other targets, Rasmussen Reports weights data by political party affiliation using a dynamic weighting process. While partisan affiliation is generally quite stable over time, there are a fair number of people who waver between allegiance to a particular party or independent status. Over the past five years, the number of Democrats in the country has increased while the number of Republicans has decreased.

Our baseline targets are established based upon separate survey interviews with a sample of adults nationwide completed during the preceding three months (a total of 45,000 interviews) and targets are updated monthly. Currently, the baseline targets for the adult population are 37.1% Democrats, 32.4% Republicans, and 30.5% unaffiliated. Likely voter samples typically show a slightly smaller advantage for the Democrats.

A review of last week’s key polls is posted each Saturday morning. Other stats on Obama are updated daily on the Rasmussen Reports Obama By the Numbers page. We also invite you to review other recent demographic highlights from the tracking polls.

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Is Democracy a Dirty Word?

Cover via Amazon

by Tara McKelvey

Last fall, Joshua Marks, a program officer from the National Endowment for Democracy, met with a group of community activists in a classroom in Abeche, a city in eastern Chad. Many of the activists had received small grants, ranging from roughly $200 to $5,000, to help in their efforts to foster civil liberties, political rights, and transparency in government. Yet democracy was not what they wanted to talk about on that day. "The main concern at the meeting," Marks says, "was 'How are we going to feed ourselves?'"

The local population had doubled over a three-year period, from 60,000 people to 120,000 people, as refugees from Darfur poured over the border in search of a peaceful haven. Many of the residents were going hungry, and the area was distressingly short on firewood, cooking oil, and maize. The activists in the classroom were anxious, even fearful. Marks decided it was not the right moment to steer the conversation back to good governance. Instead he spoke with the residents openly, allowing for an environment in which democracy would "grow organically." "I realized that if I'm going to be honest about my work, I have to recognize what they are saying," Marks says.

His experience reflects the larger conundrum of dozens of nongovernmental organizations and American nonprofits that help people around the world work toward free elections and representative governance. As Marks has discovered, developing a country's infrastructure and improving food security often take precedence over long-term goals of democracy-building.

In recent years, humanitarian aid has not been seen as closely linked with fostering democracy. Under the banner of "democracy promotion," former President George W. Bush marched toward war in Iraq and Afghanistan and portrayed elections as the only way of evaluating a country's progress. Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, under President Barack Obama "there's been a notable downplaying of democracy as a foreign-policy priority," says Michael Allen, who edits the newsletter Democracy Digest and also works for the National Endowment for Democracy.

The Obama administration is focusing on international efforts such as agricultural programs, women's rights, and economic development rather than on elections. It has also taken a more holistic approach to foreign policy, choosing to engage with nondemocratic regimes abroad in the hopes of finding some common ground. Democracy-promoting organizations such as the National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute, the Eurasia Foundation, and Freedom House are listening carefully -- "Kremlin style," as one expert puts it -- to the statements of Obama and his Cabinet members for signs that the administration considers democracy a priority. Most aren't liking what they've heard so far. When asked about Obama's approach to democracy promotion, many activists in the field sound like hurt and angry ex-boyfriends. "It's too early to talk about important changes in the Obama administration," one analyst says defensively.

"There is concern among activists that perhaps the administration sends the wrong signals to authoritarian regimes when it downplays democracy so much that it may be seen as neglected," Allen says.

In April, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed members of the Senate Appropriations Committee, saying, "The foreign policy of the United States is built on the three D's: defense, diplomacy, and development." To the dismay of democracy promoters, that other "D" -- democracy -- was not included. And when Obama referenced American foreign policy in his Inaugural Address, he said, "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

"He did not say, 'to any democracy,'" says Steven Simon, an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of The Next Attack. "A lot of people have written in the margins, 'Include here, democracy promotion,' and none of that stuff has ended up on the teleprompter."

From a monetary perspective, at least, democracy-promoting NGOs have nothing to complain about. The Obama administration requested a 9 percent increase in funding for democracy-related projects, asking for a total of $2.81 billion in the State and Foreign Operations budget for fiscal year 2010. Yet advocates worry that specific democracy issues -- such as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly -- may wither for lack of attention, and funding could drop in the years to come.

"I just think Obama's too smart to put democracy at the top of the foreign-policy agenda," Simon says. "It's too demanding. In the Arab world, it's been rendered toxic by the Bush administration."

democracy has a very straightforward definition: a government by the people, along with a respect for human-rights and justice. The definition of democracy promotion, however, is nothing if not contentious. Activists in the field have long debated how much emphasis should be placed on elections and how much should be placed on issues such as women's rights and judicial independence. Traditionally, the tendency on the right has been to put more stock in the elections, which are a shaky measurement of a nation's level of democracy because results can be fraudulent (case in point: Afghanistan). People also can, and do, elect tyrants. In contrast, experts on the left have argued that a more reliable metric can be found by examining a nation's civic institutions and its system of justice.

Obama's scaled-back approach to democracy promotion has cost him little or no political capital among Democrats, who feel burned by Bush's disastrous approach and are significantly less likely than Republicans to support democracy promotion. A 2007 Pew survey shows that 54 percent of Democrats believe it should be featured in U.S. foreign policy, compared to 74 percent of Republicans. Opinion polls show that across the board conservatives are more likely than liberals to say that the United States should help establish democracies in other countries.

Americans at both ends of the ideological spectrum acknowledge that everyone in the world wants to live in a free society. The rift is over how -- or whether -- we should help them. Historically, American efforts to promote democracy abroad have been tied in with our economic or strategic interests. "To insist that the liberation of others has never been more than an ancillary motive of U.S. policy is not cynicism," says Andrew J. Bacevich, a Boston University professor and author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. "It is a prerequisite to self-understanding."

Decades ago, President Ronald Reagan made ridding the world of communism a core mission of the United States. He placed democracy promotion high on the foreign-policy agenda and helped establish the National Endowment for Democracy. Meanwhile, he maintained friendly relations with pro-American autocracies because he believed that they, unlike communist dictatorships, could someday make the transition to democracy.

In the years since, both Democrats and Republicans have spoken about democracy promotion with exuberance, often turning to the military for help in achieving their goals. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush sent 22,500 U.S. troops to Panama to oust Manuel Noriega and, Bush declared, to defend democracy. At times, President Bill Clinton approached the issue in the same way. He announced in the 1992 presidential campaign that he believed in "an American foreign policy of engagement for democracy," and while he was in office he worked to expand the worldwide base of liberal democracies through a policy known as "enlargement."

Clinton put stock in various areas of democracy promotion, such as helping to develop independent legal programs in other countries, rather than mainly focusing on elections as Republican presidents had done. "It became not just a moral thing but a commonsense thing because it was going to promote global prosperity," explains Simon, who served as one of Clinton's counterterrorism aides. Like Reagan, however, Clinton was also willing to use force: The U.S. effort in Haiti to reinstate President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was known as Operation Uphold Democracy.

George W. Bush took military-enforced "democracy" to a new level. After failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush declared it was our national obligation to help Iraq become a democracy. "Our struggle is similar to the Cold War," he said in a 2002 graduation speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. "America confronted imperial communism in many different ways -- diplomatic, economic, and military. Yet moral clarity was essential to our victory in the Cold War. When leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants, they gave hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles, and rallied free nations to a great cause."

Bush added that "America cannot impose this vision." But under his so-called Freedom Agenda, the United States sought to establish democracy at gunpoint and trampled on the rights of prisoners and terrorism suspects. Bush's language had "a self-righteous and theological flavor," as James Traub writes in his book The Freedom Agenda. According to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, Bush's top commander in Iraq at the time, Bush said during the Fallujah battle in April 2004, "If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! ... Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course!"

***

In Obama's speeches that mention democracy, he is careful to set himself apart from Bush's vision. In a Sept. 23 address to the United Nations, Obama said, "Democracy cannot be imposed on any nation from the outside. Each society must search for its own path, and no path is perfect. Each country will pursue a path rooted in the culture of its people, and -- in its past traditions -- America has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy. But that does not weaken our commitment; it only reinforces it."

Most of the people who work in the field of democracy promotion in Washington agree with Obama's positions. But they have made clear that one of the hallmarks of Bush's approach -- the promotion of free elections -- is not the most important way to foster democracy in other countries. In fact, they are quick to point out that free elections are often illusory because autocratic leaders rig the vote count.

Instead, democracy advocates argue, the U.S. government should help provide assistance for other forms of democracy-building, such as resources for women's groups, public-health initiatives, agricultural projects, and other ways to help strengthen a nation so that democracy may someday take root. Indeed, this is basically what Obama wants to do.

However, the people who work in democracy assistance would like Obama to restore the role of democracy promotion as a central part of the foreign policy -- minus the hysteria and warfare of the Bush administration. For the past three years, democracy has been on the decline in dozens of countries, according to Freedom House. In countries like Russia, Uzbekistan, Egypt, and Venezuela, "representatives of democracy assistance NGOs have been harassed, offices closed, and staff expelled," according to a report by the National Endowment for Democracy. The situation is worse for people who are living in other countries and have received U.S. grants for democracy promotion, since some of them "have been threatened, assaulted, prosecuted, imprisoned, and even killed." Democracy activists in Islamabad, Cairo, Addis Adaba, and in other cities around the world are justly concerned about whether they will continue to have the support of the United States as they push for reform.

While the budget for democracy promotion has increased overall, funding for important regional projects, such as independent civil-society groups in the Middle East and North Africa, has been reduced by 29 percent. In Egypt, where bloggers and journalists have been arrested, imprisoned, and even raped, U.S. funding for democracy programs has been cut by approximately 50 percent, to roughly $22 million. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has imposed restrictions on American funds for democracy groups. Only those organizations that have been approved by the Egyptian government are eligible for the money, providing Mubarak with "a local veto over U.S. aid," according to a June 6 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. Bush pushed back against these restrictions, but Mubarak demanded they be reinstated earlier this year, and U.S. State Department officials accepted the change.

Several U.S. Embassy officials "have sought to distance themselves from civil society and human rights leaders who were not favored by the host government," according to a July 2009 report by Freedom House. Without the explicit support of the United States, these local leaders could be jailed, beaten, or worse. A Kabul-born psychologist who lives in Washington says that if Americans do not support the Afghan women who took to the streets earlier this year in order to secure rights, whether through government grants or public statements of solidarity, then "they will be lost."

The Obama administration has made a deliberate decision to focus on the overall relationship that the United States has with countries like Egypt, placing an emphasis on areas such as trade and terrorism and downplaying troublesome issues like democracy. "Look, I think it's an issue," says Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "I think we should not allow the country in question to dictate how we spend our taxpayer dollars, but it shows that the Obama administration wants to see a relationship in its entirety. They're making these kinds of compromises."

Obama's more culturally sensitive approach to democracy promotion is clearly better than the cowboy stance that was favored by Bush. Some advocates defend Obama, explaining he has not turned his back on democracy promotion, just adopted a subtler way of discussing it. Administration officials understand that simply granting people the right to vote does not guarantee a free society, and they seem to believe that it is better to eschew symbols in favor of carrying out pragmatic work on the ground. And yet the pendulum may have swung too far in the other direction, say other democracy advocates. Obama has become so restrained that he has allowed autocrats like Mubarak to get away with extraordinary demands on the awarding of U.S. aid, sending a signal to leaders of repressive nations that democracy abroad is not a fundamental concern of his administration.

Democracy promotion is an art, not a science. There is no empirical data that shows that authoritarian regimes respond to U.S. pro-democracy programs by scaling back repressive policies or that humanitarian missions are less effective at helping a country make progress toward democracy. As Michael McFaul, who is currently serving on the National Security Council, points out, "If the domestic conditions aren't ripe, there will be no democratic breakthrough, no matter how crafted the technical assistance or how strategically invested the small grants." That does not mean that U.S. democracy assistance is worthless -- just that the metrics for it are a bit fuzzy.

People like Marks who are experienced in on-the-ground democracy promotion know that sometimes it's better to take the long view. Over the past five years, Marks has visited Chad, Congo, and other countries in Africa and watched people take incremental steps toward more democratic societies. On one of his visits to Congo, as he recalls, he saw a clunky old car, a Peugeot that was built in the 1960s, on a highway, not far from the capital city of Kinshasa. A stick of wood was propping up the hood of the car, bags and people were piled inside, and it could "hardly putter along."

Still, the Peugeot moved, and watching it rumble down the highway captured the experience of democracy promotion in Congo as well as in other places around the world. "You could sort of throw your hands up, or you could look further down the road and say, 'It's gotten this far. Let's see how much more it can do.'"

Trafficking and Forced Prostitution of Palestinian Women and Girls: Forms of Modern Day Slavery

Author/Editor(s): SAWA – All the Women Together Today and Tomorrow

For far too long, the issue of women’s trafficking and prostitution has remained a hushed and taboo topic in the occupied Palestinian territory. Limited information exists on this human rights abuse, and when addressed, it appears sporadically in local newspapers reporting, for instance, on families selling their daughters.

Trafficking and Forced Prostitution of Palestinian Women and Girls: Forms of Modern Day Slavery is the first, in-depth study of its kind within the region that digs deeper to unravel the layers of this type of abuse. Written and researched by the not-for-profit organization SAWA – All the Women Together Today and Tomorrow with UNIFEM’s support, the briefing paper analyses six case studies — two on fathers selling their daughters, three on traffickers and one on a woman working in prostitution. Further, the study features inputs and testimonies from key informants, such as hotel owners, police officers, trafficked women and taxi-drivers, collated during the first half of 2008, and focuses on possible trafficking routes.

Ultimately, this briefing paper assesses and measures the extent of women trafficking in the Palestinian region in order to call on civil society organizations and Palestinian governmental institutions to take urgent and concrete actions against this human rights violation.

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Bibliographic Information

Product Type: Case Study

Publishers: SAWA – All the Women Together Today and Tomorrow, UNIFEM

UNIFEM Office Involved in Publication: UNIFEM Project Office in the Occupied Palestinian Territory

Publication Year: 2008

Number of pages: 26

Government to settle suit over Indian land trusts

Image by Alex E. Proimos via Flickr

ACCOUNTING MISMANAGED
$1.4 billion in payments to end 13-year-old battle

By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 9, 2009

The Obama administration said Tuesday it would pay $1.4 billion to a group of American Indians who said the government mismanaged a century-old system of Indian land trusts.

The settlement, which would end one of the epic lawsuits of modern Washington, would be divided among more than 300,000 people, the descendants of Indians to whom the government assigned plots of tribal land under an 1887 law. Many of the plots are controlled by hundreds or even thousands of heirs, and a federal system designed to track claims and distribute revenue generated by the parcels has broken down.

The administration said it would spend $2 billion in addition to the payouts to try to buy back sole ownership of the many plots, one tiny fraction at a time.

The deal, announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., would end a lawsuit that has lasted 13 years, coloring the relationship between federal and tribal governments with a bitter reminder of the Indian wars. Officials said they intended the settlement to create trust between Washington and "Indian country."

"We are here today to right a past wrong," Salazar said. Of the plaintiffs the government had battled so long, he said: "They [brought] a national injustice to the attention of our country."

This suit might be best known as the case that took the Interior Department off e-mail: In 2001, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth determined that the Indian trust accounts were vulnerable to hackers and issued an order that caused the department to sever connections to the Internet.

But its origins go back to the administration of President Grover Cleveland, when Congress passed a law allotting individual tribe members parcels of 40 to 160 acres, to be held in trust by the government for 25 years. In most cases, the land never left government hands.

Today, the Interior Department manages more than 100,000 parcels, totaling more than 56 million acres. When these lands are used for grazing, mining or drilling for oil or natural gas, the revenue is supposed to be split among its owners. But the system quickly devolved into an accounting mess. The number of owners multiplied, since many Indians died without wills and their children inherited equal ownership fractions. The parcels are split 4 million ways.

To make things worse, government records for tracking them were kept in poorly maintained warehouses, where some were destroyed by fires, floods or insects. Owners complained that they were being paid irregularly, improperly or not at all.

In 1996, they filed suit. Since then, officials said, the case has encompassed dozens of hearings, 192 days of trial proceedings and multiple appeals to higher courts. And two different judges: In 2006, an appeals court removed Lamberth from the case after finding that he appeared to be biased against the Interior Department.

The settlement announced Tuesday must be voted on by Congress and approved by the new judge, James Robertson. At a ceremony honoring Robertson on Tuesday, Lamberth praised his handling of the case and said this was "a great day for Americans and for all Native Americans."

Under its terms, officials said, most Indian shareholders would get a check for $1,000. Some could get more, however, if the judge decides they lost more money because of federal mismanagement. Some of the $1.4 billion will also be used to pay attorneys' fees.

The plaintiffs had asked for many more billions. But Elouise Cobell, the lead plaintiff and a resident of the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, said her side did not want the case to drag on further.

"This is significantly less than the full accounting to which individual Indians are entitled," Cobell said at the news conference. "We are compelled to settle now by the sobering realization that our class grows smaller" as older members have died, she said.

In addition, the settlement would use $2 billion to begin buying back 37,000 of the most heavily subdivided parcels of land, so that the federal government would be the sole owner.

David Hayes, a deputy secretary of the Interior, said that the newly bought land would be owned by the federal government but that individual tribes would be able to decide what to do with it. Hayes said the government did not want to give up the land, fearing it might allow non-Indians to buy parcels on reservations.

An official for the National Congress of American Indians said the divided ownership has made it difficult for tribal governments to build schools or health clinics because it was difficult to convince a majority of the owners to agree.

"We had kids going to school in double-wide trailer houses, that were running from double-wide to double-wide when it was 40 below zero," said Richard Monette, the former chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, whose reservation is in North Dakota. "We got money for a school, but we didn't have a place to put it" because the land was shared among so many owners, he said.

Staff writer Carol Leonnig contributed to this report.