A few weeks ago, when Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was in town, it was reported that he asked President Obama for his autograph…for his daughter Amrit Singh who works for the ACLU (see our previous posts):

How big an international star is President Obama? Even other world leaders want his autograph.

When Obama met with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this afternoon, the soft-spoken leader noted that his daughter wanted his American counterpart to autograph something for her. [Politico]

Amrit is the ACLU lawyer that has been leading the suit to obtain yet-to-be-released pictures that reportedly show the abuse of terror suspects in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Obama administration reversed its stance that previously agreed to allow the release of these damning pictures. Now Obama says “I changed my mind.”

The American Civil Liberties Union, which argued for the photos’ release, expressed outrage and said the decision “makes a mockery” of Obama’s campaign promise of transparency.

“It’s absolutely essential that these photos be released so the public can examine for itself the torture and abuse that was conducted in its name, and so that high-level officials who authorized or permitted that abuse can be held accountable,” ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said.

The human rights group Amnesty International said it was disappointed. [Link]

Last week, the Oklahoma House passed H.B. 1645 which states that you can’t cover your head in your driver’s license photo for any reason:

Hats, head scarves, head garments, bandanas, prescription … glasses … are strictly prohibited and shall not be worn by the licensee or cardholder when being photographed for a license or identification card.

It means that religious Sikhs, Jews, Muslims and others who wear religious head covering will have to choose between their faith and their ability to travel.

The legislation was proposed in a fit of pique, after the Oklahoma Department of Transportation reversed itself and allowed a young hijabi woman to have her license photo taken with her head scarf on and her face clearly visible, but without her hair showing.

Represenative Rex Duncan was so incensed by this that he took over a different bill, with a different purpose, and “hijacked it” to create requirements that the bureaucracy says it doesn’t need, that it will have to defend in court, and that don’t really make a lot of practical sense.

Why don’t I think the bill makes sense? Imagine that I actually did what the law wanted (which I wouldn’t, I would leave the state) and got my photo taken with a naked head. Do you think that a cop would find it easier to recognize me with my glasses and turban from a photograph of me with my hair down and my beard unfurled, man on the cross ishtyle? How about the TSA person at the gate at Tulsa airport?

The bill is also inconsistent. If the legislature seriously believes that hair is a critical part of identification, this is what they would have to do:

• Mandate no toupees or hairplugs or extensions — sorry, Represenative, but you have to go baldy now
• Mandate no changes to facial hair
• Mandate no changes in hair color or style — sorry Represenative, but your wife can’t color that grey out, and your daughter who had long brown hair can’t drive now that she has short pink hair unless she had the photo taken with the short pink hair, in which case you have to live with it from now on
• Mandate that any time somebody does change hair color or style they have to have their photo retaken
• Apply the bill retroactively, so that everybody whose appearance has changed at all since their photo was taken has to get a new ID

Can you imagine? The hairdresser’s lobby would kill that bill deader than a combover on a red carpet!

Here’s a petition in opposition to the bill. Right now, the bill is in limbo, since the Senate sponsor has backed down after talking to the transportation bureaucracy and finding out that they don’t actually want these changes. I’m hoping the pressure keeps it that way, and that they recognize that they will face opposition if they proceed with their hair-brained (sic) scheme.

President Obama hit the ground running today, his first acts designed to remove some of the moral stain on our nation:

In the first hours of his presidency, President Obama directed an immediate halt to the Bush administration’s military commissions system for prosecuting detainees at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. [Link]

Not only that, but guess who the new lead prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay is? David “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH” Iglesias:

Fired New Mexico US Attorney David Iglesias will be a lead prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba when and terror trials resume there, he told a New Mexico television station this morning.

The move has doubly powerful symbolism: Iglesias is recently famous for being fired for refusing to compromise his political independence, but he knows Guantanamo Bay well: He was the Navy defense lawyer played by Tom Cruise in the film, “A Few Good Men,” one of three who defended marines at the naval base.

Iglesias, a Naval reservist, said he’d been activated as a Judge Advocate General “prosecuting terror cases out of Guantanamo.” [Link]

Shutting down Gitmo and appointing an attorney fired by Alberto Gonzales wasn’t enough though. Obama then asked Osama bin Laden’s driver’s lawyer (the oft-blogged about on SM, Neal Katyal), to serve as the Deputy Solicitor General of the United States:

It’s good to see that the grownups are back in charge at the Justice Department…

Neal Katyal, the Georgetown Law professor who successfully challenged the military trials in Guantanamo while representing Osama bin Laden’s driver, will be deputy solicitor general. He’ll join Elena Kagan, the dean of Harvard Law School, who has been nominated to be Solicitor General. [Link]

This puts Katyal one step closer (although it is doubtful it would happen in the next four years) to having a serious shot at becoming the first desi appointed to the SCOTUS. What is more likely is that Kagan will eventually be appointed to SCOTUS and Neal will take over as the main man. The thought of Nina Totenberg regularly quoting a Katyal argument (as he jousts with Roberts or Scalia) on NPR as I drive to and from work excites me to a level that is uncomfortable to admit.

Aasif Mandvi wasn’t the only person to allude to the fact that Sanjay Gupta’s coming nomination makes life harder for all of us non- attractive neurosurgeon journalists. Sandip Roy, writing at New American Media, also tries to prepare us all for how hard it is going to be for us regular desis to play keep up with the Guptas now:

…I fear it’s a mixed blessing for the rest of us much more run-of-the-mill South Asians. It’s exciting to see someone who comes from your stock make it big. But another neurosurgeon-makes-good story is going to make us look even more like underachievers.

“What’s the matter, beta? Why can’t you be more like that nice Sanjay Gupta? Not just a neurosurgeon but on CNN AND meeting Obama for three hours?”

Not only is he dashing and articulate. Not only did he do brain surgery on a 2 -year-old Iraqi boy while embedded during the Iraq war, now he might be the new Surgeon-general. Let me pause, and reel in the envy!

And his only qualm, according to the Washington Post is “is said to involve the financial impact on his pregnant wife and two children if he gives up his lucrative medical and journalistic careers.”

Golly. This is a South Asian parent’s dream. He’s 39 and he’s already followed the four stages of a good Hindu life - childhood, education, family and now a sort-of-renunciation-and-service… [Link]

I completely agree with Roy’s analysis. This is the reason I have been pretty bummed ever since the Gupta nomination even though I agree he is a good pick. In fact, there has been a sort of let down ever since Obama got elected. He promised that we could all “Be the change.” How can that be true though when 300,000 people submitted resumes for ~7000 “change” jobs? Its like musical chairs and I, like may of you, am left without a seat. I’m the wrong kind of doctor, just a blogger and not a journalist, and I’m not quite so…model-like. I can’t even complain that he had access to a better education at an elitist school since we went to the same school. In short, I’m rapidly turning into a bitter hater, much like conservative pundit Stephen Colbert who basically implies in the clip below that Gupta isn’t qualified since he is a “dick eater”:

About a week ago the Houston Chronicle ran a story about a burglary here in Houston. A Sikh family (the Tagores) came home one night to find that their master bedroom had been ransacked and that a window was broken. They did what anyone would have done: called the police to report the crime. Then the story becomes not so routine:

The Harris County Sheriff’s Office is investigating allegations that deputies harassed a family of Sikhs whose home was burglarized last week.

Family members say the deputies handcuffed them, roughed them up and taunted them instead of taking a report on the break-in.

One deputy reportedly asked them if they’d “heard about the bombings in Bombay.” Another allegedly said he had been to Kuwait and “knew about Muslims…”

“The allegations, if they’re true, are certainly intolerable and inconsistent with our policies,” said sheriff’s spokesman John Legg.

The deputies could face anything from disciplinary action to termination, Legg said. He declined to release their names pending further investigation. [Houston Chronicle]

This incident occurred on November 26th. On November 27th, a film crew from San Antonio-based Sach Productions was already in Houston to interview the family.

The idea behind the birth of Sach Productions is the creation of an agency that uses the film media to further the Sikh cause. The intention of Sach Productions is to introduce Sikhs to the world and then bring forth issues that concern them.

The initial projects are short documentaries that introduce Sikhs to the Western world. The intention is to then bring issues relating to Punjab, Human Rights, Arts and Culture to the people. [Sach Productions]

By December 5th, as the local news began to pick up on the story, Sach Productions had already filmed and uploaded a documentary about the incident on to the web:

Lately, when reading some Indian publications on the web, I often see America portrayed as a dangerous jungle where Indians (especially students) get slaughtered left and right (and the race of the suspected murderer is always stressed in the article). Over the past year Anna has written here on SM about some DBD students who were the unfortunate murder victims of what were probably robberies (see here and here). Also, just last week a silicon valley CEO was killed by a disgruntled employee fired earlier in the day. All of these are really tragic deaths. However, to make the absurd leap of logic that Indians around the U.S. are being targeted is just ignorant. If all the victims were turban-wearing Sikhs and a terrorist attack has just occurred, THEN there might be reason to worry about this being a trend. But random crime in a large country does not a trend make. Enter the Atlanta-based “United States Hindu Alliance” who want something done:

Expressing concern over killing of Indian students and professionals in the US, a Hindu group in New York has approached the top American intelligence agency asking it to take steps to prevent such incidents.

In a letter to Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Hindu Alliance said it is “alarmed” by growing number of the killings, pointing out that there have been as many as five reported murders of Indian students and professionals in the past one year.

The letter, which was released by the alliance, also referred to the latest attack on 22-year-old MBA student in the University of Middle Tennessee Pulluri Shashank on November 16. He was shot but is reported to be out of danger.

The killings, it said, began at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge when two PhD students - Komma Chandrasekhar Reddy and Allam Kiran Kumar — were found dead in their apartment near the campus on December 14, 2007.

This was followed by the murder of Dr Akkaldelvi Srinivas, a second year medical student at Scranton University in Pennsylvania. Tummala Soumya Reddy, who was pursuing her master’s degree in Electrical Engineering at Southern Illinois University, was killed on September 22, 2008. Her cousin Vikram Reddy was also found dead near a lake in Chicago. [Link]

I can’t find a website for USHA but I did find a statement by one of its founders (Gokul Kunnath) that may help to explain the psychology behind this request:

Gokul Kunnath said that post 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US; Hindus became targets of racial hatred, violence, discrimination and abuse due to ignorance and misperceptions. There are one billion Indians, about 20% of the global population. The global Hindu diaspora is peace loving, and believes in pluralism and freedom of worship. Sadly it is being targeted for the wrong reasons. Hindus everywhere need to be proactive in safeguarding their interests. USHA will strive to empower Hindus everywhere through education, advocacy and activism. It will release an agenda of its concerns and problems and deliver it to the political representatives to resolve the issues in a bipartisan manner, he said. [Link]

I feel like this is tangentially related to Amardeep’s post from earlier in the week. I would be SHOCKED if the FBI decided to investigate any of these crimes. They are all local incidents and not part of some conspiracy. However, I can see how this “pro-Hindu” organization might be able to bring in donations from both here and abroad simply by writing this letter and convincing people that they are standing up for Indians/Hindus. I know that I risk coming across as overly cynical here. Maybe the folks in this organization truly are clueless and this letter is just an innocent token of concern. The alternative is that they are contributing to fear mongering and using the deaths of these students as a recruiting/fundraising tool for their organization (which is wrong no matter how innocuous the organization might be).

To complete our trifecta of news from Texas, the county of Dallas finally settled a case concerning a judge who told a Sikh plaintiff that he had to choose between his right to free exercise of his religion or his right to go to court:

Amardeep Singh appeared in Judge Albert Cercone’s court to contest a minor a traffic citation. Mr. Singh was denied entrance into the court due to his turban. Unfortunately, Judge Cercone threatened that if Mr. Singh did not leave the courtroom and stayed with his “hat” on, he would be arrested. [Link]

Judge Cercone is probably just a crazy old coot of a judge whose “no-nonsense approach to the court” is full of bakwaas. (It’s not clear to me that Judge Cercone is even a lawyer by training, his website only lists experience as a businessman, but you’d think that judge training would cover something as basic as the Bill of Rights) And I know this isn’t a common occurrence - there are plenty of Sikhs in Dallas, and many of them are able to get their day in court.

Still, what has me steamed is the way Dallas compounded its mistake by refusing to admit fault. Unlike the state of Georgia, which backed down in a similar circumstance when the first amendment issues were explained, the county of Dallas persisted in its mistaken ways.

So Amardeep Singh (not our Amardeep), with the help of SALDEF and the Texas ACLU, sued under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act and won, a process that took 2 years.

The fact that the county dug in the heels of its cowboy boots rather than admitting that they had goofed is absurd. Both the constitution and state law are pretty clear about the need not to interfere with the free exercise of religion. And Texas is hardly a state which gives judges complete control over their courtrooms. For example, state law says that prosecutors may carry firearms into the courtroom, whether the judge wishes them to or not. Seeing as the First Amendment comes before the Second, you’d think this would have been a no-brainer.

Hey Texas! Don’t mess with me either.

First of all: thank you for the opportunity to blog. I’m so excited!

And now, my post:

The city of Bangalore has banned dancing and live music in places that serve alcohol, according to this Indian Express article here.

And according to this friend of mine here:

one Abhi M., who along with famed playwright Girish Karnad and 100 other people, protested the outmoded rule. Karnad spaketh thus:

“It is tyranny of the police. It is against every artiste. Instead of going after criminals the police are going after musicians.”

[Note: Karnad’s first two lines rhyme. A true artiste, that one.]

Apparently Bangalore officials have decided to enforce a part of the decades-old Karnataka Excise Law that prohibits live music and dancing in places that sell alcohol. (Used to be, only the section barring women from dancing was enforced, which led critics to hire dancing eunuchs in bars across the city this past February. Too bad that wouldn’t even be clever this time around.)

Abhi tells me,

“it’s an outdated law that’s being dug up by immature and backward-thinking bureaucrats and cops.”

But those Bs and Cs have their defenses. Says Bangalore’s Police Commissioner in an NDTV article:

“There is no [dance] ban on discos. They have to obtain a license and they can function.”

The article goes on to say however, that not one such license has been granted in the past four years to the many places that have requested them, according to sources in the police department.

The law is being used to temper progress, and the upshot is that the city is confused. I saw it myself two years ago.

Nearly two years ago, we posted on a court case involving Section 377, India’s notorious law criminalizing homosexuality. A case had been filed in the Delhi High Court (in 2001!) by the Naz Foundation, and the High Court had initially turned down the case. Later, the Indian Supreme Court directed the Delhi High Court to consider the case after all.

Last week, the case finally came up for a hearing, and the proceedings are described here. The chief lawyer for the Naz Foundation, Anand Grover seemed to hit all the right points: the law is a colonial relic; the law is vague to the point of absurdity, opening itself to arbitrary interpretation and arrest of presumed homosexuals; the law insults the dignity of homosexuals; and the law runs counter to the interests of public health. All of these are strong arguments (read the article for the nitty-gritties, including a rather fine distinction made between “carnal intercourse” and “sexual intercourse”).

The government’s confused defense amused one of judges hearing the case, Justice Sikri:

Counsel for the Union of India submitted that her client had filed two affidavits, one by the National Aids Control Organization (“NACO”) under the Ministry of Health and the other by the Ministry of Home Affairs. She admitted that NACO’s reply is supportive of the Petitioner. To this, Justice Sikri remarked that if that is the Union’s position, then why did it not amend the law itself?

The Counsel for the Union of India replied that the Ministry of Home Affairs has opposed the petition but that its counter was filed in 2003 prior to NACO’s reply (in 2006). She admitted that the client (i.e the Ministry of Home Affairs) had not given any new or additional instructions. It therefore appears that the Ministry of Home Affairs stands by its earlier stand of contesting the petition.

Amused by the fact that the Union was divided in its opinion, Justice Sikri remarked “It (homosexuality) is not a health hazard but is affecting the home”. (link)

In short, the government’s initial response (from the Ministry of Home Affairs) on Section 377 contradicts the National AIDS Control Organization’s response (the latter group actually agrees with the Naz Foundation). The government here can’t coordinate its own defense, making any attempt to actually defend the law seem a little schizophrenic.

I really wish I could have been playing the new video game Grand Theft Auto IV this week. Unfortunately I don’t own a gaming system. I used to be an obsessive gamer as a kid so its best that I don’t go near one now that I have real responsibilities (like blogging). I can however, get my fix online. I’ve been trying my hand at a game that looks similar to GTA-IV. Instead of smacking hos and jacking cars, I’ve been learning about “my” rights as an immigrant child. The game is I.C.E.D. (I Can End Deportation):

Breakthrough’s video game, ICED, puts you in the shoes of an immigrant to illustrate how unfair immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights. These laws affect all immigrants: legal residents, those fleeing persecution, students and undocumented people.

ICED has been featured in overwhelming amounts of press including: MTV News, Game Daily and has been covered on popular blogs including, Gothamist and The Huffington Post. To get a full list of media, please look at the left-hand tool bar.

How do you play?

THE OBJECT OF THE GAME IS TO BECOME A CITIZEN OF THE UNITED STATES

Game Play:
As an immigrant teen you are avoiding ICE officers, choosing right from wrong and answering questions on immigration. But if you answer questions incorrectly, or make poor decisions, you will be detained with no respect for your human rights. [Link]

Is your knee jerk reaction that you think this game might exaggerate the plight of immigrant kids, especially those brought over by undocumented parents? Think again. More about that later, after the fold.

The plight of South Asian (mostly Malayalee) indentured servants workers employed by Signal International at shipyards in Pascagoula, Mississippi started gaining notice in more of the mainstream media late last week, and this week should see the sad story gain even greater visibility…and a stronger reaction on behalf of the workers. First, a quick background on the situation, in which these workers, among many other immigrant laborers, were brought over to help clean up the mess left behind by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita work at the shipyards (but many others to do hurricane recovery work):

About 100 Indian workers walked off their jobs at Signal International, a Pascagoula shipyard Thursday.

They talk of broken promises and shattered dreams. The Indian workers came to America for job opportunity. They now face the risk of being deported after quitting their jobs at Signal and accusing the company of illegal “human trafficking…”

“I slit my wrists to kill myself. There was no other option for me. I didn’t know what I was doing. The situation forced me to do so. I was in a horrible situation. Signal was retaliating against me for organizing my people for our rights,” he told the group of fellow workers and visiting media.

They talk of living “like pigs in a cage” in a company-run “work camp.”

“I’ve been a guest worker all my life. I’ve never seen these kinds of conditions,” said the interpreter, “We lived 24 people to a room. And for this, the company deducted $1,050 a month from our paychecks…” [Link]

This sounds more like Dubai than Pascagoula! Although ~100 workers picketed, there are actually 4-6 times that many who are stuck in the same situation but didn’t want to expose themselves in such a high profile manner, or have their families worry about them. For additional background I point you to SAJA’s coverage and also to Maitri’s blog. This ABC news article has a link to an inspiring slideshow wherein the workers are photographed ceremonially casting off their hard hats, the symbols of their servitude, as if they were shackles. In response, Signal issued this press release saying that the accusations are “baseless.” Uh huh.

I am often amazed at the claims that so-called experts make, even in a court of law. For example, the government of Ontario recently defended its policy that Sikhs riding motorcycles should wear helmets (not a requirement in BC or Manitoba) by claming that turbans would unravel in the breeze, thus posing a risk to other motorists.

Born to be wild

… the Crown declared that an expert it had hired proved that turbans unravel rapidly in 100 km/h winds. The Crown’s test had been carried out by a professional engineer who purchased a mannequin head, mounted it on a stick and then placed the assemblage in a wind tunnel. [Link]

Say what? Turbans unravel at 60 mph? Have they ever seen a Sardar riding a motorcycle? Or riding a roller coaster? Or even sticking his head out of a moving vehicle? The paag stays on tight my friend.

To test this claim, the plaintiff, Baljinder Badesha of Brampton (can you say that 10 times fast?), tried to replicate the study. He drove down the Cayuga Speedway at … gasp, 110 kmh. Did his turban unravel and flutter into the wind like a wayward plastic bag? Ummm … no. It was fit to be tied.

Mr. Hutchison [Baljinder Singh’s lawyer] was unable to find a documented case anywhere in the world where a Sikh motorcyclist’s turban had unravelled. Skeptical, he persuaded the OHRC to authorize its own test. After he confronted the Crown with the dramatically different test result, prosecutors conceded that their engineer had grossly miscalculated the force of the wind he had generated to batter the imitation head, Mr. Hutchison said.

In fact, the device had been subjected to a 300 km/h wind. [Link]

That’s right - they used 180 mph winds in their test, more of a gale than the stiff breeze you get at 60mph. And even so, I’m not entirely convinced. I’ll bet if they used a real person with a real turban going 180 mph, it might still stay on. But in any case, given that driving at 300 kmh is illegal, the point is moot.

I’ve mentioned it before, but for those of you who weren’t aware, I’m addicted to Scrabulous, the Facebook application which allows me to play multiple games of Scrabble with several of you at the same time, and at our leisure.

Scrabulous is so fabulous, I ditched Friendster and MySpaz out of my desire for it; I had no need for such retrograde networks, not when Facebook was so superior— and the whole basis for its superiority is this stellar timesuck. If you read the message boards on the “official” Save Scrabulous group or under news articles about the game, I’m not the only one who has embraced Facebook out of my nerdier impulses, nor am I the only one who is twitching in a corner, rocking back-and-forth over this:

The saga of Scrabulous is nearing an end…[link]

I can’t bear to contemplate it. Better I edify you as to why this tragedy is occurring. Hasbro is not pleased that their game is suddenly so popular, not when they have no part in the fun. Never mind that they were stupid for not sensing the untapped desire of millions of word-nerds for protracted online Scrabbling, they’re using words like “licensing” and “stealing” to rain on our vocabulary-littered parade.

A flurry of behind the scenes deal-making has been going on between Hasbro, Scrabulous, and Electronic Arts, which has the license in the U.S. to the online version of the game. Hasbro is trying to get Scrabulous to sell itself for a song to Electronic Arts, or else shut down completely by the end of the day today. [link]

The Calcutta-based brothers behind the awesomeness, software developers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla are trying to find a way…

Scrabulous has been trying to shop itself to other buyers as well, but its legal liability is scaring away any potential white knights. Unless it gets some sort of reprieve or agrees to sell to Electronic Arts, Scrabulous will be no more, despite the more than 46,000 Facebook members who have joined the “Save Scrabulous” group. What choice does it have, really, but to sell? [link]

Lest you think this is a tiny sort of tempest, consider these numbers:

Scrabulous was started in 2006 as a standalone site operated by a pair of 20-something Calcutta, India-based brothers, Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, but the game exploded when they created a Facebook application that currently boasts 2.3 million active users and soon became the workplace productivity drain du jour. It’s currently the ninth most popular application on the site. [link]

The FBI recently released its latest statistical roundup of hate crimes throughout the United States. These stats are maintained as a result of a congressional mandate and provide an interesting time series analysis of crime against specific races and / or religions -

Statistics released today by the Federal Bureau of Investigation revealed that 7,722 criminal incidents involving 9,080 offenses were reported in 2006 as a result of bias against a particular race, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity/national origin, or physical or mental disability. Published by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Hate Crime Statistics, 2006, includes data from hate crime reports submitted by law enforcement agencies throughout the nation.

…Analysis of the 7,720 single-bias incidents by bias motivation showed that 51.8 percent were motivated by a racial bias, 18.9 percent were motivated by a religious bias, 15.5 percent were triggered by a sexual-orientation bias, and 12.7 percent of the incidents were motivated by an ethnicity/national origin bias.

Because racially- and religiously-motivated crimes are frequent topics on Sepia Mutiny, I thought it would be intersting to do some number crunching to make the stats available for future discourse….

A couple of diabolically ingenious (or phenomenally stupid) plans have been recently reported on in the media, both plans intended to ascertain where American Muslims be hanging out (so as to keep tabs on the potential terrorists hiding among them). The first was Los Angeles’ Muslim Mapping Project. At first I assumed that the LAPD intended to map the spread of Islam in the world since the birth of Muhammad…but then I realized that the department probably doesn’t employ many history or religion PhDs. “Muslim Mapping” must mean something else. Here is an excerpt from the LAPD officer who briefed the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs (headed by Joe Lieberman):

“In order to give our officers increased awareness of our local Muslim communities, the LAPD recently launched an initiative with an academic institution to conduct an extensive “community mapping” project. We are also soliciting input of local Muslim groups, so the process can be transparent and inclusive. While this project will lay out the geographic locations of the many different Muslim population groups around Los Angeles, we also intend to take a deeper look at their history, demographics, language, culture, ethnic breakdown, socio-economic status, and social interactions. It is our hope to identify communities, within the larger Muslim community, which may be susceptible to violent ideologically-based extremism and then use a full-spectrum approach guided by an intelligence-led strategy…” [Link]

“We want to know where the Pakistanis, Iranians and Chechens are so we can reach out to those communities,” LAPD Deputy Chief Michael P. Downing was quoted by CBS news as saying Thursday. [Link]

This plan actually makes a lot of sense to me (and doesn’t Downing seem downright neighborly?). It would be much too difficult to move all the Muslims into ghettos with well-defined boundaries. I don’t think Homeland Security has that kind of budget (yet). Why not use GIS data and other high tech strategies to simply make a virtual map of Muslims? I mean, Google Map already has overlays for satellite imagery, traffic, and street view. It wouldn’t be hard for Google to simply add a “Muslim neighborhoods” overlay to their GoogleMaps would it?

We have learned that Muslim communities in the U.S. are mistrustful of the mainstream media. Therefore, they may turn to other sources of information for news and socialization, such as the Internet. Unfortunately, despite all of the positive aspects of the Internet, it allows those individuals and groups with ideological agendas to easily make contact with like-minded individuals and access potentially destructive information. [Link]

Holy crap. I know that Muslims read our site and socialize here with like-minded individuals through comments. Despite the fact that I like this plan I hope we aren’t getting mapped as well.

Amrit Singh, the hardworking New York ACLU lawyer who is also the daughter of the current Indian Prime Minister (written about many times here on SM), has teamed up with fellow ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer to author a book which outlines the broad scope of the detention and torture policies practiced by the Bush Administration in its “War on Terror.” [via Ultrabrown]

Administration of Torture is the most detailed account thus far of what took place in America’s overseas detention centers, including a narrative essay in which Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh draw the connection between the policies adopted by senior civilian and military officials and the torture and abuse that took place on the ground. The book also reproduces hundreds of government documents; including interrogation directives, FBI e-mails, autopsy reports, and investigative files; that constitute both an important historical record and a profound indictment of the Bush administration’s policies with respect to the detention and treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad. [Link]

“Awesome” is the first thing that comes to mind. Even though we can’t undo a lot of what has been done to take America way off course in the last several years, it feels somewhat better to know that someone is taking the time to bear witness to and document it all thoroughly. This way, as Bush likes to proclaim, history can best judge his presidency. To get a feel for the book you can download part of a chapter here. You can also listen to a Podcast here where the authors discuss their book, and a recent NPR interview with Singh here.

You all recall me blogging back in March about the Alberto Gonzales-installed U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis right? Indian American Rachel Paulose, at only 33 years of age, was one of the loyal “Bushies” picked to replace the apparently disloyal outgoing attorney (Tom Heffelfinger) from that region. Right away news began to surface that Paulose’s staff couldn’t stand her reportedly imperious ways. Well now it seems that the largely ignored Office of Special Counsel is investigating formal complaints against Ms. Paulose [via Eric Black Ink]:

The federal Office of Special Counsel is investigating allegations that Rachel Paulose, U.S. attorney for Minnesota, mishandled classified information, decided to fire the subordinate who called it to her attention, retaliated against others in the office who crossed her, and made racist remarks about one employee.

Paulose did not return phone calls seeking her comment. Black Ink will publish any response that she makes.

The investigation has been under way since June. The Office of Special Counsel, which handles complaints about retaliation against whistleblowers and prohibited personnel practices by political appointees such as Paulose (that’s her at the podium in the photo at right), appears to be taking the allegations seriously. Investigators from two of its regional offices have been to Minnesota to interview witnesses and may be back for more. I could not find out when the OSC, an independent executive branch agency that is not part of the Justice Department, might complete the investigation. [Link]

It should be noted that this is an on-going investigation that is little more than he-said she-said right now. Here are a couple of the specific allegations being made, however:

*Paulose committed large and small acts of retaliation against others in the office whom she accused of disloyalty to her. In one instance, after changing the job assignment of one employee, Paulose allegedly said that she would make the woman so miserable that she would want to quit. In some instances, Paulose allegedly ordered those in charge of performing job evaluations to downgrade the reviews of those she considered disloyal, or turned down requests that they be allowed to perform work outside the office. The allegation is that Paulose took these actions against employees for reasons other than the quality of their work, but rather for offenses like advising her that some actions she was contemplating would exceed her legal authority.

*Paulose allegedly denigrated one employee of the office, using the terms “fat,” “black,” “lazy” and “ass…” [Link]

I don’t think using the four words above necessarily means you said anything wrong or that you are racist (as the allegations seem to imply). For example, I think it is perfectly acceptable to criticize a subordinate like this:

“When you sit in that black chair eating non-fat yogurt when you should be working as hard as a four-legged ass it makes me think you are a bit lazy.”

Can anyone else come up with a possible non-controversial sentence that Paulose might have uttered using those four words?

The outlook may not be favorable for Paulose. With Alberto out the knives will be coming out and Democrats will be applying some pressure to clean-up what they see as a crony-filled Justice Department.

A little over a month ago, I wrote a post about a Muslim youth who had cut the hair of a Sikh peer, during a fight in their high school bathroom. You may recall it— I asked you if this was a hate crime and many of you responded, some by saying “yes”, others “no”. The utility of hate crimes legislation was also debated; weren’t all violations worthy of condemnation? What if penalizing hate crimes really meant prosecuting thought crimes?

I thought of all of this, today. I was moderating a link on our news tab by clicking it, to make sure it worked. This takes less than a second, but sometimes, I linger for an extra moment on whatever news site you’ve submitted, especially if there’s another story which captures my attention (I’m powerless against the “most emailed” list).

“Survivor of Hate Crime Takes Own Life”, it said. Or something similar. I realized that David Ritcheson, 18, was dead, a year after he probably should have been. A comment from the post I referenced above came back to me:

I wouldn’t classify this as a crime… a little hair cut doesn’t hurt. He wasn’t sodomized for crying out loud. Plus, these were kids. Kids can be more sadistic than adults at times. Its actually somewhat normal for a pre-teen to be sadistic… part of the maturation process. This was peer pressure, not a hate crime. Whoever cut the Sikh fellow’s hair did to retain his status among the peer group. [Link]

Well, David was sodomized, for crying out loud. He wasn’t just sexually assaulted, he was brutalized. Stomped. Burned. Kicked. And as he lay on the ground, naked and dying, his attackers poured bleach on him. Why? He tried to kiss a 12-year old white girl, who was not related to either of his murderers.

Who was David?

David Ritcheson had been a running back on the Klein Collins High School football team. He was homecoming prince as a freshman and had a girlfriend. He “hung out with the good crowd,” he says, and had every reason to look forward to returning last fall.

But once classes resumed, Ritcheson was overwhelmed by the looks he got everywhere he went — in the halls, in the cafeteria, in classrooms.

The looks all said the same thing: You’re a victim, how do you deal with it? Everybody knew what had happened to him, and the attack, he says, “was just so degrading.”

In a case that drew national attention, Ritcheson, a Mexican-American, was severely assaulted last April 23 by two youths while partying in Spring. One of the attackers, a skinhead named David Tuck, yelled ethnic slurs and kicked a pipe up his rectum, severely damaging his internal organs and leaving Ritcheson in the hospital for three months and eight days — almost all of it in critical care. [Houston Chronicle]

Here are his own words, which were uttered at a hearing on H.R. 1592, The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2007; he testified, in an effort to wrest some good from his pain.

I appear before you as a survivor of one of the most despicable, shocking, and heinous acts of hate violence this country has seen in decades. Nearly one year ago on April 22, 2006, I was viciously attacked by two individuals because of my heritage as a Mexican-American…a minor disagreement between me and the attackers turned into the pretext for what I believe was a premeditated hate crime. This was a moment that would change my life forever. After I was surprisingly sucker punched and knocked out, I was dragged into the back yard for an attack that would last for over an hour. Two individuals, one an admitted racist skinhead, attempted to carve a swastika on my chest. Today I still bear that scar on my chest like a scarlet letter. After they stripped me naked, I was burned with cigarettes and savagely kicked by this skinhead’s steel toed army boots. After burning me in the center of the forehead, the skinhead attacker was heard saying that now I looked like an Indian with the red dot on my forehead.

HL Menken famously said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” That’s true not just of customers, but of corporate employees as well.

If I managed a gym and I was hiring somebody to do sales, I would care about how much experience they had, maybe how fit they looked, but I can’t imagine caring about the nationality or religion of the applicant. And this would especially true in a place like Fresno which is one of the most diverse counties in the state of California. Still, that’s just what one Bally’s in Fresno did - out and out discriminated against a Sikh man:

Sukdev “Devin” Singh Dhaliwal applied for a sales job with one of Bally’s five Fresno fitness centers in 2004. An interviewer quizzed Dhaliwal, who was born and raised in California, about his religious and ethnic background, and then denied him a job and hired non-Sikh, non-Indian applicants with less experience, according to the commission.

”He was basically asked where he was born, where his parents were born, what religion he subscribed to and whether he was a Muslim,” said EEOC program analyst Linda Li. “He’s very American.” [Link]

Why bring up news from almost 3 years ago today? Because it took that long for Bally’s to face justice and … lose:

Under the consent decree approved by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White, Bally must pay Dhaliwal $24,000 in damages and provide training in equal opportunity hiring practices to managers at its Fresno locations. Dhaliwal said he plans to donate some of the money to his alma mater, California State University, Fresno, where a business law professor steered him to the EEOC after hearing about the interview. [Link]

It’s not a lot of money, but it should send a message. Sadly, it’s a message that still needs sending.

One of the two major keynote speakers at this year’s NASABA conference in San Francisco is going to be Rachel K. Paulose, United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota [Thanks Maisnon]. Yes, that Rachel Paulose.

On the one hand, this makes sense - she’s a very prominent desi legal figure. As we said before, at age 33 she is:

the youngest serving U.S. Attorney, the first woman to hold that position in Minnesota and the first U.S. Attorney of South Asian descent. [Link]

So of course she’d make a great keynote speaker. The other speaker will be Kamala D. Harris, the District Attorney of San Francisco, so Paulose is the bigger fish of the two.

Then again, there has been a lot of controversy around her. Since our last post about her, which dealt with her credentials and swearing-in ceremony, a number of other problems have cropped up, including an unprecedented vote of no confidence from her subordinates who demoted themselves rather than work for her:

On April 5, 2007, three of her top administrators — First Assistant U.S. Attorney John Marti, second in command; civil division head Erika Monzangue and criminal division head James Lackner — voluntarily resigned those positions, reverting to simple assistant U.S. attorney status, reportedly in protest over Paulose’s management style. [Link]

This is very highly unusual since the key people in her office took a rank and pay cut both to avoid working directly under her. It’s strange enough that the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee may even investigate.

And just recently, to top it all off, the Republican Senator from Minnesota, Sen. Norm Coleman, has done a 180 in terms of his support for her. Whereas earlier he took credit for her nomination, now his office is claiming that the Senator never nominated her at all.

Paulose is clearly a hot potato, which should make for a lively convention. If anybody is going, let us know if she gets asked anything interesting when she speaks, OK?

I have had a fever for most of the day, so when I woke up and checked my GMail, I thought I was hallucinating while reading something sent out via ASATA (Alliance of South Asians Taking Action). SALDEF (The Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund) just issued a press release regarding an incident which makes me sick; Kuldip Singh Nag, a Sikh American VETERAN was assaulted by the Joliet police, in front of his six-year old child and wife. His crime? Parking a van with expired tags in his driveway. What. The. Fuck.

I can’t find anything beyond a useless mention of Nag’s arrest on a “police blotter” type of article, so if any of you know of further developments, please let us know. The following is from SALDEF:

On Friday March 30, 2007 at around 3:00pm, Mr. Kuldip Singh Nag, a Sikh American who was awarded the Bronze Star for his service in the U.S. Navy during the first Gulf War, was at his home in Joliet, IL when a local police officer noticed that a van parked on Mr. Nag’s private property had expired registration tags. Upon being confronted with this, Mr. Nag’s wife, Vera Kaur Nag, informed the officer that the van is parked on their driveway and was inoperable.

Mr. Nag then came outside to answer the officer’s questions regarding the van. The Joliet police officer then demanded that Mr. Nag park the van inside his garage and not on the driveway, to which Mr. Nag responded to the officer that it was not possible and that regardless, the van is parked on his private property and he has a right to park it on his driveway.

At this moment, the officer pulled out his pepper spray and attacked Mr. Nag. As Mr. Nag screamed in agony, the officer removed his baton and violently struck Mr. Nag numerous times until he fell to the ground. While the assault ensued, the officer was reported by both Mr. and Mrs. Nag as saying, “You f****** Arab! You f***** immigrant, go back to you f****** country before I kill you!”

Mr. Nag’s wife and six year-old child both witnessed the violent assault, which resulted in Mr. Nag immediately being admitted to the hospital where he stayed for five days due to complaints of intense pain and head trauma. Mr. Nag also received numerous bruises and a serious head injury which have caused him to go blind for several minutes at a time.

I join SALDEF in calling for an immediate investigation into this brutal crime. Kuldip Singh Nag served the very nation this xenophobic police officer screamed at him to leave and while a few of you may question my emphasis on his military service, I just think it adds an extra ungrateful, deplorable angle to an incident which is already appalling.

“This case seems to be a clear incident of police misconduct in Illinois,” said SALDEF Managing Director Kavneet Singh. “We are horrified at the anti-immigrant sentiment the officer allegedly used as he violently accosted Mr. Nag, and further that his six year old son was a witness to this violent assault. We call upon both Joliet and Illinois officials to investigate this incident and for the Illinois community to stand in solidarity with Mr. Nag.”

Illinois desis, where you at? And will there ever be a point in my lifetime when someone doesn’t tell a South Asian American to go back to where they “fucking came from”?

UPDATE [By Ennis]: I spoke to somebody at SALDEF who said that Mr. Nag’s legal counsel can indeed verify that he is a Veteran.

The Supreme Court has been asked to overturn a case arguing that under certain circumstances the fear of an abusive arranged marriage can be grounds for asylum.

The plaintiff’s request for asylum granted on appeal by the Second Circuit which argued that where forced marriages are valid and backed by law, the plaintiff “might well be persecuted in China - in the form of lifelong, involuntary marriage.”

The government is now asking the Supremes to overturn this verdict because they are afraid it would make America a haven for women fleeing abusive forced marriages. To be fair, they’re saying this is a decision that should be taken by Congress, and not the courts, but they also warn that this could lead to a flood of women in arranged marriages applying for asylum.

At the center of the case is a woman from China, not India:

At age 19, Gao was sold by her mother for the equivalent of $2,200 to become the wife of a man in her home village who, Gao says, will physically abuse her. [Link]

She was granted asylum by the appeals court, which extended the grounds under which one could traditionally apply for asylum:Approximately 60% of marriages worldwide are arranged

To qualify, an individual must show a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.

In most cases, the persecution is meted out by a government. But the Second Circuit said in the Gao case that persecution could also stem from a personal relationship in combination with government-enforced customs.

If you have a pulse then you know that the biggest news story of the past week has been the politically motivated purge of U.S. Attorneys not deemed loyal enough “Bushies.” The eight fired attorneys were all ones that Karl Rove and the Whitehouse felt weren’t acting partisan enough. They were either pursuing corruption cases against Republicans or not pursuing cases against Democrats hard enough. Evidence didn’t really matter, nor did the fact that of the eight attorneys 6 were Republican and two Independent. The most vociferous of the fired attorneys has been David Iglesias:

United States attorneys have a long history of being insulated from politics. Although we receive our appointments through the political process (I am a Republican who was recommended by Senator Pete Domenici), we are expected to be apolitical once we are in office. I will never forget John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, telling me during the summer of 2001 that politics should play no role during my tenure. I took that message to heart. Little did I know that I could be fired for not being political. [Link]

What’s the first thing you do after you fire eight attorney’s who don’t play political ball? You hire new ones of course. You’d probably go for someone you know you could trust. A loyal “Bushie.” Meet the only (as far as I know) Indian American U.S. Attorney. Her name is Rachel Kunjummen Paulose and she was appointed to the recently vacated job in Minnesota. She is the youngest attorney, and the first woman in Minnesota to hold this post (thanks for the tip Ravi):

It seemed like a fairy-tale: University of Minnesota graduate goes to Yale Law, gets a few high-profile jobs, including stints at Dorsey & Whitney and the Justice Department, and winds up, at age 33, the youngest serving U.S. Attorney, the first woman to hold that position in Minnesota and the first U.S. Attorney of South Asian descent. Her appointment to the post is sponsored by Republican Senator Norm Coleman, but also endorsed by outgoing Democrat Mark Dayton, who makes it his final priority in the Senate to see her confirmation through in the waning hours of the session.

This is the narrative we have received from the media of the meteoric rise of Rachel Paulose, the new U.S. Attorney in the Minnesota district. But with the recent furor over the firings of the “Gonzales Seven”—several of whom were involved in ongoing corruption investigations, and others of whom have revealed that they were pressured to speed up investigations by sitting members of Congress—and their replacement by up-and-coming partisans, the curious case of Rachel Paulose merits a closer look. [Link]

Last week, a Sikh in New Zealand got on a Qantas flight from Queenstown to Auckland. You can guess what happened next … he got kicked off because the other passengers didn’t want him flying with them.

“People either side of me were saying they don’t want me on here … One of the ladies told another guy ‘I’m not comfortable with him on this plane’,” Mavi says. “She was talking to a whole group. The lady started it and then somebody went and spoke to the captain. The Qantas man requested me and said ‘You’re not allowed to travel in this plane because the passengers are not happy’…” [Link]

I hadn’t realized that commercial flights were like survivor, that the passengers are polled and one unlucky one is voted off. Silly me, I thought you paid, you got checked out by security, and you disembarked at your destination. Things seem to be a bit … different on the other side of the world.

Of course, Qantas has a different account of what happened. They say simply that:

A Qantas Airways spokesman from Sydney [said] … the passenger “displayed behaviour prior to boarding and on board before departure which concerned our staff”. After “careful consideration” a decision was made to offload the passenger. [Link]

I work with twenty people, eighteen of whom are men; recently, I’ve been privy to outrage and debate regarding the following scandal (when I’m not ignoring boasts regarding bracketology, that is). I didn’t realize that there was a Sepia angle to the Adam “Pacman” Jones controversy until Anantha kindly alerted us to it, earlier today. I’ll get to that, but first, let’s catch up other non-ESPN-addicts with what the hell I’m going on about:

It’s Feb. 19 in Vegas and, two miles from The Strip at a club called Minxx, the three-day party that is the NBA All-Star Weekend is about to end.

With gunfire.

According to witnesses, Adam Bernard “Pacman” Jones sits in a VIP booth with seven acquaintances, six of them women, the other his bodyguard. They’re drinking Dom Perignon champagne and Patron tequila, which goes for $600 a bottle. Pacman watches as Cornell Haynes Jr. — America knows him as the rapper Nelly — and music producer Jermaine Dupri (whose girlfriend is Janet Jackson) “make it rain” dollar bills for several songs. Jones, the Tennessee Titans cornerback who considers himself a major player, wants a piece of their action. Pacman asks an employee to convert $3,400 in larger bills into smaller denominations and approaches the stage. Wide-eyed, almost childlike, he showers fists full of dollars on the dancers.

What happened next, in the context of the law, might not be determined for months, if ever. But when the gunshots ended, a security guard, a former WWF wrestler named Tommy Urbanski, was on the ground with his spinal cord shattered by a bullet. Two others, another bouncer and a female patron, were also shot.

To be clear, Las Vegas police consider Jones a WITNESS, not a person of interest; the trouble-magnet of an athlete claims he’s not the one. The club owner says he made threats and knows the gunman, who has yet to be found. But just in case…

Even though he hasn’t been charged, Jones hired an attorney, Manny Arora, from the same Atlanta-based law firm that defended Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis on charges of murder and aggravated assault in 2000.

The entire ESPN article is a fascinating read and I say that as someone who is almost entirely bored by sports (unless it’s something else fascinating…like cricket). I’m not saying I have any sympathy for Pacman (who got his nick because of the enthusiastic way he housed bottles of milk when he was a wee thing) or the devil for that matter, but after reading a backstory like this:

Misfortune is something that has touched Jones early, and often. His father, Adam, was shot in the back of the head and died when Pacman was 5. His mother, Deborah, spent three years in prison. An uncle died from a knife wound. He’s seen some of his peers die. He was raised chiefly by his grandmother, Christine Jones, and she died of cancer after he graduated from high school.

It’s only because Abhi doesn’t pay us I don’t have the time that I haven’t taken myself down to Manhattan Supreme Court to check out on your behalf, gentle reader, the ongoing circus that is generating press clips of this nature:

A city cop who testified he was seduced at age 13 by his East Side Montessori school principal suffered a figurative beating by the same headmistress in court yesterday. …

“Did that involve any noise?” Shargel asked. “Noises that are often attendant to the act of making love?” The cop answered, “The TV would be on loud.”

Backstory and Desi Angle (TM): Well, you see, the Montessori school principal in question is desi. Name of Lina Sinha, age 40. The alleged events took place about ten years ago. It seems something went down between the two, but just what, and how illegal, and whether it can be proved, is up in the air. He says she raped him when he was underage. She says they had an affair after he turned 17, which ended badly; that she had accused him of beating her and he, fearing this would lose him his job with the NYPD, turned around and accused her of rape.

Additional elements of note: Steven Soderbergh was almost a juror in the case. Too bad he didn’t make the final cut - there’s sex here for sure, and lies somewhere, and all we need is the videotape. Second element of note: Sinha’s attorney is Gerald Shargel, who is best known for defending mobsters. Damn! Maybe I will make it down to the court after all. The whole scene sounds classic.

Get your fix with these stories from the first day of the trial last week (Daily News flava; New York Post flava with photo of Sinha — go on, you know you want to; New York Times flava), and these updates. Looks like Shargel’s scoring some points, which is why he gets paid the big bucks. We’ll try and keep an eye on this tawdriness for you as the trial continues.

Quite predictably, my inbox was blowing up this morning and the news of a bizarre love triangle at the workplace was the only thing people wanted to talk about. It was the first item at our weekly office meet-up (under the heading “safety”). At my workplace safety always comes first. So THIS is what they mean by a “water cooler topic”:

This is the story everyone’s talking about at the water cooler today. (Fortunately, I sit right next to the water cooler.) NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak has been charged with attempted murder of another astronaut, who was in a astronaut love triangle with another astronaut. She also had on diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop on the drive. Okay, so attempted murder and kidnapping aren’t cool, but if they have to happen, I’m pretty happy that astronauts are involved. [Link]

First of all, if I was a rockstar I would totally name my band “astronaut love triangle.” It’s so edgy. If you click on my first link it will lead you to the arrest report which provides details about the steel mallet, rubber tubing, knife, pepper spray, large trash bags, wigs, and trench coat involved. I will spare you re-hashing the details that have been replayed on the news all day. This far into my post I am SURE you are all wondering “where is the desi angle?” Stay with me a moment.

Earlier this week Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams (see previous posts 1,2,3) set the spacewalking record for a woman. This is an amazing achievement that took many long hours of hard work in a dangerous environment!:

U.S. astronaut Sunita Williams has now spent more time in space [outside of a vehicle] than any other woman, setting the record on Sunday.

She and a crew mate upgraded the international space station’s cooling system.

Williams broke the previous female spacewalking record of more than 21 hours when she and Michael Lopez-Alegria completed the second of what could be a precedent-setting three spacewalks in nine days. The new record is 22 hours and 27 minutes. [Link]

So what do these two seemingly unrelated news stories have in common besides the fact that they both involve astronauts? Three words: Maximum Absorption Garment (MAG).

According to a complaint filed this week in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. (thanks, tipster Ashwini!), in the summer of 2005 a Kuwaiti diplomat and his wife brought with them to the United States three Indian women as domestic workers. In order to obtain for the workers the appropriate visas, they presented contracts in which they promised each woman a monthly salary in the range of $1,300 for 8 hours of work per day, 6 days per week.

You know where this story is going. Once established at the residence at 7027 Elizabeth Drive in McLean, Va., according to the complaint, the couple proceeded to demand of the three women that they work non stop, 7 days a week, 18 hours a day, for which they were paid in the range of $250 each month, which they never saw as it was sent directly to their families.

The defendants, Waleed al-Saleh and his wife Maysaa al-Omar, abused the workers physically and emotionally:

They were subjected to threats and verbal and physical abuse, including one particularly violent incident in which Sabbithi was knocked unconscious after being thrown against a counter by Al Saleh. The women were often not allowed time to eat or to use the bathroom and frequently were deprived of food. Two of them were allowed one hour off a month to attend church. The workers had their passports taken away and they were isolated from contact with the external world.

“I was scared of my employers and believed that if I ran away or sought help they would harm me or maybe even kill me,” said Kumari Sabbithi, who is now living in New York. “I believed that I had no choice but to continue working for them even though they beat me and treated me worse than a slave.”

Some examples from the complaint:

Bollywood actor Sanjay Dutt (star of the Munnabhai movies) has been acquitted on the terrorism charge that’s been on his head since 1993. The judge did find him guilty of illegal possession of arms, but it appears that charge is much less of a concern: though he may still do years of prison time, according to the New York Times, Dutt’s family and friends are celebrating.

Some background on the case is available at Wikipedia:

Mumbai was engulfed in riots as the aftermath of the destruction of the Babri Masjid complex in Ayodhya in December 1992. The resulting riots claimed hundreds of lives and it is during this time that Sanjay Dutt claims to have asked his under world friends to provide him with a fire arm for protection. He however had not conveyed to police any threats to his life.

As per the CBI case filed in a TADA court Abu Salem and his men went to Dutt’s house on January 16, 1993 and gave him three AK-56 rifles, 25 hand grenades, one 9 mm pistol and cartridges. He returned two AK-56 rifles, hand grenades and cartridges to Hanif Kadawala and Samir Hingora but kept one AK-56 rifle with himself. (link)

Admittedly, the Wikipedia article is a bit slanted towards Dutt here, as it presumes that Dutt’s purpose in buying a weapon was self-defense. But the problem with this interpretation is Dutt’s supplier, Abu Salem, a notorious terrorist seen as one of the key organizers of the terrible 1993 blasts in Bombay. While it’s fair to imagine that a half-Muslim actor might want protection following some nasty communal riots (December 1992-January 1993), it’s also fair to speculate that he knew Abu Salem was up to something unsavory by the spring of 2003. Even if Sanjay Dutt wasn’t actively involved in the bombings that took place in March of 1993, isn’t it possible he knew something about the plans given his association with Abu Salem?

I guess I lean towards Dutt a bit in this case. While I do find Abu Salem’s involvement disturbing, it’s hard to imagine that Dutt would have been actively involved in terrorism given his famous parents and his status as an actor. That said, if this were the U.S., and Sanjay Dutt had bought an AK-56 rifle from, say, Mohammed Atta, he would probably be permanently locked up in Guantanamo Bay. (Sometimes, the Indian legal system seems more rational than the current American one.)

Dutt served 18 months in jail immediately following his arrest, but within a few years was back and more popular than ever in Bollywood. The 2000s have been the peak of his career, with the two superhit Munnabhai movies. As I recall from the comments to one of my earlier posts on Lage Rago Munnabhai, some people at least have been aware of the irony of an actor in a movie about “Gandhi-giri” being found guilty of possessing an assault rifle. Well, at least he has one thing in common with the Mahatma — they both did lots of jail time.

The Philadelphia Inquirer has the first in a series of articles about an illegal prescription drug network that was busted in 2005, as part of “Operation Cyber Chase.” The ringleaders of the network were the Bansals, a family based in India, though part of the business was run out of a warehouse in Queens.

Here’s how the business worked:

Akhil [Bansal] oversaw the family’s North American operations, shipping roughly 75,000 pills a day via UPS. In a little more than a year, the network had smuggled 11 million prescription tablets to more than 60,000 American addresses, an operation that grossed at least $8 million. These numbers did not include the steroids or the kilo shipments of the tranquilizer ketamine, a club drug called “Special K.”

The family’s Internet business represented a dark slice of the global economy so new, and so widespread, that national governments were still struggling to understand it, let alone police it.

Laws were vague, outdated, inconsistent. Technology - new medicines and ways to deliver them - was outpacing regulation. (link)

Unlike Operation Meth Merchant, where a number of the defendants pleaded guilty because they were going to be deported anyway, these guys clearly knew exactly what they were doing, and what they were doing was definitely illegal. In contrast to Operation Meth Merchant, which disproportionately targeted Indian immigrant store clerks, I’m not at all bothered at the take-down of the Bansals — they deserve to be in jail. Rather, it’s an intriguing case study that shows yet again how India’s entry into the globalized, internet-based economy goes well beyond the rosy picture suggested by talk of outsourcing and call centers.

At the same time, I don’t think the Bansals are especially “evil” for smuggling imitation prescription drugs, though it’s definitely dangerous for these drugs to be floating around. (According to NPR, at least one person died after purchasing drugs from a website based in Mexico.) If anything, the Bansals were evil because their business was based on spam, which wreaks havoc with email and is the bane of many a blogger’s existence.

Thirty-three people including two Massachusetts imams have been arrested for abuse of the Religious Worker visa program:

Federal immigration agents arrested imams from two Boston-area mosques yesterday on charges they were involved in a scheme that provided religious worker visas to immigrants who used them to enter the United States and work instead as gas station attendants, truck drivers, and factory laborers. …

Under the scheme, described by federal authorities yesterday, the immigrants, who were mostly Pakistani, paid a fee to US religious organizations, which then sponsored them for the visas.

The Religious Worker Program was created under the Immigration Act of 1990:

…churches, synagogues, and mosques can ask the government to approve visas for foreigners to fill vacant positions. Several thousand visas are issued each year that permit immigrants to enter the United States exclusively for religious employment. To obtain the visa, immigrants must have religious training and experience in their native country. Once here, they are not allowed to hold secular jobs. The religious worker permits can ultimately lead to green cards, or permanent residency. …

Federal immigration officials believe that abuse of the program is widespread: an August 2005 audit found signs of fraud in more than 30 percent of applications.

That wasn’t the prevailing view in Congress two years earlier, when the program was extended to 2008 in a fine display of bipartisan blather. Here’s Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.):

It is with great relief and extreme sadness that I leave the mutiny today ending the sequel to my Mutiny-Wallah gig. I think there may have been a way to bribe the head macacas to hang around the bunker blogging some more, but my lawyer and I have decided against it. I came back on board to Sepia Mutiny months ago with the expectation of blogging on the 2006 elections and am leaving today having spent more time researching cyber law than should be legal (bad pun, I know). You didn't think I was going to leave without sharing some of the research I dug up, now would you?

1) It is a misdemeanor in the state of California to be sent multiple e-mails after you sent one that said stop contacting me, even if the perpetrator is in another state (check to see what your state's laws are). My advice: never block or delete e-mails until you've accumulated enough evidence, never respond to the e-mails except for a one liner that says 'stop contacting me' and file a report with the police immediately.

2) Those IP addresses are a tricky thing -- they are often anonymous to protect the bloggers and commenters. But IP addresses can be tracked with a court order, and sites like MySpace, Friendster, or Blogspot have a wealth of IP information that they have to give to the police if given a court order, especially if the perpetrator used those sites to contact you. Also, if you do blog, get a sitemeter, and monitor those IP addresses religiously.

3) If you Flickr, photolog, whatever -- copyright your pictures. According to blog laws, sites such as Brown People can post your pictures up legally as long as they link to the source. If you copyright your pictures, they are not allowed to take your image. The laws around image copyright infringement are pretty harsh (known as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act), and the Google law team is standing by to make sure Blogspot users don't infringe this aspect of the law. You should copyright your blog too.

4) Save everything, take screenshots (go to File, Save page as...) of everything. In a world where the Internet can be so easily manipulated and deleted, it is important that you save things immediately. Not just saving e-mails in your inbox, but take screen shots of profiles, blogs, websites and accumulating your data. Both your lawyers and law enforcement will be pleased to see that you have evidence to back your claim.

The rest of the list continued after the jump...

Between the radioactive elucubrations of the Dear Leader, the accumulation of tortured and executed bodies in Iraq, the tawdry revelations of the Foley affair, and the growing murmur of a supposed Democratic sweep in the midterm election (I’ll believe that one when I see it), there has been precious little front-page consideration of the signing, earlier this week, of the Military Commissions Act.

As you may have heard, the act drastically changes the legal landscape for foreigners in the United States, whether here legally or illegally. It allows the government to deny a foreign suspect the right to challenge his or her imprisonment (habeas corpus), to employ evidence obtained by a wide and ambiguous range of coercive methods, and to use classified evidence whilst withholding it from the defense. Small things like that.

I will leave it to the lawyers here to amplify or amend this summary. Perhaps one reason why there hasn’t been much discussion is that the Supreme Court will ultimately determine whether, and in what form, this law stands. It’s quite possible that the Hamdan case, in which desi lawyer Neal Katyal plays a prominent role, will become the test case. At any rate, some in the media are looking ahead to this next phase, and already centering speculation on Justice Anthony Kennedy, the current swing Supreme.

I did, however, come across one very interesting piece of commentary that I wanted to share. In an Op-Ed in the Boston Globe, Harvard Law professor Martha Minow and a former legal adviser to the Israeli military, Gabrielle Blum, compare the new legislation with Israel’s approach to the same problem. They lead with their finding:

BEFORE ENACTING the “Detainee Bill” (otherwise known as the Military Commissions Act) two weeks ago, Congress should have spent more time learning from the Israeli experience. Compared with Israel’s security measures during a long and difficult experience with terrorism, the US Congress has gone too far in its willingness to compromise human rights and civil liberties. Security considerations, as legitimate and forceful as they are, do not justify such excessive measures, as the Israeli practice demonstrates.

Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Act, enacted in 2002, among other things provides for an immediate military hearing of the detainee upon detention, and a judicial hearing within two weeks and again every six months; a range of requirements for detention conditions and privileges; and the detainee’s right to meet with the Red Cross. The current U.S. legislation provides none of these safeguards. In addition, also unlike Israel, the U.S. law grants immunity to U.S. officials from prosecution except in the most extreme cases.

Minow and Blum conclude:

… the US Military Commissions Act sends to other countries facing terrorism the message that effective judicial review is null and void once the security alarm is sounded. It demonstrates a level of panic and irresponsible abandonment of principles that other nations, facing similar dangers, have avoided.

As bad as this may be for America, it is potentially far worse for countries that look to the United States for leadership. Now, the US example will encourage other nations to throw away rights just when they are sorely tested.

Fifty years ago, on October 14, 1956 — and a mere two months before his death — Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the scholar and political leader who was principally responsible for the drafting of India’s Constitution, converted to Buddhism in a public ceremony in Nagpur. Somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 of his Dalit followers — the accounts vary — embraced Buddhism in the immediate wake of his conversion. For Dr. Ambedkar, nothing in his long, distinguished career could convince him that the socio-cultural dynamics of Hinduism would ever offer Dalits a way out of “untouchability,” disenfranchisement, poverty and social stigma.

Each year on October 14, conversion ceremonies take place at which Dalits embrace Buddhism or Christianity. This year they have extra poignance, not only because it is the 50th anniversary of Ambedkar’s act, but also because several states ruled by the BJP have recently adopted or strengthened laws limiting conversion. On top of all this, a principal follower of Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram, who founded the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) which is the main political vehicle for the Dalit movement now, passed away earlier this month.

From accounts in the press so far, there were major conversion ceremonies today in Nagpur and also in Gulbarga in Karnataka:

Hundreds of Dalits on Saturday embraced Buddhism and Christianity at a mass conversion programme in Nagpur, in which copies of Gujarat government’s anti-conversion bill were also put to fire.

The mass conversion, organised by the All India Conference of SC/ST Organisations and the All India Christian Council on the occasion of World Religious Freedom Day, was attended by Dalits from Orissa, Karnataka and Gujarat states, organisers said.

The conversion of Dalits to Buddhism was performed by priests, while a group of Christian pastors from the Council led by President Dr Joseph D’Souza baptised the Dalits. [Link]

GULBARGA (Karnataka): More than 3,000 Dalits on Saturday embraced Buddhism at an impressive ceremony here on Saturday, synchronising with the golden jubilee of Dr B R Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism.

Marking the change of faith, the Dalits were administered the oath by Bante Bodhi Dhama, a Buddhist monk from Japan.

Preceding the ceremony, “Buddha Dharma Deeksha Pratigne”, a huge procession led by more than 500 monks, was taken out through the city streets. [Link]

There are some very interesting present-day political angles here, not least the controversy over the anti-conversion laws, and the fact that the leader of the BSP, Mayawati, the former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, has said she will not convert to Buddhism yet. She said this at today’s Nagpur rally, while announcing that Kanshi Ram’s funeral rites were performed in the Buddhist tradition, even though he had not converted; and while expressing her hope that Buddhism would spread further among Dalits. The mixed message clearly reflects the political complexity of the Dalit leadership’s position.

In the larger historical frame, perusing the day’s news and doing a little background research reminds me how shamefully little I know about Dr. Ambedkar’s story, let alone more obscure yet significant figures like Kanshi Ram. I hope that comments and debate on this post will help me, and surely others, remedy this lacuna.

The writer Vikram Seth, along with a group of activists, recently signed an open letter directed to the Government of India and the Delhi High Court, asking it to repeal Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This is the section that prohibits sexual relations between men as well as other “unnatural” acts. Amartya Sen has put out a follow-up open letter with dozens of prominent Indian intellectuals and celebrities signing on.

Human Rights Watch put out a report in 2002 criticizing the law because it weakens efforts to mobilize against AIDS. In the NYT Somini Sengupta mentions that the government’s own National AIDS Control Agency has stated that the law hampers AIDS prevention and treatment programs.

The key actor in all this a group called the Naz Foundation India Trust, which sued the government in 2004 to request the repeal of the law. The case was initially refused by the Delhi Court, but the Indian Supreme Court required the Delhi Court to examine the case on its merits. The next hearing is scheduled for October 4. The recent agitations seem to be oriented to influencing the outcome of these particular hearings.

For reference, here is the text of the 1861 law:

Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.

Explanation- Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section. (link)

This is a very bad, outmoded law. It is, for one thing, euphemistic to the point of absurdity. Who exactly defines what is “against the order of nature”? I believe the earlier versions of the Penal Code didn’t include the “explanation,” so one obvious question is whether it includes, to be quite direct, everything but the heterosexual missionary position. (The term “sodomy” once included oral sex as well as masturbation; it is still only euphemistically defined as “any sex act that does not lead to procreation”.)

More generally, the law has many deleterious effects that its critics have explored. Let’s have a look at some of these arguments, as well as the government’s response to them so far.

Edison, NJ just can't seem to get out of the news. Seems that filmi starlet Bipasha Basu was recently harrassed there this month by a couple of the organizers at Indian Business Association. And as any woman of my disposition a like-minded desi woman that doesn't take crap lying down anymore, she made sure that she was not silenced.

Girl Powered Bipasha Basu

Bollywood star Bipasha Basu has publicly accused two organisers of an India Day parade at Edison Township, New Jersey, of harassing her physically and mentally. The movie star was scheduled to lead the parade -- organised by the Indian Business Association -- on Sunday, August 13, through Oak Tree Road, a centre of Indian businesses, as Grand Marshall.

Before the parade... Bipasha appeared on stage. "I wanted to attend the parade, but I could not," she said, adding that she was harassed physically and mentally in the car by two people who were taking her to the parade. [link]

Girlfriend was angry, and partial footage of Basu on stage enraged into a girl power frenzy almost brought a tear to my eye. (The entire tirade was shown on Asian Variety Show this weekend, but I couldn't find it online). Though the IBA said they were going to do an investigation, they are also doing what every good American does. Suing her.

Officials said the IBA, which instituted an inquiry into the allegations, will sue Basu for an undisclosed amount for violating the contract and making such an allegation. Though officials were not willing to talk till the inquiry was over, sources said it could sue her for $5 million. The legal action is expected to be initiated in a New Jersey court. [link]

[Bipasha] claimed she had received some bruises, which were photographed... [link]

Bipasha has not made a formal complaint to the organisers, he said. The alleged incident could cause a criminal investigation, but she has not lodged any complaint with the police either.[link]

So IBA, your volunteer organizers pick up this woman, they don't 'molest' her but she does get bruises from the incident, and your step is to sue her for breach of contract? Seriously? Too bad Basu doesn't blog anymore, I'd love to hear what she has to say.

Edison as we know, has the fifth largest desi population, and the most significant concentration of desis in the U.S. With police brutality and now this incident, the desi community of Edison has their community organizing work cut out for them.

Earlier this month SAALT sent around this statement in response to the following event that took place in Edison, New Jersey:

Community members in Edison gathered on August 2nd, 2006, at a rally to protest incidents of police brutality that an Indian man, Raj Parikh, allegedly experienced on July 4th, 2006, by an Edison police officer. The rally on August 2nd occurred after several unsuccessful attempts by community members to address their concerns with government officials. At the rally, a group of approximately 60 South Asians were met by counter protesters who made anti-immigrant and racist slurs, such as, "How many of you are illegals? You must've slid under the border to come here"; "You're all cockroaches! Go home!"; and "If you behave like animals you will be treated like animals". Mr. Parikh was scheduled to speak at the rally but was unable to do so, because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials appeared and arrested him. Apparently, Mr. Parikh was out of status and had an order of deportation against him.

The statement that was sent out included the following recommendations; a) to ensure Mayor Choi's office leads an investigation that is detailed and public, b) a declaration from the mayor's office and Edison Police Department. to clarify official policies between local law enforcement and immigration authorities, c) to have elected officials and civic leaders commit to community forums to address the racial tension, and d) to require the Edison Police Department employees to receive a diversity training and meet with the South Asian community members. High but simple basic demands needed to be taken in a community with such a large percentage of South Asians (5th on the list of cities with the highest South Asian American population.)

This past Friday, Mayor Choi attempted to address the community, but was met with much disdain:

Holding a microphone, Edison Mayor Jun Choi stood alone Friday night facing Hilltop Apartments, a complex almost entirely populated by Indian-Americans.

The mayor's critics and political observers say Choi, 34, has mishandled the racial controversy over the Indian's arrest. Barely eight months into office, Choi faces opponents on both sides of the dispute. For Choi, who never held elected office before becoming mayor, it has been a test of how well he can maintain the balance between his Asian-American constituency and the rest of the township, which has become increasingly diverse. [link]

It's not just the members of the South Asian community who are disapointed here:

The San Francisco Chronicle reported this weekend that Muhammad Ismail and his son Jaber Ismail, U.S. citizens, have been barred from re-entering the United States until they answer questions in Pakistan to the satisfaction of the FBI. The two men were pulled aside during a layover in Hong Kong and informed there was “a problem with their passports.” The elder Ismail is a naturalized U.S. citizen; his son, 18, was born in the U.S. Neither one is a dual national.

The two have not been charged with any crime. They are, however, close relatives of another father and son pair, Umer and Hamid Hayat of Lodi, California, who were tried last year on support of terrorism charges. Coincidentally, the elder Hayat, an ice cream vendor, was just released on time served and fined $3,600 for a minor offence.

Back to the Ismails and their unusual treatment as U.S. citizens denied re-entry into their country without any charge or stated cause:

“We haven’t heard about this happening — U.S. citizens being refused the right to return from abroad without any charges or any basis,” said Mass, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

McGregor Scott, the U.S. attorney for California’s eastern district, confirmed Friday that the men were on the no-fly list and were being kept out of the country until they agreed to talk to federal authorities.

“They’ve been given the opportunity to meet with the FBI over there and answer a few questions, and they’ve declined to do that,” Scott said.

Mass said Jaber Ismail had answered questions during an FBI interrogation at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad soon after he was forced back to Pakistan. She said the teenager had run afoul of the FBI when he declined to be interviewed again without a lawyer and refused to take a lie-detector test.

Here again, we’re looking at an apparently unprecedented situation, and one that any U.S. citizen who travels outside the country might have grounds to be worried about:

Michael Barr, director of the aviation safety and security program at USC, said the Ismail case appears to be unusual in the realm of federal terrorism investigations.

“You become what is called a stateless person, and that would be very unprecedented,” Barr said.

Last Thursday Javed Iqbal, a Pakistani citizen and longtime resident of Staten Island, New York City (that’s his house in the picture), was arrested under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act after he offered to sell to an informant a satellite TV package that included al-Manar, the Lebanese channel operated by Hezbollah. The government argues that Iqbal’s commercial provision of this service amounts to financing a terrorist organization. However, the act also exempts a broad range of news and publications:

The broadly defined statute, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, is also used frequently to block the importation of goods and services that would directly support terrorist operations.

The law, which went into effect in 1977, was meant to put legal teeth in international trade embargoes with other nations, but once it was amended by the Patriot Act after 9/11, the government began to use it far more frequently against particular groups and individuals.

The use of the law, however, to focus on television broadcasts seemed to fall under an exemption laid out in a 1988 amendment to the act, several experts said, and it raised concerns among civil libertarians and some constitutional scholars about limiting the free marketplace of ideas.

The exemption covers publications, films, posters, phonograph records, photographs, microfilms, microfiche, tapes, compact discs, CD-ROM’s, art works and newswire feeds.

“One person’s news is another’s propaganda,” said Rod Smolla, the dean of the University of Richmond Law School and a First Amendment expert. “It runs counter to all of our First Amendment traditions to ban the free flow of news and information across borders, yet at the same time all nations have historically reserved the right to ban the importation of propaganda from a hostile nation.”

Professor Smolla also said that so far as he knew, this was the first use of the law to block information, as such.

Clearly, a First Amendment versus “War on Terror” showdown looms. Interestingly, Iqbal’s hometown paper, the Staten Island Advance, reports that al-Manar has a readily accessible online presence (although I couldn’t get through when I tried to connect just now):

Even as Iqbal now faces charges of offering access to what has been dubbed terrorism-backed programming, an Al-Manar Web site is available free to the public, with streaming video, news stories and updates on protests and demonstrations.

The site has logged more than 1.1 million hits in the last month and half.

Another interesting note: one of his attorneys says that Iqbal, who supplies a range of satellite TV services, does more than half of his business with Texas-based Christian evangelical channels.

Iqbal is in jail, having been unable to raise the $250,000 bond. [Update: He posted bond today, Tuesday, August 29.] To be continued…

Happy Indian Independence day, everyone!

In the comments of some recent posts at Sepia Mutiny, some readers have questioned why India needs “secularism,” and even just what secularism means in India. Similar questions were also raised in response to Abhi’s “jingoism in the blogsophere” post from a few weeks ago. Since I have researched the issue of secularism as part of my academic work, I thought it might be interesting to look at the Indian and American approaches to secularism in comparison as a thought-exercise. Instead of focusing on recent issues such as the train bombings in Mumbai last month, or almost-current events like the Gujarat riots of 2002, I wanted to back up a little and take a brief look at the texts of the respective Constitutions themselves. I think this comparative exercise might shed some insight on the value and importance of secularism in both countries.

Tipster Adnan alerts us to the case filed this week in Manhattan State Supreme Court by Pakistani-American pilot Faisal Baig against JetBlue, which revoked his hiring the eve of his start date:

Baig said he asked for an explanation and was told JetBlue considered him “a security risk.”

“I asked if it’s my name or my religion,” said Baig, who had been a pilot for Independence Air for nearly six years, beginning in 2000, before applying to JetBlue in January. “The woman on the phone said she didn’t want to go into it, but basically she said yes.”

“I was shocked,” said Baig, who was not born in this country but came here with his family when he was 7 years old and is a U.S. citizen. “I was devastated. I don’t know how to describe it to you. Her words more or less told me I wasn’t an American.”

Jenny Dervin, a JetBlue spokeswoman, confirmed that the airline had been advised the lawsuit was filed but said the company does not comment on pending litigation.

Now this suit was just filed, so we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about its merit. But I thought I might take a look at the reactions on the popular right-wing site Free Republic, just to check in on the state of the discourse. Here’s a sample:

Tipster Aliya alerts us to this breakthrough in British jurisprudence: This week a London judge offered a convicted sex attacker a suspended sentence in exchange for a letter of apology to his victim. The judge felt this was appropriate as the perpetrator was “unsophisticated by Western standards,” being instead a poor little rich boy from India.

The perpetrator, 33-year-old Prashant Modi, travels frequently to Britain for his father’s oil business, the court learned, which no doubt explains his lack of sophistication. He was also unsophisticated enough to go clubbing with three Swedish women ten years younger than him, and unsophisticated enough to take them to his hotel room and order room service in the early morning. At some point the women fell asleep in his room. Mr Modi’s (female) defense attorney argued that her client was too unversed in the ways of the West to make sense of this situation in any but the most primal, dare I say primitive way:

She added: “It was a situation he had never come across before. I am told in India it is not heard of. Mr Modi was simply unable to know how to behave. Not surprisingly, he was aroused.”

The judge concurred:

After sentencing Modi, Judge Roberts said: “I suspect that this situation of having three women asleep in his bed and sofa would have been somewhat confusing. It was, of course, that situation that led him into temptation.”

“Temptation,” in this situation, meant undressing and mounting one of the sleeping women until another one woke up, saw what was going on and screamed. All in a night’s good time, the judge opined:

He added: “I don’t suppose it occurred to any of these four people that there was anything dangerous in going back to the hotel room. There is no suggestion that he lured them back with any dishonourable intentions. All four were affected by alcohol. It is unfortunate that having had their food, the women did not go home.”

I guess they should have know that their host was a sheltered Indian ruled by animal passions. Amazing how the celebrants of the oh-so civilized West can trip over themselves in a rush to denigrate entire religions for not respecting women’s bodies and rights, then use this sort of noble-savage argument to excuse crimes against women. Hey, here’s a thought experiment: what if Prashant had been — oh, nevermind.

The prosecution has just scored a major victory in Operation Meth Merchant (previous SM post here):

U.S. District Judge Harold Murphy refused Wednesday to toss out cases against dozens of South Asian merchants accused in the methamphetamine sting, rejecting the American Civil Liberties Union’s argument that police intentionally targeted South Asian merchants while ignoring white-owned stores.

As a reminder, here are the key objections the ACLU raised about this operation:

* Operation Meth Merchant resulted in the arrest of 49 people, 44 of whom are South Asian, and 33 of whom have the last name Patel.

* Operation Meth Merchant targeted 24 stores for investigation, 23 of which are owned by South Asians. This, despite the fact that approximately 80 percent of area stores are owned by whites or other ethnic groups, according to the ACLU’s investigation.

* The officials directing Operation Meth Merchant had evidence that at least 16 white-owned stores in the area sold products used to manufacture methamphetamine, and yet failed to investigate any of them. These stores include Avaco, Bell’s Smokeshop, Bi-Lo, Breezy Top, Citgo Quikmart, Dollar General, Family Dollar, Food Lion, Fred’s, Home Depot, Jerrell’s Food Mart, Lowe’s, Sam’s Club, and Wal-mart.

* The officials directing Operation Meth Merchant have failed to disclose the existence of any evidence against the vast majority of the 23 South-Asian-owned stores prior to targeting them for investigation.

The ACLU’s summary sheet is here. The motion for dismissal with details of the argument is here.

The judge saw it differently:

His 38-page ruling noted that the defense lacks even basic evidence showing discrimination, citing a magistrate judge’s earlier order that said allowing the group a chance to dig through more evidence would be authorizing a “fishing expedition.”

… And he echoed a previous ruling that “simply pointing out that most of the individual defendants are of Indian national origin is insufficient.”

The ruling is here (August 3, second item). The crux seems to be that according to the judge, the defense presented no evidence that the non-Indian-run stores above sold the items in question (e.g. cold medicine containing pseudoephedrine) in the specific knowledge that buyers intended to use them to make meth. In the sting on Indian-run stores, the buyers made statements about “cooking” that referred to meth. The defense argues that this does not mean the sellers understood the reference. In any case, since there was no sting on the non-Indian-run stores, how would one get the evidence either way? To me this still looks like a clear case of selective prosecution on an ethnic basis, but perhaps legal minds can pore over the documents and give us their more considered views.

A comment on my Hindi film music post from Kush Tandon earlier in the week got me thinking:

Where do you buy India/ Bollywood music in electronic from? I have browsed Rhapsody, they seem decent. I could not find much on iTunes. Is there some other place too?

Or is it all pirated and/ or through buddies?

No one responded to the comment at the time — is it because everyone is in fact downloading pirated desi music and films over the internet, and they’re not sure they should admit it?

There are a number of good explanations for why downloading is popular. First, not everyone lives near an Indo-Pak grocery/music store, and a lot of Desi stores aren’t very serious about getting current music, or a broad range of it. Second, so much of the music is kind of crappy and derivative to begin with (Hindi film producers often borrow bass-lines and samples from western or Arabic pop songs), so why worry about making sure the artist is adequately paid for his or her work?

Third, there’s never been any attempt from Indian record and film companies to crack down on downloads of their stuff in the diaspora. Grocery/music/video stores that sell pirated material are often raided, but there’s no desi equivalent of the RIAA or MPAA suing online pirates, or shutting down BitTorrent/filesharing sites. (Note: Kazaa just settled with American record companies for $100 million.)

And finally, there’s no desi equivalent of Itunes, where you can legally buy MP3 singles from CDs and be assured that your money is going to the label and the artist who made the music (any entrepeneurs out there? go for it, buddy).

What are your thoughts on piracy? Do you yourself download pirated music (note: if you normally use your real name in comments, here I would recommend an alias)? What is your “piracy to legal consumption” ratio? Would you spend $1.00 a song if a desi version of Itunes were available?

Kenyandesi posted this story on the News tab yesterday and then Ruchira kindly reminded me of it via email today, (Thanks, ladies!) so I thought I should probably blog about the latest bit of stupidity regarding arranged marriages:

Citing the potential bride’s protruding teeth, bad complexion and poor English, a family in Massachusetts called off an arranged marriage and filed a lawsuit for damages.

The Hindu family, residing in Belchertown, Mass., had agreed to an arrangement proposed by Hindu friends in Maryland to marry their niece, who lives in India, the Springfield Republican newspaper reported.

But the father of the groom-to-be, Vijai B. Pandey, 60, filed suit after family members saw the selected bride in New Delhi last August. The Pandeys, according to the lawsuit, were “extremely shocked to find … she was ugly … with protruded bad teeth, and couldn’t speak English to hold a conversation.” The woman’s complexion also was cited. [linkage]

There is only one thing of which I am a rabid fan and that is my home city, my ancestral homestead, New York New York. This is where my heart is (although I did leave a piece in San Francisco). It is the place that I feel safest post 9/11, safest from both terrorists and violent bigots, despite the fact that both have been active there. What can I say? It’s home.

Not only is it home, but New York is what I think of when I think of America. In a freudian slip, the other day I said “when I’m in America next” when what I meant was “when I’m in New York next,” particularly ironic since I am currently based in the midwest. And why not? New York was America’s first campital and 40% of Americans are descended from at least one person who came through Ellis Island. Growing up, if somebody told me to “Go back where I came from” I would reply “After you!” We’re all immigrants here.

This is why these two news stories from this month have been sitting in my craw, and I’ve put off posting them. In the first week of June, Assemblyman Hikind introduced legislation that he had been promising for some time, legislation that would allow:

law enforcement officials to “consider race and ethnicity as one of many factors that could be used in identifying persons who can be initially stopped, questioned, frisked and/or searched.” [Link]

Hikind is very clear about who he wants stopped — brown people:

“The individuals involved look basically like this,” Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn) said … brandishing a printout of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists - all with Arabic names, most with facial hair, some wearing turbans.

“Why should a policeman have to think twice before examining people of a particular group?” Hikind asked. “They all look a certain way.” [Link]

[Hikind’s website shows no reaction to recent accusation that seven black men may have plotted to blow up the Sears Tower, nor to the fact that half the London bombers were black, nor to various reports from the US government about SouthEastAsian plots.]

As we have blogged about several times before, The Supreme Court has been considering the case of Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld for most of this year. Today the court handed down a 5-3 decision (Chief Justice Roberts had to recuse himself) in favor of Hamdan. It was also a victory for his two lawyers, Indian American attorney Neal Katyal, and Cmdr. Charles Swift. It has been the most awaited decision of the year.

A great victory...at least for now

The Supreme Court today delivered a sweeping rebuke to the Bush administration, ruling that the military tribunals it created to try terror suspects violate both American military law and the Geneva Convention.

In a 5-to-3 ruling, the justices also rejected an effort by Congress to strip the court of jurisdiction over habeas corpus appeals by detainees at the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

And the court found that the plaintiff in the case, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, could not be tried on the conspiracy charge lodged against him because international military law requires that prosecutions focus on specific acts, not broad conspiracy charges. [Link]

The Court split along idealogical lines and Roberts had to recuse himself because The Court had overturned his ruling on this case when he was a still a lower court judge. Thomas hasn't been this unhappy since the Coke incident:

Justice Thomas took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench, the first time he has done so in his 15 years on the court. He said that the ruling would "sorely hamper the president's ability to confront and defeat a new and deadly enemy..." [Link]

Hamdan's other attorney, a JAG officer, issued a statement after the ruling:

Cmdr. Charles Swift, the Navy lawyer assigned by the military to represent Mr. Hamdan, said at a televised news conference held outside the Supreme Court that the logical next step would be for Mr. Hamdan to be tried either by a traditional military court martial, as provided for under the Geneva Convention, or by a federal court.

He called today's ruling "a return to our fundamental values."

"That return marks a high-water point," Commander Swift said. "It shows that we can't be scared out of who [we] are, and that's a victory, folks..." [Link]

He may be the “muslim Martin Luther” but author and activist Tariq Ramadan has been the object of controversy in the post 9-11 climate. In 2004, his visa was revoked by the department of homeland security because of the fear that he would use his

“position of prominence…to endorse or espouse terrorist activity.”

Despite all the suspicion, most evidence pointed to Ramadan being a scholar, not a terrorist. Furthermore, Ramadan is a Swiss citizen, and taught all over Europe, including at Oxford, with no mishaps or accidental bombings. So why the stall on the visa? Obviously, the feds didn’t enjoy Ramadan’s vocal criticism of the war against terrorism.

Recently, however, federal Judge Paul A. Crotty ordered the government to stop stalling on Ramadan’s visa for teaching at the University of Notre Dame. I went to school with Judge Crotty’s daughter and vaguely remember hearing him speak at a conference, but my respect for him doubled with this decision, but he is clearly not immune from the dreaded Legalese Virus.

Allowing the government to wait for ‘possible future discovery of statements’ would mean that the government could delay final adjudication indefinitely, evading constitutional review by its own failure to render a decision on Ramadan’s application. The Court will not allow this…

crikey. basically, the decision also slaps the knuckles of the DHS for assuming that there would be no judicial review of the visa denial. translate, if you will:

While the Executive may exclude an alien for almost any reason, it cannot do so solely because the Executive disagrees with the content of the alien’s speech and therefore wants to prevent the alien from sharing this speech with a willing American audience.

Take that, Patriot Act! And Professor—welcome to Indiana. Enjoy the football.

More about the decision can be read at PEN American Center, an organization which works to preserve the freedom to write and be read all over the world. For the hardy, here is Judge Crotty’s full decision in its technical, DHS-bashing splendor.

Alamo Rent A Car, one of the largest rental car agencies in the United States, recently got smacked down for blatant anti-Muslim discrimination [via DNSI]. In essence, Alamo tried to claim that it was OK to discriminate on the basis of religion to pander to the anti-Muslim bigotry of post 9-11 customers. This case was so clear cut an example of discrimination that the court didn’t even put the case to the jury.

Alamo meets its waterloo pandering to predjudice

Bilan Nur was hired by Alamo in 1999. With Alamo’s permission, she wore a head scarf during Ramadan of 1999 and 2000. However, after September 11th, Alamo said that wearing a scarf was against their dress code. Nur even offered to wear an Alamo scarf, but that that compromise was refused. In the end, she was fired.

According to the EEOC, here’s how the law works:

… the law allows employers to avoid accommodating [religious] requests if they can show undue hardship. And that has been defined in law to include financial considerations other than insignificant amounts. But … a company that argues it will lose customers because of its workers’ religious garb will lose in court — even if it could conceivably show some monetary harm ….the exception in the law does not apply to the discriminatory preferences of customers. [Link]

In this case:

the company’s regional manager admitted under questioning that the only hardship Alamo might suffer is the image that the firm has with customers. [Link]

And therefore,

The judge rejected a series of arguments by the company, including its contention that allowing her to wear the scarf — a clear sign of her religion in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks — would cause the firm undue hardship. [Link]

What appals me about this case is that

Alamo disciplined, suspended and terminated her employment following consultation with regional level human resources officials and in-house counsel. [Link]

This was not some irrational gut decision by a low level manager acting alone. This was a corporate decision - they seem to have felt a need to pander and furthermore, they seem to have believed that the courts would back their bigotry up. I’m glad to see that they were wrong, at least on the second point.

I woke up on Saturday morning, rolled out of bed and made a cuppa tea. “Terror plot near Toronto”, screamed my first email of the day and I almost choked on my chai masala (thanks, Abhi!). My blood pressure grew worse as I scoured the web for more and found only speculation, fabricated tie ins with Al Qaeda and fictitious “targets”. My five simple ‘W’s remained unanswered. Three days later a story has finally emerged in bits and pieces.

A report by the Toronto Star says the Canadian Security Intelligence Service began monitoring internet sites, which the suspects allegedly used, and in 2004 brought the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in on the case to facilitate a criminal investigation. Toronto mayor David Miller was informed of the investigation this past winter due to growing concerns about the group’s activity. Upon learning of their plot to build a bomb using ammonium nitrate, investigators intercepted the delivery of three tons of fertilizer to certain group members in a massive sting operation. There have also been reports of a connection between the Toronto group and two U.S. citizens, one was indicted while the other was arrested on terror charges earlier this year.

Shortly after the operation, on Friday night, RCMP officers arrested 17 Canadian residents on terror-related charges in a raid on their homes. Many of these suspects are long-time Canadian residents, five of them are teens under 18 years of age while the oldest two in the group are 30 and 43 years of age.

Details of the suspects are being revealed slowly as trusty journos bang on doors and beat on windows to answer that one as-yet elusive ‘W’. Who?

It is time once again for the annual North American South Asian Bar Association (NASABA) conference. This year it is being held in Atlanta on the June 16th weekend. I have attended this worthwhile conference the past two years, 2004 in Los Angeles and 2005 in Washington D.C. No, I am not a lawyer just a lawyer groupie (although I pass myself off as a tort lawyer when mingling amongst their kind). In addition to getting to attend fantastic seminars, NASABA is also a great place to flirt with federal clerks as well as meet desi attorneys who will one day run for office. Just read my recap from last year. Unfortunately, despite their gracious invitation, I won’t be able to make it down to Atlanta this year, but all you lawyers (and lawyer groupies) should:

More than 400 South Asian judges, attorneys and law students will gather in Atlanta for the third annual national convention of the North American South Asian Bar Association (NASABA), June 16-18, marking a year of progress for the South Asian legal community.

Achievements in the U.S. and Canada to be acknowledged at the conference include high-profile South Asian legal appointments, diversity strides and greater representation of South Asian concerns in business, entertainment and education. Expert speakers will cover more than a dozen topics at this year’s conference, “Networking to Influence, Influencing the Network: South Asian Lawyers Changing the Flow of the Mainstream.”

Seminars, workshops and networking events will provide thought-provoking and productive sessions for attendees to review the year’s significant strides and establish new objectives. Representing more than 5,000 South Asian American attorneys, this year’s NASABA convention is expected to be larger than previous gatherings. The Convention, for one memorable weekend, will bring together attorneys from firms, large and small, from small private companies to large public companies, like CompuCredit Corporation, a convention-level sponsor, from the public and private interest sectors, from all branches of government, and from the world of academia.

The keynote this year will be given by Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal (see previous SM posts 1,2,3,4). Here is a schedule which includes a list of all the great seminar panelists they have coming out.

“outrageous, unlawful and a breach of accepted moral standards.”- Sir Sydney Kentridge QC

A British court has just issued a decision that has significant implications for both the former inhabitants of Diego Garcia and for the U.S. military:

In a decision that could have ramifications for the huge US airbase on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, a British high court ruled earlier this month that attempts by the British government to keep the former residents of the Chagos islands from returning to the islands (which include Diego Garcia), even after they had won a court ruling in 2000 to do so, were “outrageous, unlawful and a breach of accepted moral standards.”

The British government expelled the Chagossians, the original inhabitants of the islands, some 40 years ago so the US could build the airbase at Diego Garcia, but a British court ruled in 2000 that the islanders had a right to return to their home. After the decision, then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook said the British government would not appeal the ruling.

But under pressure from the US, London changed directions in 2004, using what was called “Royal Perogative” to overrule the original decision. Government lawyers had argued that in a territory like Diego Garcia, the Queen (and her ministers) have unlimited power and can use Royal Perogative powers in these territories, despite the fact that she lost the right to use such powers in Britain in the 17th century. [Link]

NPR’s Morning Edition also featured a story about this on Tuesday morning. Roughly 2000 people were forced to leave Diego Garcia at the hands of the British in the 1960s. Domestic animals were gassed and most inhabitants were relocated to slums in the nation of Mauritius. The expulsion by the British involved a deal that would lease the island to the U.S. who needed it as a strategic base during the Cold War (good place for long-range bombers to take off from). The trade? The U.S. gave the Brits the Polaris missile system. About 2000 U.S. military personnel now live there. Ironic when you consider the number of people forced to leave was almost exactly the same.

As most of you surely know, USA TODAY broke the story yesterday that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been sifting through all of our phone records in order to see if they can establish “patterns” of terrorist activity. This post serves as a follow-up to my post last December.

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews…

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added. [Link]

The ACLU, which defends our civil liberties, was not happy:

“Both the attorney general and the president have lied to the American people about the scope and nature of the NSA’s program,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “It’s clearly not focused on international calls and clearly not just focused on terrorists… . It’s like adding more hay on the haystack to find that one needle.” [Link]

Oh, and by the way, did you guys know:

One government lawyer who has participated in negotiations with telecommunications providers said the Bush administration has argued that a company can turn over its entire database of customer records — and even the stored content of calls and e-mails — because customers “have consented to that” when they establish accounts. The fine print of many telephone and Internet service contracts includes catchall provisions, the lawyer said, authorizing the company to disclose such records to protect public safety or national security, or in compliance with a lawful government request. [Link]

I for one defend President Bush’s data mining program wholeheartedly. A person who cares about and is entrusted to maintain the security and success of ANY institution the way George W. Bush obviously cares for the United States of America, is expected, nay…duty-bound I should say, to keep track of their “organization.” If you guys disagree with this view then you obviously don’t understand the fact that with great power comes great responsibility.

My tremendous sense of responsibility is the very reason that I have been data mining and tapping the telephone calls of my fellow-bloggers here in our North Dakota headquarters for the past two years. Let me tell you a bit of what I’ve learned from this patriotic tool.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered is running a three part series this week that takes a look at the 1965 Immigration Act. As mentioned at various times on SM, this is the law which is responsible for many of our parents being allowed to legally enter the U.S., as well as the reason many of us are born citizens. The series by NPR is particularly relevant because one can draw comparisons between the immigration debate then and now. There are three to four million people standing in line waiting to get into America legally right now.

The FULL story is an audio story (and contains rich detail in the form of short interviews-12 min long). I am excerpting the abridged transcript below, although you are much better off listening to the whole story. First, one must remember the immigration laws before the 1965 Act:

“The law was just unbelievable in its clarity of racism,” says Stephen Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University. “It declared that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race. The Nordics were superior to the Alpines, who in turn were superior to the Mediterraneans, and all of them were superior to the Jews and the Asians.”

By the 1960s, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese and Italians were complaining that immigration quotas discriminated against them in favor of Western Europeans. The Democratic Party took up their cause, led by President John F. Kennedy. In a June 1963 speech to the American Committee on Italian Migration, Kennedy called the system of quotas in place back then “nearly intolerable…” [Link]

So Kennedy and the Democrats saw the political advantages to updating the racist laws in order to give an equal shot to everyone in the world, but Kennedy died before the ‘65 act was passed. When Lyndon Johnson signed it into law he went out of his way to state that he didn’t think anything would come of it. Neither Johnson, nor most of the government, thought that people would really line up to come to the United States:

“This bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions,” Johnson said at the signing ceremony. “It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

Looking back, Johnson’s statement is remarkable because it proved so wrong. [Link]

I wanted to provide SM readers with a quick update on the trials of the ice cream truck driver and his son from Lodi, California. As you may remember the father’s prosecution resulted in a mistrial due to a hung jury, while the son was convicted on one charge of providing material support to terrorists and three counts of lying to the FBI (he faces up to 39 years in prison). Last Friday the U.S. Attorney’s office said that it will have another go at the elder Hayat:

Federal prosecutors announced Friday that they will retry a Lodi man whose first trial on charges that he lied to FBI agents during a terrorism investigation ended in a mistrial last month after half the jury voted for acquittal on one of the counts.

U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. set June 5 as the new trial date for Pakistani American Umer Hayat, 48, on two counts that he made false statements about his son’s training at a terrorist camp in Pakistan in 2003-04 and about his own knowledge of such camps.

“In the post-9/11 environment in which we live,” said U.S. Atty. McGregor Scott, “lying to the FBI in the course of a terrorism investigation is serious misconduct. False information may result in agents losing valuable time to foil a deadly plot, or perhaps bringing the wrong person or persons under suspicion.”

After deliberating for more than a week, jurors in the first trial reported April 25 that they were hopelessly deadlocked. According to prosecutors, the jurors split 7 to 5 in favor of conviction on one count and 6 to 6 on the other. [Link]

This wasn’t about just one holdout juror. Half the jury thought that there was reasonable doubt, especially considering the fact that the father was accused of providing misleading statements in order to protect his own son AND the fact that the FBI used shady interviewing techniques. Umer Hayat’s attorney sounded confident with respect to the outcome of a second trial:

“Continuing to pursue Umer Hayat on the charge of lying will have a chilling effect on people in the community coming forward and talking to the FBI,” Griffin said. “Umer Hayat did not have to go to the FBI. He voluntarily went to the FBI to talk with them and then found he was being accused of being a terrorist. When they couldn’t prove that, they accused him of being a liar.” [Link]

As a side note, Hayat’s homecoming upon his release was bittersweet:

Hayat’s homecoming was a mixture of joy and sorrow: Moments after learning of his immediate release Monday morning, Hayat’s attorney told him that his father, who had lived with him in Lodi, died Saturday. [Link]

I was quite sad all day yesterday after I learned that the rights of a Hindu family in a small town in upstate New York had been trampled upon. It seems that in every direction that we gaze these days someone else in America is losing a fundamental right that our founding fathers believed in and bled for. In this case it is the right to bear cows for protection. The New York Times recently reported on this gripping story:

The Voiths lament on their front porch. Their cow may now be fifteen minutes away, but they still have their faith and each other.

To Stephen and Linda Voith, keeping cows at their home on Main Street in Angelica, N.Y., a tiny rural village, is a central facet of their Hindu beliefs.

To local officials, though, keeping the Voiths’ growing herd outside village limits is a matter of law, not religion.

The Appellate Division of State Supreme Court in Rochester recently agreed, upholding a lower court ruling that prevented a lawyer for the couple from raising the issue of religious freedom when the village won an injunction against them. In 2003, an acting State Supreme Court justice found the Voiths in violation of a law against keeping livestock on parcels smaller than 10 acres.

“We’re being denied our right to practice our religion, because it seems like such a threat to the status quo in this country,” Mr. Voith said, calling attention to a dairy farm across the street behind their home.

The village attorney, Raymond W. Bulson, said the law does not single out any religion and described the dispute as a quality-of-life matter.

“You move to a village because you want the amenities,” Mr. Bulson said. “If you move there to have those amenities, you don’t want a cow next door. I’m sure their religious beliefs are sincere, but that was never an issue…” [Link]

Bigots. They aren’t even ashamed. They just come out and say it. “You don’t want a cow next door.” I guess it doesn’t even matter to Mr. Bulson that the cow in question is both young and in love. This isn’t just a story about religious discrimination but also one about forbidden love.

Mahvish Khan has spent a lot of time at Guantanamo Bay lately. Born in 1978, Mahvish is the daughter of Pashtun Pakistani parents who met while in medical school in Peshawar. Mahvish is a US citizen, speaks Pashto, practices Islam, and studies law at the University of Miami.

It’s clearly been a heavy few years for the sister, and in response, she took a remarkably deep, courageous course of action. She found out which law firms were representing Guantanamo detainees, and pestered them to take her on as an assistant and interpreter. She found an interested firm and underwent a 6-month security check.

She’s now been to Guantanamo nine times. Her first-person account of visiting the detainees, published in Sunday’s Washington Post, is a beautiful, powerful piece of testimony, made all the more so by the poignancy of her cultural connection to the diminished men she found.

At 80, Haji Nusrat — detainee No. 1009 — is Guantanamo Bay’s oldest prisoner. A stroke 15 years ago left him partly paralyzed. He cannot stand up without assistance and hobbles to the bathroom behind a walker. Despite his paralysis, his swollen legs and feet are tightly cuffed and shackled to the floor. (…)
In the middle of our meeting, he says to me: ” Bachay .” My child. “Look at my white beard. They have brought me here with a white beard. I have done nothing at all. I have not said a single word against the Americans.” (…)
The old man looks at me. “You are a daughter to me,” he says. “Think of me as a father.” I nod, aligning and realigning pistachio shells on the table as I interpret.
As the meeting ends and we collect our things to go, the old man opens his arms to me and I embrace him. For several moments, he prays for me as Peter watches: “Insha’allah, God willing, you will find a home that makes you happy. Insha’allah, you will be a mother one day… . “

The sister is no romantic. She states her belief that the fifteen men her firm is representing are guilty of no wrong-doing, but she limits her claim to those men. She paints a subtle picture of life on the base, in which the U.S. soldiers are pleasant and welcoming. It’s a fascinating account of a place out of space and time, deliberately established and kept that way, sad, tragic and in no small measure absurd.

From our News Tab we got word that late on Thursday the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta unsealed and indictment against a Pakistani American student at Georgia Tech, as well as another Atlanta-based U.S. citizen who was arrested a few days ago in Dhaka. From CNN:

A Georgia Tech university student has been indicted for material support of terrorism, and another Atlanta-area man has been arrested in Bangladesh in connection with the case, authorities said Thursday.

Though the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Atlanta on Thursday unsealed an indictment against Syed Ahmed, 21, details remained sealed. A grand jury indicted him March 23, the same day he was arrested.

“The charge against Mr. Ahmed is serious and involves national security and will be prosecuted with that in mind,” U.S. Attorney David Nahmias said in a news release.

Ahmed is not accused of committing a terrorist act; he is charged only with providing material support, the federal prosecutor said…

On Monday, Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, was arrested in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, according to his sisters. He was handed over to the FBI and put on a plane to New York on Thursday, the federal source said. [Link]

We have to remember that grand juries will usually indict anyone with a pulse. More details about the actual indictment will hopefully follow in the next several weeks and we will try to keep an eye on it. I am assuming that this will turn out to be more than just part of the “taking pictures while brown” phenomenon.

Ahmed is studying mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech. He is a naturalized American citizen and the papers detailing his arrest last month on charges related to terrorism have his parents shocked and surprised….

Ahmed’s family suspects a videotape of their son made of a building, is what authorities are suspicious of. The family reportedly allowed federal agents to take computer information from their son’s room. [Link]

Indo-Canadian Akhil Sachdeva, an accountant originally from Delhi, is suing the U.S. government for his shabby treatment in the aftermath of 9/11. But does he have a case?

Akhil Sachdeva

Chaining him to a bench at the FBI’s Manhattan office on Dec. 20, 2001, federal agents demanded to know his religious and political beliefs, asked whether he had taken flying lessons and sought his personal views about the suicide hijackers…

… 30 or 40 armed agents barged into the uncle’s home where he was staying and took him away. At the FBI’s offices, they shackled his legs to a steel bench and interrogated him for four to five hours, never offering him a call to his family or lawyer, he said…

Sachdeva said he was later taken to the Passaic County Jail, where he was strip-searched and put in a cell with dozens of inmates… He and the other seven plaintiffs say their biggest fear came from guards who threatened them and the police dogs that were routinely paraded. “… suddenly there are eight or 10 officers holding dogs, then they took us in small corridors and pushed us against the walls, and the dogs were two inches away,” Sachdeva said. “They started barking and it was so terrifying.”‘They… pushed us against the walls, and the dogs were two inches away’

Other inmates called them terrorists, and one punched him in the face…

“One day I have everything, the next day they destroyed my life and I was not even charged for anything… I had done no crime… how can they treat people that way?” [Link]

The survivors of the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking of 1986 have just filed a $10B reparations suit against the government of Libya because of information which came out in 2004 about Libya’s role:

… the lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, and it seeks $10 billion in compensatory damages, as well as unspecified punitive damages, from Libya, its long-time leader, Muammar Qadhafi, and the five convicted militants, all of whom were members of the notorious group Abu Nidal Organisation (ANO). [Link]

The Bombay-Karachi-Frankfurt-JFK flight was taken over in Karachi by a Middle Eastern terror group called Abu Nidal. Four men dressed as Pakistani security guards and bristling with arms got on board the Boeing 747. Twenty people were massacred on board:The hijackers had intended to crash the jumbo jet into Tel Aviv

Flight attendants were able to alert the cockpit crew using intercom, allowing the pilot, co-pilot and flight engineer to escape through a hatch in the cockpit, effectively grounding the aircraft…

… flight attendants surreptitiously declined to collect some of the United States passports and hid other United States passports from the hijackers… [Link]

Sometimes it’s better to be a citizen of a subcontinental country:

When [Jordanian terrorist Zayd Safarini] arrived at the seat of Rajesh Kumar, a 29-year-old California resident who had recently been naturalized as an American citizen, Safarini ordered Kumar to go to the front doorway of the aircraft and to kneel with his hands behind his head… Shortly thereafter he shot Kumar in the head and pushed him out the door onto the tarmac below… [Link]

Surviving passenger Jay Grantier, a resident of the state of Washington, said, “This was an attack on America. The terrorists murdered their first victim because he was an American, and when they ordered the cabin crew to collect all our passports, it was pretty obvious that they intended to kill more of us in the hours to come.” [Link]

The ACLU just filed sworn informant testimony in the Georgia meth merchant case showing law enforcement targeted Gujarati shopkeepers because they spoke poor English, entrapped them, then selectively prosecuted based on race (thanks, technophobicgeek):

Documents filed by the A.C.L.U. yesterday include a sworn statement from an informant in the sting, saying that federal investigators sent informants only to Indian-owned stores, “because the Indians’ English wasn’t good.” The informant said investigators ignored the informant’s questions about why so many South-Asian-owned stores were visited in the sting.

Other filings said prosecutors had several tips that more than a dozen white-owned stores were selling the same ingredients, but failed to follow up on them. According to a sworn statement from a witness, law enforcement officials tipped off a white store owner about the investigation and recommended ways to avoid scrutiny…

Of 629 convenience stores in the six-county area in the sting, 80 percent are owned or operated by whites, according to the A.C.L.U.’s court filing, but fewer than 1 percent of the stores in the sting are white-owned or operated. The filing said the clerk at the only white-operated store was known widely as a methamphetamine addict whose husband was in prison for making the drug. [Link]

I think we have a new rallying cry:

“Selling Sudafed while South Asian is not a crime,” said Christina Alvarez, an attorney with the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project. “The U.S. Constitution requires police to investigate people based on evidence, not ethnicity…”

By the time Operation Meth Merchant was completed, almost 20 percent of the South-Asian-owned stores in the area were indicted, while only 0.2 percent of stores owned by whites or other ethnic groups were similarly accused. All in all, South-Asian-owned stores were nearly 100 times more likely to be targeted…

“They only sent me to Indian stores…they wanted me to say things like ‘I need it to go cook’ or ‘Hurry up, I’ve got to get home and finish a cook’,” said an undercover informant in a sworn statement attached to the ACLU’s legal papers. “The officers told me that the Indians’ English wasn’t good, and they wouldn’t say a lot so it was important for me to make these kinds of statements…”

“Northwest Georgia is made no safer by police targeting a particular racial group while giving a free pass to those they have good reason to believe are actually making and selling meth,” said Deepali Gokhale, organizer of the Racial Justice Campaign Against Operation Meth Merchant… [Link]

The facts aren’t all on the table yet, but from a distance it smells like Tulia all over again, and both times in the South. I can’t muster much sympathy for people who knowingly supplied tweak traffickers, selective prosecution or no. But if it turns out the cops entrapped shop clerks with poor English proficiency by using inscrutable drug jargon, it would be ethically disgusting.

What also bothers me is that all the first-gen Gujarati shopkeepers I’ve met seem socially conservative and anti-drugs at a visceral level. If I were to play ‘Name the Criminal Mastermind,’ anything drug-related would be pretty far down the list.

As Dave mentioned earlier, the lawyer arguing one of the most important cases in front of the Supreme Court right now is a desi - Neal Kumar Katyal.

The future Justice Katyal?

At a panel discussion at the Brookings Institution on the Senate hearings on Judge Roberts, moderator Stuart Taylor, a columnist for the National Journal, pointedly asked panelist Katyal if a future Democratic president nominated him to the Supreme Court, which could well be, would he also be as evasive as Roberts was at the hearings?… [Link]

To give you a sense of why this is a plausible conjecture, here are just some of the highlights from his resume:

• He clerked for both Justice Breyer and Judge Guido Calabresi of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. He also worked for now Justice Roberts the summer after he graduated from Yale Law. [Link]
• “In 1998-99, Katyal served as National Security Adviser to the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice” [Link]
• “He … served as Vice President Al Gore’s co-counsel in the Supreme Court election dispute of 2000” [Link]
• He “represented the Deans of most major private law schools in the University of Michigan affirmative-action case” that was settled in 2003. [Link]
• In 2004, he was responsible for the case that “struck down the Guantanamo trial system as unconstitutional and a violation of the Geneva Conventions.” [Link]
• In 2005, at age 34, Katyal was named one of the the leading “40 lawyers under 40” by the National Law Journal
• He is listed as a speaker by ICM, one of the largest literary and talent agencies around. They also represent Mel Gibson, Denzel Washington and Jodie Foster.
• Even with all the time he spends in court, he’s a Professor at Georgetown Law.
• And yes, ladies, he’s married. That means even his Punjabi parents are happy!

Katyal is the lead lawyer in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, Amrit Singh is one of the lawyers involved in Ali et. al. v. Rumsfeld, and Vanita Gupta argued the Tulia case. Looks like we’re doing alright in terms of representing in the field of civil liberties, no?

Related posts: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, The art of the book review, The “Devils” Advocates

Sri Lankans Saluja Thangaraja, who is now 26, and Ahilan Nadarajah have been sitting in a U.S. Federal pen for 4 years now. Why? They are victims in a sense of the politics that resulted from 9/11. The SJ Mercury news picks this off the AP wire:

A Sri Lankan woman fleeing persecution in her native country has been released after spending more than four years in federal detention on allegations that she entered the country illegally.

Saluja Thangaraja, 26, was freed from the Otay Mesa detention center late Monday after the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the release of a Sri Lankan man who also spent more than four years in the same facility.

The court ordered the release of Ahilan Nadarajah on March 17, saying the government was violating federal law by holding him even though he wasn’t criminally charged and couldn’t be deported in the foreseeable future.

Nadarajah and Thangaraja both fled Sri Lanka and stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border in October 2001 and were charged with being in the U.S. without a valid visa. Both were granted political asylum but the government refused to release them.

In case you are keeping score at home, this is yet another example of the Executive Branch selectively ignoring the power of the Judicial Branch in the name of “protecting” Americans. The fact that these two were stopped at the Mexican border may have incentivized the government to over-prosecute this case so as to justify their specious arguments connecting illegal immigration on the Mexican border to terrorism. Thangaraja and Nadarajah were kept in jail while the original ruling was appealed by the government. As you have probably already guessed, the U.S. government insisted these two were LTTE terrorists despite evidence to the contrary.

As I write this post, the Supreme Court of the United States is hearing oral argument in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, an important case involving the president’s constitutional and statutory authority in times of war, and the legality of military commissions set up to try detainees captured in the war on terror. The facts of the case:

Petitioner Salid Ahmed Hamdan is a detainee being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He was captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and admits to being a personal bodyguard and driver to Osama bin Laden. He was charged with conspiring to commit acts of terrorism, and was to be tried before a military commission, which is a special adjudicatory body created by Presidential order to try individuals accused of war crimes. [Link]

The procedural history, or how the present case made its way to the Supreme Court:

Before trial, Hamdan challenged the lawfulness of the military commission that was to try him, and in November 2004, the D.C. District Court enjoined the military commission proceedings as illegal under the Geneva Convention and the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reversed, holding that military commissions had been duly authorized by Congress; that relief was unavailable under the Geneva Convention because it did not create privately enforceable rights and because it did not apply to Al Qaeda; and that the UCMJ did not preclude Hamdan’s trial before military commissions. [Link]

Hamdan appealed to the Supreme Court and in November 2005, the Supreme Court agreed to review the case. Chief Justice John Roberts recused himself, as he served on the D.C. Circuit Court panel that upheld the war crimes tribunals. (Some are calling for Justice Antonin Scalia to step aside as well because of comments he recently made in Switzerland, see here.)

Respected desi law professor Neal Katyal is arguing the case on behalf of Hamdan. There are two questions (.pdf) before the Supreme Court. The first is a threshold inquiry regarding the Court’s jurisdiction to hear the case. The government contends that the Court should dismiss the case on jurisdictional grounds:

[The government] argue[s] that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA), enacted by Congress after the Supreme Court granted certiorari in this case, preclude pre-trial review by establishing an exclusive post-trial review process for all Guantanamo detainees. In addition, the Government has argued, even absent the DTA, the Court should withhold ruling on the merits until a final decision has been reached in accordance with traditional abstention doctrine. Petitioner, on the other hand, argues that Congress specifically modified the effective date provisions of the DTA to ensure that the Supreme Court could decide this case.[Link]

petitioner argues [in part] that the military commission that seeks to try him is not authorized to do so under U.S. law. [H]e argues that such authorization must be explicitly provided by Congress. Respondents dispute whether such explicit authorization is required, pointing to the historical practice of the President convening military commissions as evidence of his inherent “Commander-in-Chief” power to do so. [Link]

The ToI claims two tourists from Morocco and the UAE were deported for making out in Mumbai. What say we pass the hat so the thin khaki line gets laid once in awhile?

Slapping hussies in Meerut

Ibtisay Lamyani, 27, and Alfasar Nasir Abdul Hussain Ali, 37, were visiting India separately and had met at the Gateway of India. They were necking near the Metro cinema junction on Tuesday afternoon when a woman constable from Azad Maidan police station decided to intervene. She warned them against indecent behaviour in a public place. [Link]

The ToI’s smug commentary mirrors the sourpuss constable:

When they argued back, she demanded they show their passports. As luck would have it Lamyani’s visa had expired… Not chastened in the least, they promptly got into a clinch again. [Link]

The female tourist saw the director’s cut of Bombay (now with behind-the-bars footage), and both tourists were deported:

The police then submitted a chargesheet to the court which convicted Lamyani to a day’s imprisonment… Ali was also fined. They were both deported to their respective countries on the same night. [Link]

India Welcomes You.

Related posts: Bitter much?, Do Not Touch!, No sex please, we’re Indian, There is no place to hide it in India, Sex (gasp) in India: juxtaposition, Those legs are weapons of mass distraction, apparently, Indian Maxim is out to save lives, Dress Code

In 2000, a Muslim girl named Shabina Begum enrolled in Denbigh High School in Luton, England. The school required students to wear uniforms, and the uniforms were developed in consideration of the fact that approximately 80% of the students at Denbigh were Muslim:

In devising a suitable uniform, the school went to immense trouble to accommodate the religious and cultural preferences of the pupils and their families. There was consultation with parents, students, staff and the Imams of the three local mosques. One version of the uniform was the shalwar kameez (or kameeze), a sleeveless smock-like dress with a square neckline, worn over a shirt, tie and loose trousers which taper at the ankles. [Link]

In accordance with her religious beliefs and consistent with the school’s uniform requirements, Shabina wore a salwar kameez, or “shalwar kameez” as noted above. She did so for the first two years of her time at Denbigh. However, she later determined that the salwar kameez would not be appropriate for her to wear.

Her brother Shuweb Rahman says that “as Shabina became older she took an increasing interest in her religion” and through her interest in religion “discovered that the shalwar kameez was not an acceptable form of dress for Muslim women in public places.” [In 2002, Shabina] turned up at school wearing a long shapeless black gown known as a jilbab. [Link]

The school’s response? The assistant head master told Shabina to “go home and change.” She went home and never came back.

Shabina sued, claiming that her freedom to manifest her religion was violated. Yesterday, five Law Lords unanimously disagreed, holding that

there was no interference with the respondent’s [i.e., Shabina’s] right to manifest her belief in practice or observance. [Link]

there were three schools in the area at which the wearing of the jilbab was permitted…. There is, however, no evidence to show that there was any real difficulty in her attending one or other of these schools…. [Link]

No, I’m just kidding. There is not a new Law & Order show in the works. Unbeknownst to me, the U.K. actually has an entire unit of people, the Forced Marriage Unit, which reviews cases of human rights violations as pertaining to forced marriages:

The Forced Marriage Unit sees around 250 cases a year. “There used to be confusion between forced and arranged marriages,” explains a member of unit staff. “They were seen as being part of a certain culture. But that’s changing now. Forced marriage is not a religious or cultural issue - it is a global human rights abuse”. Forced marriage means just that - where a victim (one was 13 years old) is told they have to get married and they don’t want to.

Cases can be difficult, as the young person doesn’t usually want to see their parents get into trouble. “As well as providing guidance, if we know in advance that someone is about to be forced into marriage, we can work with partners organisations to find an appropriate way to support the victim. If the victim goes overseas, our consular staff will work with the local police to do what they properly can to help the victim. In extreme cases this can mean helping to bring them back to the UK if this is what the victim wants.”

The BBC is reporting that the FMU is unveiling a new campaign, complete with awareness posters like the one seen to the right:

The campaign by the government’s Forced Marriage Unit (FMU) is backed by actor and writer Meera Syal and former EastEnders star Ameet Chana.

More than 250 cases are reported to the FMU each year, most of which involve links to south Asian countries.

A decision by the government is also expected soon on whether to outlaw forced marriages.

The new drive will include poster and television campaigns and radio and press adverts…

It will highlight the difference between an arranged marriage and a forced marriage, which is one conducted without the full consent of both parties and under duress. [Link]

We’d be forever grateful to our U.K. readers if they give us the heads up on any television or radio ads they’ve seen that get posted to the internet. I wasn’t able to find other versions of the posters but I am sure they will pop up soon. Not to make light of this very serious and worthwhile effort but the funny thing is that the poster to the right is vague enough that it may send casual passerbys (who are also committment-phobes) into an anxiety attack about an impending non-forced marriage. I’m just saying.

Many of you may remember my previous post about the two Lodi, CA men (father and son) being tried for terrorism:

U.S. v. Hamid Hayat and Umer Hayat

Federal criminal charges alleging that a 47-year-old California father and his 22-year-old son lied to the FBI about training at and/or visiting al Qaeda terrorist and jihadi training camps in Pakistan. (June 7, 2005)

The Los Angeles Times provides details from their ongoing trial:

In a 2004 visit to a clandestine camp in Pakistan, Umer Hayat said he witnessed nearly 1,000 terrorist trainees — masked like “ninja turtles” — slashing curved swords at dummies with images of President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In a videotaped interrogation by FBI agents shown in federal court Tuesday, Hayat said trainees at the camp allegedly attended by his son also practiced pole vaulting “like 50 feet” so they could leap rivers.

Hayat, 47, an ice cream truck driver, and his son Hamid, 23, both of Lodi, are on trial in Sacramento. Hamid Hayat is accused of attending a terrorist training camp, and both are accused of lying to federal agents.

The son is the one who the FBI thinks visited the terrorist training camp and he faces up to 39 years in prison. The dad, who faces up to 16 years in prison, is basically accused of trying to protect his son by covering up the facts. Here is the part that got my attention though. I have seen this a thousand times on episodes of NYPD Blue or The Shield, but it caught me off guard to see it in real life, even though I know how it’s done. Check it out:

As in the videotaped interrogation of Hamid Hayat shown earlier in the trial, the FBI agents did most of the talking and sometimes appeared to reassure the Hayats, who speak halting English, about their actions.

FBI agent Timothy Harrison described attending training camps in Pakistan as “an important part of growing up there.” FBI agent Gary Schaaf characterized terrorist camps as a rite of passage for Pakistani males. Another agent described Umer Hayat’s visit to the camp as the equivalent of a father inspecting a child’s college campus.

Defense attorney Johnny L. Griffin said Umer Hayat was “psychologically bullied and emotionally pressured into doing whatever the FBI agents wanted him to say or do.”

Why the hell didn’t they have a lawyer present? Were they tricked into speaking on the record without one because they didn’t understand English too well, or because they just didn’t want one?

The Solomon Amendment is a Federal law which directs that certain Federal funds be withheld from recipient colleges and universities that do not grant military recruiters access to their campuses on a level equal to that provided to any other employer.

The Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights (FAIR), an association of law schools and professors that oppose discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, alleged that the Solomon Amendment infringed on its First Amendment freedoms of speech and association due to the military’s discriminatory recruitment practices (i.e., “don’t ask, don’t tell”). (See Abhi’s previous post on the case here.)

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled against FAIR yesterday, issuing an opinion [.pdf] that upholds the constitutionality of the statute and that in effect gives FAIR three-snaps in a Z-formation (i.e., the “Zorro snap”). (While some legal commentators predicted a unanimous outcome, I honestly did not think a case this contested in the public sphere would yield an 8-0 result.)

Joan Biskupic of USA TODAY described the Court’s reasoning:

“Accommodating the military’s message does not affect the law schools’ speech, because the schools are not speaking when they host interviews and recruiting receptions.”

[T]he basic communications required of colleges were bulletin board notices and e-mails [which] hardly could be compared to the kind of “compelled” government speech that has been invalidated through the years, such as a West Virginia law that required schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and to salute the American flag, or a New Hampshire law that ordered the state motto — “Live Free or Die” — to be on license plates. [Link]

As this astute (and hopefully single) desi notes on her blog, Mia Culpa:

The decision boosts the Bush administration as it struggles to maintain recruiting levels to wage wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a defeat for Harvard, Yale, Columbia and other universities that accused the government of intruding on academic freedom. [Link]

Gurbaj Singh Multani, a Sikh student in Québec, was playing during recess when, oops, his kirpan, a ceremonial Sikh dagger, fell out of his clothing. The mother of another student noticed, and minutes later the principal of the school, Danielle Descoteaux, informed Gurbaj that he would not be permitted to attend the school so long as he continued to carry this “weapon” on his person.

The school board agreed with Descoteaux’s initial reaction, stating that the kirpan violated its code of conduct, which prohibits the carrying of weapons. The board’s council of commissioners upheld that decision, but told Gurbaj and his parents that Gurbaj would be permitted to wear a kirpan-shaped pendant or a kirpan that was made of some other material (e.g., plastic or wood), not metal. Gurbaj’s father sued, claiming his son’s rights under the Canadian Charter were violated.

The Supreme Court of Canada unanimously sided with Gurbaj’s father, holding that, “The council of commissioners’ decision prohibiting [Gurbaj] from wearing his kirpan to school infringes his freedom of religion,” as guaranteed by Section 1 of that Charter.

The Court described the importance of this specific right as applied to Gurbaj:

Religious tolerance is a very important value of Canadian society. If some students consider it unfair that [Gurbaj] may wear his kirpan to school while they are not allowed to have knives in their possession, it is incumbent on the schools to discharge their obligation to instil in their students this value that is at the very foundation of our democracy. A total prohibition against wearing a kirpan to school undermines the value of this religious symbol and sends students the message that some religious practices do not merit the same protection as others. Accommodating [Gurbaj] and allowing him to wear his kirpan under certain conditions demonstrates the importance that our society attaches to protecting freedom of religion and to showing respect for its minorities. The deleterious effects of a total prohibition… outweigh its salutary effects.

The recent verdict in a scandalous Delhi killing argues the well-connected can still literally get away with murder. Our Most Favored Flatulation Guy Trebay summarized the case in the Village Voice in ‘99:

A man refused a late-night drink at a tony hot spot pulls out a gun and fires it twice… the alleged killer was the son of a former cabinet minister, his victim was a onetime model, the bar was in the most stylish shopping complex in the city, and the murderer waltzed away in front of hundreds…

Demanding whiskey, Sharma was told by Malini Ramani that he could have a sip of her drink for 1000 rupees, or about $35, her sister claims. “It was a normal remark, and I guess only a madman would react in such a violent way,” Malini would later say. Sharma apparently approached Lal next and, when she told him the bar was closed, pulled out a .22 and fired. It was the second bullet that caught Lal in the forehead. Sharma then walked to the courtyard and smiled his way out through the crowd. [Link]

Seven years on, it’s not that the tabloids beat the broadsheets, it’s that every broadsheet has turned into a tabloid:What India lacked until lately: a headless body in a topless bar

Since liberalizing its trade policies in the early ’90s, the vast subcontinent has become a kind of dumping ground for Western culture. It’s a phenomenon observable in everything from the upper-class vogue for New Age anodynes (reiki and Viennese voodoo are currently the rage) to the more obvious glut of MTV.

What India lacked until lately… was Amy Fisher­-Joey Buttafuoco­-style saturation coverage. It lacked a headless body in a topless bar. In the weeks since Lal’s shooting, the capital’s major papers have printed dozens of stories daily under headlines that wouldn’t be out of place in the Post… In a country where Hindu newspapers still print pages of ads for traditionally arranged marriages, and where such stop-the-presses headlines as “Pachyderm Tramples Tigress” are commonplace, there’s an unfulfilled hunger for the Dynasty-style dross of the West. Not since the days of serial killer Charles Sobhraj has a crime so deliciously fit the bill. [Link]

Amidst the Danish toon non-troversy, the Muslim Council lost a vote in the UK parliament this week on a bill banning insults to religion (via Asians in Media).

Supporters of the bill wanted to ban anti-Muslim ads by right-wing political parties. They also argued Hindus and Muslims deserved the same protection against incitement to violence already granted to Sikhs, Jews and Christians under racial hatred and blasphemy laws.

Opponents, such as comedian Rowan Atkinson, said the bill was a sop to Muslim voters, was overbroad and would also ban religious satire like Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. The bill passed in a weakened form with only the hatred and incitement to violence planks intact. Incidentally, Mr. Bean is married to a desi woman.

Salman Rushdie… “There are moments when one is profoundly grateful for, and proud of, British Parliamentary democracy. This is one of them…”

Hanif Kureishi… “This is an amazing result and a great achievement for writers and intellectuals when they unite…”

Hari Kunzru… “I was very happy to wake up to this news. The Government’s loss is Britain’s gain… This defeat should be another signal to the Government that in its disregard for civil liberties, it’s losing touch with the mainstream of British opinion…”

[PEN…] “… It will now be criminal to publish posters showing women of many colours in hijabs with the slogan ‘Muslims go home…’ ” [Link]

That blasphemy laws still exist on Britain’s books, pushed by the government church and enforceable by the state, makes me doubly glad of the upcoming 230th anniversary of American independence.

There have been new developments in the Operation Meth Merchant case that we have been following (see related posts at bottom) here at SM:

The infamous Operation Meth Merchant case in Georgia took an unexpected turn with as many as 23 of the accused pleading guilty and two more cases being dropped. Seven of them have already been sentenced to jail time.

“Different people pleaded guilty for different reasons,” said Deepali Gokhale, organizer of the Racial Justice Campaign against Operation Meth Merchant, an apex body of several organizations.

“Those living undocumented pleaded guilty, because in any case they would be deported,” Manny Arora, an attorney, said. Two of his clients pleaded guilty. Some pleaded guilty because the evidence against them was very strong and there was no chance for them in a trial which could have brought stiffer sentences.

One person with a green card was also among those pleaded guilty, Gokhale said. He could be deported because pleading guilty to felony charges is sufficient cause… Since all three were undocumented, the immigration authorities, specially invited by the prosecutor, were waiting to take them immediately to an immigration detention center. Pravin Patel’s wife and four-month old baby were taken to Chicago by her brother.

Though these men said they would leave on their own, the immigration officials did not agree. “INS interfered and used the mandatory detention provision to take them into custody. They may be in custody for up to eight weeks before being formally deported,” Arora said. [Link]

This is quite a convenient situation for the Feds. They don’t need to prove that the actual Meth case was legitimate, and not racially motivated. They can simply coerce a guilty plea. If you are one of the accused and are going to be deported anyways, then pleading guilty will at least move your case through the system more quickly. Even then, you will face jail time before the deportation paper work goes through. Illegal immigration laws should not be enforced in this manner which singles out a particular minority.

Part of Sepia Mutiny’s hidden agenda (we have never published our actual mission or spoken of the Machiavellian designs that drive us) has been to develop an influential and well placed system of CIs that will help our collective Mutiny to spread in both numbers and power (but especially in power). I have taken the liberty of modifying former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno’s formal definition of a “CI” for those of you unfamiliar with this term:

“Confidential Informant” or “CI” — any individual who provides useful and credible information to a JLEA Sepia Mutiny regarding felonious criminal interesting desi-related activities, and from whom the JLEA Sepia Mutiny expects or intends to obtain additional useful and credible information regarding such activities in the future. [Link]

Basically this means that we want to encourage SM readers to send us the “goods” or the “dirt” on happenings that we don’t yet know about. Want me to give you an example of what kind of CIs that we are seeking out? SM reader Venkat of BTD gives us a heads up about some interesting developments at the Supreme Court. Three of the incoming Supreme Court Clerks are desi:

Scalia: Hashim Mooppan (Harvard ‘05/Luttigator ‘05-‘06)… [Link]

Ginsburg: Arun Subramanian (Columbia ‘04/Jacobs ‘04-‘05/G. Lynch ‘05-‘06) [Link]

Breyer: Thiru Vignarajah (Harvard ‘05/Calabresi) [Link]

These three make ideal CIs. I am reaching out to them. If you know them then forward this on. We can be very discreet. Dead drops could be arranged in random parks by a variety of means. I have had pleasant dealings with clerks from lower federal courts before. Just ask around. We know that in the coming term the Supreme Court will be dealing with many cases involving desis, or with definite importance to the desi community. These three could maybe keep us up to speed on things.

The Drudge Report broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal before major media outlets did. We want SM to break more news also. That is where we need YOU dedicated reader. Are you in a position of power or influence and are just dying to share something you know, or stick it to the man? Do you work for some government agency or powerful corporation that doesn’t appreciate you enough? We appreciate you. Think of me as your very friendly case officer. The agent Vaughn to your agent Bristow. Will some real CIs please stand up?

[Disclaimer: For the record, I am not advocating that you break any laws, at least if they get me in trouble also…or if they get me subpoenaed, because I don’t think I could last in jail very long to protect you as my source. I would really try to though…unless they put me in a cell with some guy named “Tiny” who really isn’t.]

See related posts: The “Devils” Advocates, The Court has Hindu friends, …then you can’t have our money, Orwellian logic

Our tipline has been buzzing (thanks “mg” and others) with news that Rakesh Sharma, director of the award winning “Final Solution” about the Gujarat riots, is suing the City of New York, and that the NYCLU’s got his back. Here is why:

Rakesh Sharma was filming cars emerge from under Manhattan’s Metlife building in 2005 when he was stopped, questioned, allegedly shoved, and then detained by the NYPD for shooting footage of the building. The cops were suspicious of Sharma’s motives but, after four hours, the director was released and told that he would need a permit if he wanted to do any further shooting.

When Sharma applied for a permit, however, his application was denied because he lacked the proper insurance. Now, represented by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the director (who has won multiple awards for his documentaries) has filed suit against the city’s “police restrictions on taking pictures in public.” Among those named in the suit are the city itself and the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting. [Link]

Why was Sharma filming cars? Well it will make sense when you know what kind of cars he was filming:

Rakesh Sharma was shooting footage for a film on New York taxi drivers in May 2005 when officers stopped him…

“It’s a sad day when the police think they can detain and mistreat someone simply for making a film on a public street in New York City,” Mr Sharma said on Tuesday.

“I co-operated with them and answered all their questions, but they treated me like a criminal. It was wrong, and I was scared and humiliated,” he said. [Link]

A blogger at Mediabistro quips:

Honestly, if the cops in New York start arresting Indian guys with cameras, they’re going to have to shut down all of Sixth Avenue. We’re officially scared.

I’m hoping that DNSI’s Valarie Kaur might leave a comment and shed some light on this for us. She has recently been filming in New York City as well. I wonder if she was similarly hassled.

Update: Both Rakesh Sharma and Valarie Kaur were kind enough to respond to this post.

You can sign the petition to protest his arrest here.

Superstar desi lawyer Neal Katyal, who will later this year be representing Osama Bin Laden’s former driver in a Supreme Court case, had a book review in yesterday’s Washington Post. The book he was reviewing was a new one by John Yoo titled, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11. Katyal cleverly uses his book review to slam Yoo and his conservative policies, while also adding to the very relevant debate about what limits should be imposed on the powers of the Executive.

In particular, the book argues that the Constitution gives the president a much larger role in foreign affairs and military operations than the other two branches of the federal government, that the president does not need a congressional declaration of war before placing troops on the ground and that treaties ratified by the Senate have no legal impact unless Congress explicitly passes laws saying that they do.

In advancing these claims, the book is burdened by its strange attempt to mix constitutional claims grounded in the Founders’ intent in 1787 with the practicalities of living in an age of terrorism. Either one can take the position of such conservative icons as Robert Bork and Justice Antonin Scalia — that the original intentions of the Constitution’s authors bind us today and changes can only come through amendment — or hold the view of more liberal figures such as Justice Stephen Breyer that practical, functional considerations create a living Constitution that adapts as times change. Both are perfectly plausible. What isn’t credible is a theory that cherry-picks from the two to advance a particular thesis. And that’s exactly what Yoo does at times.

…In the end, the most glaring failure of the book is its one-sided attack on the courts and Congress, with no real attention paid to the failures of the executive branch. The underlying message is that the executive doesn’t need checks on its activities, but that the other branches consistently do. Yet presidents of both parties have made tremendous mistakes, and recent events have shown that claims of unchecked power can lead to massive abuse. Yoo even unwittingly refers to at least one recent miscalculation, in words that already date the book, by stating that Iraq was “potentially armed with weapons of mass destruction.”

It seems very likely that this book review also gives us a small preview of what some of Katyal’s arguments in front of the Supreme Court may be in Hamdan v Rumsfeld. I am just counting the weeks until Nina Totenberg wakes me with details of Katyal’s fight in front of the Roberts court.

The biggest legal news of the week was a decision yesterday by Judge Michael Luttig of the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. The Fourth is considered the most conservative of the Court of Appeals, and Luttig the most conservative of judges. He makes Roberts and Alito look liberal, which is why the President thought it would be too hard to get him confirmed to the Supreme Court. It must have thus shocked the Bush administration that he sharply rebuked their handling of the Padilla case. If you’ll recall, over three years ago the government accused American CITIZEN Jose Padilla of being a potential “dirty bomber.” He was stripped of his rights as a citizen under the U.S. Constitution and was thrown into jail as an enemy combatant based upon the secret evidence of the Administration. The assertion was that he had no rights. His lawyer, Andrew Patel, appealed his status and it was headed for the Supreme Court after a brief layover in the Fourth. At this point (over three years into the ordeal) the government changed its mind. To paraphrase the Justice Department’s logic, “let’s just change his status and charge him with other crimes so that the existing case cannot be appealed to the Supreme Court.” Not so fast, said Luttig. The Christian Science Monitor reports:

The administration’s actions create “an appearance that the government may be attempting to avoid consideration of our decision [in the Padilla case] by the Supreme Court,” writes Judge J. Michael Luttig in a 13-page order released on Wednesday.

“We believe that the issue [in Padilla’s case] is of sufficient national importance as to warrant consideration by the Supreme Court,” Judge Luttig writes.

The judge went on to criticize the government for underestimating the damage its actions were causing to public perceptions of the war on terror and the government’s credibility before the courts.

“While there could be an objective that could command such a price as all this, it is difficult to imagine what that objective might be,” Luttig writes.

The rebuke carries extra sting, analysts say, because of who delivered it. Luttig is one of the nation’s most conservative appeals court judges and was on the short list of White House favorites for each of the two recent vacancies on the Supreme Court.

It has been a real bad week for Civil Libertarians, hasn’t it? It seems that every time I turn on the television there is news of one of my Constitutional rights is being eroded. Earlier this week Newsweek asked, “why have [Americans] reacted so insipidly to yet another post-9/11 erosion of U.S. civil liberties?” This question was posed in reference to the revelation of illegal wiretaps. I point this out because these two issues are inextricably linked. A U.S. citizen who is spied upon without a warrant can then be labeled an enemy combatant and locked up without any rights, all on the word of the Bush Administration. Why then are they jonesing so bad for a Patriot Act renewal? This method is way more powerful.

California, here I come
Right back where I started from [Link]

John Yoo, professor of law at my alma mater, UC Berkeley, became infamous last year for writing a memo justifying torture by the CIA.

As Abhi posted, the NYT just reported that Yoo also wrote a legal opinion claiming Dubya could break U.S. law and let the NSA, a Defense Department agency which intercepts and decrypts overseas sigint, spy domestically on U.S. citizens.

The NSA activities were justified by a classified Justice Department legal opinion authored by John C. Yoo, a former deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel who argued that congressional approval of the war on al Qaeda gave broad authority to the president… That legal argument was similar to another 2002 memo authored primarily by Yoo, which outlined an extremely narrow definition of torture. That opinion, which was signed by another Justice official, was formally disavowed after it was disclosed by the Washington Post. [Link]

On one hand we’ve got Manmohan Singh’s daughter Amrit Singh fighting CIA torture and open-ended detentions in Guantánamo Bay. On the other, we’ve got Professor Yoo on the side of virtually unlimited police powers and Ass’t Attorney General Viet Dinh co-authoring large portions of the Fascist Act.

At first glance, Yoo might seem a political soldier willing to write whatever tissue-thin legal justifications his superiors order. But what if he’s sincere in his belief that torture, locking people up without charge and domestic spying by the NSA is legitimate rather than prima facia illegal and unconstitutional?

Mario Savio

I get the sense that first-gen Asian Americans tend to be socially conservative and more pro-law and order (vs. civil rights and privacy) than the mainstream. It’s the whole idea put forth by GOP recruiters that many first-gen Asian-Americans, including desis, ought to be ‘natural conservatives’ because they tend to hold traditional social views, value family and own small businesses:

Grover Norquist, a Republican anti-tax campaigner with influential friends in the White House, claims that “Indian-Americans are natural Republicans and natural conservatives.” They are on the whole well-educated and well-to-do; they respect family values, and like working for themselves. [Link]

In this case, however, it doesn’t really apply. Yoo was born in Seoul, but he grew up and went to undergrad in the U.S. What’s perhaps most symbolically striking is how involved Asian-Americans are in this administration in crafting key antiterror laws which disproportionately affect minorities. We’ve truly arrived.

Even more ironic, UC Berkeley is best known for its role in the Free Speech Movement. Now one of its most highly-placed professors is working hard to undermine those very same ideals. Mario Savio, meet John Yoo.

Update: The NYT reports Yoo’s conservatism was in fact influenced by his parents’ generation, specifically their revulsion towards North Korea’s communism. It parallels the Reagan conservatism of Cuban-Americans:

By then, Mr. Yoo already thought of himself as solidly conservative. He had grown up with anticommunist parents who left their native South Korea for Philadelphia shortly after Mr. Yoo was born in 1967, and had honed his political views while an undergraduate at Harvard. [Link]

Update 2: (thanks, Siddharth):

Yoo traces his convictions in no small part to his parents, and Ronald Reagan. His father and mother are psychiatrists who grew up in Korea during the Japanese occupation and the Korean War. They emigrated in 1967, when Yoo was 3 months old… Coming of age in an anti-communist household, Yoo said, he associated strong opposition to communist rule with the Republican Party and was himself “attracted to Reagan’s message.” [Link]

Update 3: A review of Yoo’s book in the NY Review of Books.

He was merely a mid-level attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel with little supervisory authority and no power to enforce laws. Yet by all accounts, Yoo had a hand in virtually every major legal decision involving the US response to the attacks of September 11, and at every point, so far as we know, his advice was virtually always the same— the president can do whatever the president wants…

In short, the flexibility Yoo advocates allows the administration to lock up human beings indefinitely without charges or hearings, to subject them to brutally coercive interrogation tactics, to send them to other countries with a record of doing worse, to assassinate persons it describes as the enemy without trial, and to keep the courts from interfering with all such actions. Has such flexibility actually aided the US in dealing with terrorism? In all likelihood, the policies and attitudes Yoo has advanced have made the country less secure. [Link]

Related posts: Hullo. Hullo. Who’s that clicking?, Escape from Draconia, Every little helps, Cabbie hartal in Naya York, Reappeared, Brimful of Amrit, Indian PM’s daughter says Bush personally authorized torture

I am very paranoid when on the phone. I always listen for the little clicks and clacks. I have nothing to hide but my parents think that blogging will draw unnecessary attention to me. Perhaps they are right. I know that when I speak to Manish on the phone about some blog-related matter I should not be using the word “mutiny.” After a while though you just become complacent and let words like “mutiny” and phrases like “overthrow the establishment” drip from your mouth like honey into a cup of green tea. I’ve also been using a calling card (from what may be a shady NSA front company) to call my parents who are vacationing in India. I should think twice about what I say because the big news of the day is that the New York Times is confirming what many of us already suspected. Big Brother might be listening to your mutinous conversations. He can hear you.

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

Last Tuesday Wisconsin Congressman James Sensenbrenner introduced legislation on the House floor that will greatly impact the South Asian American community as well as many other immigrant populations. The legislation is up for vote on Dec. 15th. The San Jose Mercury News reports on the bill:

Sensenbrenner’s measure combines the border security bill by homeland security chairman Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y. with several other enforcement provisions. The key non-border enforcement measure is patterned after a bill by Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., to require employers to verify the Social Security numbers of their employees. Such a program is now voluntary.

Sensenbrenner’s bill would give employers six years to use a federal data base to verify that all their employees are legally entitled to work here. Calvert’s bill would have applied only to new hires and phased in compliance.

Sensenbrenner’s bill also increases the penalties for employers found to hire illegal immigrants, with the minimum fine going from $250 per illegal worker to $5,000. Small business would have lower fines.

“If we do just this,” Calvert said Tuesday, “we’ll pick up about 95 percent of those who are using false documents” to get their jobs.

In reality though this bill will have the same effect as chasing a fly around the house with a baseball bat. The bill, if enacted into law, would not only punish illegal immigrants, but it would also punish almost everyone that they come into contact with (possibly even social service workers). This is pure politics. House Republicans need some issue to rally behind that appeals to their conservative base and will serve to take people’s minds off the war in Iraq. By allowing the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party to take center stage they have found their issue. For the final touch they pretend that this is also about helping to keep terrorists out of the country. As a bonus, Republican congressman uneasily eyeing elections next year, can put some space between themselves and President Bush who is partially on the other side of the fence (pun intended) from his own party on this issue, as he supports a guest worker program. Earlier today SAALT put out an alert asking the South Asian American community to immediately write their representative and senators and urge them to vote this down:

If passed, the bill threatens to have a harmful impact on non-citizens, legal residents, and citizens. If enacted, this bill will be the harshest immigration policy in 80 years. The bill was voted out of the House Judiciary Committee late last week. It is expected to be voted on by the entire House as early as Thursday of this week. The day to call your representative in the House is WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 14th.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

— Balwinder Shaikh’s Pir in Amrit

Mama Beeb reports that India is putting together an ayurpedia to fight inappropriate patents in developed countries (via Slashdot): Claim: 80% of U.S. patents on medicinal plants by 2000 were of Indian origin

In a quiet government office in the Indian capital, Delhi, some 100 doctors are hunched over computers poring over ancient medical texts… One of them is Jaya Saklani Kala, a young ayurveda doctor, who is wading through a dog-eared 500-year-old text book for information on a medicine derived from the mango fruit…. putting together a 30-million-page electronic encyclopædia of India’s traditional medical knowledge…

Dr Vinod Kumar Gupta, who is leading the traditional wealth encyclopaedia project… reckons that of the nearly 5,000 patents given out by the US Patent Office on various medical plants by the year 2000, some 80% were plants of Indian origin… … in most of the developed nations like United States, “prior existing knowledge” is only recognised if it is published in a journal or is available on a database…

Mogambo is displeased

The ambitious $2m project, christened Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, will roll out an encyclopaedia of the country’s traditional medicine in five languages - English, French, German, Japanese and Spanish - in an effort to stop people from claiming them as their own and patenting them. The electronic encyclopædia, which will be made available next year, will contain information on the traditional medicines, including exhaustive references, photographs of the plants and scans from the original texts…

… ayurvedic texts are in Sanskrit and Hindi, unani texts are in Arabic and Persian and siddha material is in Tamil language… there are some 54 authoritative ‘text books’ on ayurveda alone, some thousands of years old… [Link]

I know that there are many lawyers and current law students that read SM on a daily basis. Therefore I thought it might be of value to point out that the Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments today in a case pertaining to the Solomon Amendment. The Christian Science Monitor reports on the crux of the debate:

At the center of the legal showdown: to what extent military recruiters should have access to law school campuses. The case involves conflicting conceptions of free speech. It also could erode some civil rights laws, which use federal funding to encourage nondiscrimination.

On one side of the current case are a group of law professors and law schools seeking equal treatment of gays interested in serving the nation as members of the armed forces. In protest of the Pentagon’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy banning openly gay individuals from the military, the law schools restricted military recruiters from fully participating in school-sponsored employment events.

Military recruiters could still come to campuses, but the law schools’ employment placement offices would not assist them. The message was that the schools would not abet military discrimination against some of their own students.

I have thought a lot about this issue. I am a big time supporter of the military but on this issue I would side with the law schools. The law schools could bar any other employer that openly discriminates, so why not the U.S. military? I understand that a ruling in favor of the law schools could set a dangerous precedent. It would embolden people to protest all kinds of federal laws based on the logic that they were following their conscience. Take for example the pharmacists that oppose filling a prescription to the morning-after pill. In many instances they HAVE to fill the prescription by law. I would not want that to change. The threat of federal money being taken away from a University that only has the best interests of its students (i.e. protecting is LGBT community) in mind does not seem fair to me.

Law schools have “a Hobson’s choice: Either the university must forsake millions of dollars of federal funds largely unrelated to the law school, or the law school must abandon its commitment to fight discrimination,” justices were told in a filing by the Association of American Law Schools.

The federal law, known as the Solomon Amendment after its first congressional sponsor, mandates that universities, including their law and medical schools and other branches, give the military the same access as other recruiters or forfeit money from federal agencies like the Education, Labor and Transportation departments.

Dozens of groups have filed briefs on both sides of the case, the first gay-rights related appeal since a contentious 2003 Supreme Court ruling that struck down laws criminalizing gay sex.

I wanted to quickly update readers on the case of Pakistani American Tariq Khan. If you will recall, Saheli blogged about Tariq, who is a George Mason University student, last month. To recap:

Tariq Khan, now a junior majoring in sociology, said he was standing in front of the recruitment table outside the school student center—as he has often done before - during noontime with a paper sign reading, “Recruiters lie, don’t be deceived,” taped to his shirt. A student approached Khan and initiated a verbal argument, screaming in his face; he then took the flyer and ripped it up in front of him, Khan says.

The student then left and returned with another student claiming to be a Marine having recently served in Iraq, and the three continued a verbal argument that began to escalate, Khan claimed. “I asked the marine, ‘So how many people did you kill?’” Khan said. “And he answered, ‘Not enough.’” The marine student soon ripped Khan’s sign off his shirt and threw it in the trash.

… [A] staff member called campus security, at which point a police officer, Lt. Reynolds, approached Khan and demanded to see his student ID. Khan said he told the officer he was not carrying his ID and tried to walk away when the policeman tried to arrest him and then became violent. “He threw me into the stage,” Khan claimed, referring to a dance area in the student center left from an event earlier in the day, “and I just sort of raised my hands to show I’m not violent and tried to get as much attention by saying, ‘I’m being non-violent and I’m being brutalized.’” [Link]

Just this week, that shining beacon of hope, the ACLU, announced that all charges against Khan have been dropped:

The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia announced today that government lawyers in Fairfax County have agreed to drop their case against Tariq Khan, a George Mason University student who was arrested while protesting the presence of military recruiters on campus…

After conducting its own investigation into the incident, university officials asked Fairfax County prosecutors not to proceed with the case. The university has also announced that it will be reevaluating its campus speech and protest policies to ensure that they comply with the First Amendment.

The ACLU said it will be reviewing the campus speech policies. “This arrest should never have occurred,” said Willis. “The next step for us is to make certain that GMU does not do this again…” [Link]

Both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times recently featured in-depth profiles on Samuel A. Alito Jr. who has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States (see previous post). Both articles show the judge in a fair and mostly positive light, digging all the way back to his childhood to foreshadow the brilliant judge he would one day become:

Alito, who was valedictorian, excelled to such a degree that teachers at Steinert were forced to adjust their grading curves to exclude his marks. “Sam almost always scored 100, so the teachers responded by giving him an A and then determining the curve for everyone else,” McDonald said.

For college, he chose the lone Ivy League school in New Jersey. At Princeton, Alito majored in an elite public affairs program in the Woodrow Wilson School. He shunned the university’s selective private clubs and instead belonged to Stevenson Hall, a social and eating club that was more egalitarian because it was open to all students. He participated in the debate club. [Link]

Dave Sidhu of DNSI noticed something in both articles that he researched some more and then brought to our attention. It seems that Alito’s career had one small scandal that was connected to his days as a tough Justice Department attorney in the state of New Jersey. From the LA Times:

The Alito era did suffer a measure of scandal and embarrassment. One of the prosecutors in the office was charged with faking death threats against herself in the course of a case against two Sikhs accused of being terrorists.

What’s this all about? The New York Times fills in more detail:

In one of his office’s more difficult moments, Judy G. Russell, a special prosecutor who was a former assistant United States attorney, was found to have sent death threats to herself and the magistrate hearing an extradition case.

The threats came in the matter of two Sikhs facing extradition to India on terrorism charges. Mr. Kuby, a member of the defense team, faulted Mr. Alito for not having the prosecutor arrested and for failing to uncover the false threats more quickly.

Oh joy, oh giddy delight. I love anniversaries, don’t you? Wikipedia’s always interesting and informative main page reminds us that it’s already been four years since we helped America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism:

Passed by the U.S. Congress after the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks, the (Patriot) Act enhances the authority of U.S. law enforcement for the stated purpose of fighting terrorist acts in the United States and around the world. This enhanced legal authority is also used to detect and prosecute other alleged potential crimes. Among other laws, the USA PATRIOT Act amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Among the laws the PATRIOT Act amended are immigration laws, banking and money laundering laws, and foreign intelligence laws…

Critics claim that some portions of the Act are unnecessary and allow U.S. law enforcement to infringe upon free-speech, freedom of the press, human rights, and right to privacy. Much controversy has arisen over section 215, which allows judges to grant government investigators ex parte orders to look into personal phone and internet records on the basis of being “relevant for an on going investigation concerning international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities”, rather than probable cause as outlined in the fourth amendment.

In June I posted about Operation Meth Merchant in Georgia that netted nearly 50 people, most of them Indian convenience store owners, on suspicion of selling components that make methamphetamines, knowing what they’d be used for. 

But first, a quick lesson in meth production: The key ingredient in the process is ephedrine or pseudoephedrine, which also happen to be the key ingredients in cold and allergy medicines such as Sudafed, Tylenol Cold capsules and Max Brand Pseudo 60s.

Those are legal products, legally bought and sold in stores all over the country. Selling them becomes a federal crime only if the seller knows that they’re going to be used in meth production. To minimize that problem, stores at the time had been urged by law enforcement to limit the amount of ephedrine-based medicines sold to each individual. [Link]

In August, Ennis reported on some of the prosecution’s mix-ups.  Now, Rediff reports how elements of the case have begun to dramatically unravel for the prosecution, and asks the question, “why did it take so long?”:

US District Attorney David E Nahmias requested the courts last fortnight to dismiss charges that Siddharth Patel had sold over the counter components used in the manufacture of the drug methamphetamine.

And well he should — Patel was over a thousand miles away when he supposedly committed the crime, and had photographic evidence to prove it.

In a case that has assumed racial overtones, Nahmias told the court Patel had been identified, erroneously, as the man who sold the components July 23, 2004 in Georgia, USA — when it was conclusively proved that at the time, and on the date, in question, he was in New York…

Earlier, similar charges against Malvika Patel of Cleveland, Tennessee, and her husband Chirag Patel were withdrawn after McCracken Poston appeared as their attorney. Poston is also Siddharth Patel’s attorney in the case…

“Malvika Patel was picking up her young son from day care in Cleveland, Tennessee, at the exact moment this informant claimed she was behind the counter of a store in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia,” Poston told rediff India Abroad. “Similarly, Chirag Patel was with his family in India at the time the informant claimed he was at the same store in December 2004.”

Similarly, Siddharth Patel was working at a Subway outlet in Hicksville, New York, at the time the informant placed him in Whitfield County, Georgia, selling the components at Deep Springs Superette, a convenience store in the Varnell community of Whitfield County. [Link]

Uhhh, woops, I guess.  Why did it take so damn long to establish that the person arrested had been misidentified.  In stinks of incompetence and probably something worse.

The IIPM issue in India provides me with a great opportunity to educate SM readers and fellow bloggers about the assault of late on a precious (but little known) liberty here in the United States of America.  It is the fundamental, God-given right to blog!  A few weeks back we received what was intended to be a “Cease and Desist Notice” from someone claiming to be the lawyer of a person that we had written about on SM.  This “lawyer” threatened legal action and dire consequences unless we took down the “libelous” statements against their client.  However, in none of our posts had we made any libelous statements about the semi-celebrity in question.  Rather, it was some of the commenters to our site that had written what might be considered rude.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I represent the legal interests of ########. The content on your site contains libelous information that is against the interests of my client ########. The information on your website cannot be verified and contains defamatory, heresay information.

We are firmly requesting that you take down this web site within 24 hours. We are prepared to take legal action against your company and will sue you at the full extent of the law for punitive damages.

This notice was followed by several others (including a “second notice” time stamped two minutes after the first one) that increasingly led us to believe that this lawyer was either a friend of the person we had offended, or the person themselves posing as a lawyer.  Making a few spelling mistakes and citing laws that seem sketchy, sort of erode one’s credibility.  Getting sued over this might have been a welcome experience though.  I have always sort of dreamed of representing myself in front of the Supreme Court, grilled by Scalia, and waking up to that goddess Nina Totenberg re-capping my oral arguments on NPR as I lay in bed the next morning in rapture.  I coulda’ been a contenda’.  Having reviewed the relevant precedents, we think we would have done quite well in court if slapped with a lawsuit.  I am what people would term a Constitutional Originalist. Who am I to doubt what the Framers originally put into the Constitution?  Who am I to question or re-interpret their original intentions?  Let me direct you to Article IV Section 4 of that most sacred of documents:

The United States shall guarantee the rights of every Blogger in this Union, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence and frivolous lawsuits.

This past week conservative John Roberts became the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).  Within days Bush will nominate a second judge who will decisively tip the balance of the court. We can be sure that we will continue to see brilliant desi lawyers in front of the Robert’s court in the coming years.  Just a few days ago for example, ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh (see previous entries) successfully sued in federal court to compel the government to release more pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

On Thursday, a U.S. federal judge ordered the release of more images of Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse - which may open up the American military to more embarrassment from a scandal that already has stirred outrage around the world.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein rejected government arguments that the images would incite acts of terrorism and violence against U.S. troops in Iraq, saying that terrorists “do not need pretexts for their barbarism.”

“Our nation does not surrender to blackmail, and fear of blackmail is not a legally sufficient argument to prevent us from performing a statutory command. Indeed, the freedoms that we champion are as important to our success in Iraq and Afghanistan as the guns and missiles with which our troops are armed,” he said. [Link]

My guess is that this decision may be appealed by DOD and DOJ and find its way in front of the Robert’s court, where hopefully Amrit will continue to argue it.

The judge gave the government 20 days to appeal before releasing the pictures, which are edited so the faces of prisoners are not shown.

Lt. Col. John Skinner, a Pentagon spokesman on detainee issues said the Department of Defense, “continues to consult with the Department of Justice on this litigation, to include additional legal options…”

ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said the ruling was a victory for government accountability.

“The United States government cannot continue to hide the truth about who is ultimately responsible for the systematic abuse of detainees from the American public,” she said. [Link]