DebateGate

Latest Offerings from the Religion of Peace

8/7/07 ( Gaza, Pal. Auth. ) - Two Gaza children, ages 6 and 8, are killed by a rocket fired at Israel by a Palestinian Islamic group.
8/7/07 ( Yala, Thailand ) - A man is murdered and his body burned by Islamic separatists.
8/7/07 ( Pattani, Thailand ) - A roadside bombing by Muslim radicals leaves two Thai soldiers dead.
8/7/07 ( Banadir, Somalia ) - A mother and her 11-year-old daughter are killed when Islamists detonate a roadside bomb.
8/6/07 ( Pulwama, India ) - A civilian is abducted four days earlier and murdered by the Mujahideen.
8/6/07 ( Yala, Thailand ) - Muslim terrorists gun down a 61-year-old civilian on his way home.




 
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/

Democrats' 180 on Bush's Secret Wiretapping Program
Monday, August 06, 2007

Remember the impeach Bush movement?

John Conyers, the Democrat from Michigan, was going to open hearings into a basket-load of Bush offenses. Principle among them was that Bush had violated the Constitution by secretly establishing the terrorist security program. This was the secret mission of the National Security Agency to listen to phone conversations between America and certain foreign countries where certain terrorists are known to be from.

Oh my lord, the hue and cry that went up about that. It was the foundation for all Bush offenses, even topping the war. After all, wars are things that presidents do get involved in, and even though Democrats and leftists ? and later independents and even Republicans ? blamed Bush for the reasons for going to war and the way it was conducted, it hardly seemed an impeachable offense.

On the other hand, violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution when the president had sworn to protect and defend the Constitution, well, now we were in the very wheelhouse of an impeachment prosecutor. Leading Democrats railed against Bush, called him the worst ever, stopped short of suggesting he resign only because they feared Cheney more.

So now, what happens last Friday and Saturday?

The Democrats in the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives voted to make legal everything Bush's secret NSA program was up to and more. Every bit of the so-called violation of Americans' constitutional rights was made legal by a vote of Democrats, the very people who got elected decrying and condemning Bush's so-called trampling of the Constitution.

Where's that impeachment talk now? Where are the people demanding he live up to an antiquated FISA law?

They just voted to let this president ignore all that red tape of the FISA system.

Boom! What was illegal is now legal. And the very people who condemned Bush for doing it have now, with their vote, admitted wiretapping keeps Americans safe, just as Bush said.

Did I mention that sometimes politicians are truly despicable?

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292333,00.html







 

Some Guantanamo inmates say they'd rather stay than be sent home to N. Africa to face torture
The Associated Press
August 6, 2007

ALGIERS, Algeria: This was supposed to be the moment Ahmed Bel Bacha was waiting for ? the end of his five years in prison at Guantanamo Bay. Instead, the Algerian is fighting to stay put rather than return home.

Bel Bacha, reportedly slated to leave Guantanamo Bay soon along with three of his countrymen, fears he will be tortured back in Algeria, a country he had already fled once before to seek asylum in Britain, his lawyers say.

And so lawyers for the 38-year-old former hotel cleaner have been waging an 11th-hour attempt to keep him temporarily at Guantanamo while looking for another country to give him political asylum.

Bel Bacha is not alone in his fears: Human rights groups say at least two dozen Guantanamo detainees ? including many from the North African countries of Libya, Algeria and Tunisia ? are afraid they will face abuse on returning home.

"How many times is the U.S. willing to take the risk with someone's life and send them back to regimes with terrible human rights records?" said Zachary Katznelson, an attorney for the rights group Reprieve, which represents Bel Bacha and three dozen other detainees. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are among other groups that are worried.

About 80 detainees have been declared eligible for release. Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Pentagon spokesman, said detainees at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba can leave only "once humane treatment and continuing threat concerns have been satisfactorily addressed by the receiving country."

"I reiterate that detainees are not repatriated to countries where it is more likely than not that they will be tortured," he said.

Algeria's presidential office told The AP that Algeria had U.S. concerns about the prisoners covered, both through the country's "constant and incontestable commitment to the struggle against international terrorism," and by having signed "numerous international conventions for the protection of human rights."

But rights groups say countries' promises are not enough.

With U.S. President George W. Bush facing international pressure to close the military prison camp down, and with the U.S. administration struggling over what to do with roughly 360 remaining prisoners, rights groups fear U.S. officials may overlook the torture records of inmates' home countries.

In at least one other case already in North Africa, a former Guantanamo detainee says he was mistreated on returning to Tunisia.

Abdullah bin Omar's lawyer and wife say the 49-year-old father of eight was struck while in Tunisian custody, and that security services also threatened to rape bin Omar's female family members.

Bin Omar's wife said in an interview that his physical and mental state has improved since his return, though his prison conditions are "appalling."

"If he had known he was going to be treated that way, he wouldn't have accepted to come home" and would have sought asylum elsewhere instead, Khadija Bousaidi told The Associated Press.

Tunisia's Justice Ministry has dismissed the allegations he was mistreated as "baseless."

Another Tunisian who was recently returned home and jailed, Lofti Lagha, has still never seen a lawyer, either before or after leaving Guantanamo, Reprieve says. Two representatives from the rights group left Tunisia on Sunday after trying unsuccessfully to see Lagha and bin Omar.

"We were basically given the run-around the entire week," Cori Crider of Reprieve said.

One North African country, Morocco, seems to be treating former Guantanamo prisoners "relatively fairly," Reprieve's Katznelson said. Ten prisoners have gone back, and all are free except two.

In the case of Algeria, Amnesty International said this weekend that U.S. authorities planned to send Bel Bacha and three other Algerians home imminently. Lawyers for Reprieve have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to halt Bel Bacha's transfer to Algeria, and the court ordered the U.S. government to respond by Wednesday afternoon.

Algeria is still trying to turn the page on an Islamic insurgency that has killed as many as 200,000 people since 1992, and anyone suspected of terrorist activities or knowledge of Islamist groups there "faces a real risk of secret detention and torture in Algeria," Amnesty says.

Beatings and electric shock treatments are often reported in Algeria, as is a method of tying victims down and forcing them to ingest dirty water, urine or chemicals through a rag stuffed in their mouths, Amnesty has said.

Bel Bacha lived for a time in Britain where he worked as a hotel cleaner before his capture in Pakistan, where he had gone to study the Quran, his family said. His brother, Mohammed Bel Bacha, complained that Algerian authorities gave the family little information on the case and that his lawyers had not been allowed to visit the country.

If authorities are afraid to let the lawyers in, who can guarantee that my brother is going to come back to Algeria safe and sound?" he asked.

The Pentagon alleged Bel Bacha had weapons training in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden twice, declaring him an "enemy combatant." A later review, however, found he no longer posed a threat to the United States and could be released.

Bel Bacha has been held at Guantanamo since February 2002 and is held in a solid-wall cell by himself for as many as 22 hours a day. Twenty-four Algerians are being held there, according to the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights.

"If anyone comes back to Algeria it's a golden opportunity for Algeria to show that they have changed, that there is a new page in Algeria," said Katznelson of Reprieve. "Because the world will be watching".

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/06/africa/AF-GEN-Africa-Leaving-Guantanamo.php?page=1

Fleeing Cubans Reach U.S. Through Mexico

By WILL WEISSERT
The Associated Press
Wednesday, August 1, 2007

HAVANA -- The vast majority of Cubans sneaking off the island now enter the United States through Mexico after U.S. relatives pay thousands of dollars to organized crime networks that scoop them off Cuba's westernmost tip in souped-up speedboats.

The Mexico route is more dangerous than a direct, 90-mile voyage from Cuba to Florida, but there is less chance the U.S. Coast Guard will intervene. Nearly 90 percent of all undocumented Cubans who make it to America now come overland rather than reaching U.S. shores by boat, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Quintana Roo's state justice public prosecutor Vello Rodriguez holds a sheet with pictures of Luis Lara Morejon's body, in Cancun, Mexico, Tuesday, July 31, 2007. The body of Morejon, a Cuban-American who was under investigation in a migrant smuggling case, was found riddled with bullets along a road outside this Caribbean resort, authorities said Tuesday.
 
From the Mexican coast, Cubans then travel up to the U.S. border, where unlike other undocumented migrants, they are welcomed in under U.S. law.

Mexico, already struggling against organized crime, is paying the price for the migration shift, especially in Cancun, the nation's glittering Caribbean getaway. On Monday, investigators there found the body of a Cuban-American from Miami, Luis Lazaro Lara Morejon, handcuffed and with duct tape over his eyes. He had been shot 10 times, obliterating his face.

Days earlier, authorities had arrested at least eight people on suspicion of smuggling Cubans to Mexico, including six Cubans with U.S. residency or citizenship who had just been interviewed by U.S. authorities. Lara had connections to the suspects, Mexican investigators say.

"These gangs are well-organized, well-financed and very powerful," said Sen. Carlos Navarrete, who was among a group of Mexican lawmakers who came to Havana to discuss the issue with Cuban lawmakers in June. "They are a very serious problem for both governments _ Cuba and Mexico."

Some 9,296 Cubans arrived in the United States from Mexico between Oct. 1 and July 22, more than double the 4,589 who crossed or were picked up by the Coast Guard in the Florida Straits during the same period.

The Mexico route is now so popular that U.S. immigration officials call those who follow it "dusty foot" Cubans, a play on Washington's "wet-foot/dry foot" policy that lets Cuban migrants captured on U.S. soil stay in America, but sends those picked up at sea back to the island.

"That route, it has taken over," said a U.S. official interviewed at a Havana hotel on condition of anonymity because publishing his name would violate State Department protocol.

Mexican officials blame increased security along the U.S. coast, but the U.S. official said richer and more-powerful smuggling gangs are responsible.

A speedboat smuggler making the 120-mile dash from Cuba to Mexico's Yucatan peninsula can earn $30,000 per haul of 30 or more Cubans. They often rendezvous with yachts that can ferry large groups to shore undetected.

The money usually comes from relatives in the U.S. who pay smugglers up to $10,000 per person to get loved ones off the island. As the recent arrests suggest, most gangs employ U.S. residents of Cuban origin operating in Cancun and other locales along Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula.

The smugglers use satellite phones and GPS technology to coordinate late-night pickups in Cuba's western-most Pinar del Rio province. Their "go-fast" boats have up to three 275-horsepower motors, reducing the trip to 6 hours if they don't have to change course to escape detection.

Some Cubans try to reach the Yucatan on their own using makeshift rafts and boats, but it is easy to get lost in the Gulf of Mexico. One homemade vessel floated in the Gulf for 25 days before all but one of 19 Cubans on board were found dead in June.

Quintana Roo's state justice public prosecutor Vello Rodriguez holds a sheet with pictures of Luis Lara Morejon's body, in Cancun, Mexico, Tuesday, July 31, 2007. The body of Morejon, a Cuban-American who was under investigation in a migrant smuggling case, was found riddled with bullets along a road outside this Caribbean resort, authorities said Tuesday.
 
Cuban authorities are barred from using force to stop the boats, except in self-defense. Instead, they contact the U.S. Coast Guard with the fleeing vessel's coordinates _ even if it is clearly headed to Mexico. And since combatting people-smuggling between Cuba and Mexico is not a top Coast Guard priority, U.S. officials generally just notify the Mexican navy.

Detentions of undocumented Cubans in Mexico have skyrocketed, from 254 in 2002 to 2,205 last year, according to Mexico's National Immigration Institute. But most are released after 90 days at immigration centers. Only 722 Cubans _ one third of all those arrested last year _ were repatriated to Cuba.

The rest make their way to the U.S. border, where entering Cubans rose from 6,130 in fiscal 2004 to 7,281 in 2005 and 8,677 last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.

Unlike other migrants, the Cubans have no need to run from the Border Patrol. They simply announce their nationality and ask to stay. As long as they don't have criminal records or dangerous health problems, they are allowed to remain in America and seek permanent residency after a year.

Mexican officials privately complain the U.S. accepts Cuban migrants too easily, but publicly acknowledge that their own authorities aren't doing enough to stop smugglers.

"We have to be very clear that there is a flow of people from Cuba to Mexico and that it is increasing," said Rosario Green, president of the Mexican Senate's foreign affairs committee, who was in Havana for the inter-parliamentary meeting. "Mexico shouldn't be a trampoline for the United States."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/01/AR2007080101617_2.html

Democrat Congressman Ellison returns from trip to Iraq
July 31, 2007





WASHINGTON (AP) Rep. Keith Ellison made a weekend trip to Iraq, where a pair of sheiks urged Congress' only Muslim lawmaker to help in countering al-Qaeda's vision of Islam.

Ellison, D-Minn., said he met in Ramadi in Anbar province with the two sheiks, who oversee several hundred thousand congregants.

"They were very upset and concerned that al-Qaeda is misrepresenting Islam," Ellison told reporters on a conference call Monday from Germany, on his way back to the U.S. "And they were talking to me about what I can possibly do to work with them to give a clearer, more accurate picture of what Islam is all about."

Ellison said he would assist in any way he can. He is already helping a State Department outreach effort aimed at improving the image of the U.S. in the Muslim world.

Ellison, a vocal critic of the Iraq war, said he still believes it was a mistake for the U.S. to invade Iraq.

"But there are 150,000 American soldiers there now, and I care very deeply about them," said Ellison, one of six members on the all-freshman trip led by Rep. Jerry McNerney, D-Calif. "I also care about the Iraqi people. I don't want to see them suffer."

The group met with Iraqi and U.S. military officials, including Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq.

Ellison said that local leaders in Ramadi told him of how they partnered with U.S. and Iraqi military officials to virtually rid al-Qaeda from the city. Although the lawmakers had to travel in flak vests and helmets, "we did see people walking around the streets of Ramadi, going back and forth to the market."

There have been fewer anti-U.S. sermons as the violence has been reduced, Ellison said, and religious leaders meet regularly with U.S. military officials.

"The success in Ramadi is not just because of bombs and bullets, but because the U.S. and Iraqi military and the Iraqi police are partnering with the tribal leadership and the religious leadership," he said. "So they're not trying to just bomb people into submission. What they're doing is respecting the people, giving the people some control over their own lives."

Ellison said he was particularly impressed watching Maj. Gen. Walter Gaskin, U.S. commander in the Anbar province, greeting people with "as-salama aleikum," meaning peace be upon you.

"And they would respond back with smiles and waves," Ellison said. "I don't want to overplay it. There were no flowers. There was no clapping. There was no parade. But there was a general level of respect and calm that I thought was good."

McNerney, the California congressman, also said he saw signs of progress in Ramadi and was impressed by Petraeus, who argued in favor of giving President Bush's troop surge strategy time to work.

McNerney said he still favors a timeline to get troops out of Iraq ? something House leaders may bring to the floor again this week as part of a defense spending bill  but is open to crafting it in a way more favorable to generals' wishes.

"As long as we start at a certain date I'd be willing to be a little more flexible in terms of when it might end," McNerney said.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-07-30-ellison-iraq_N.htm

How does that make less sense than trying to win a civil war in Iraq?

why do you feel the need to tie everything to bush?
why not be honest and admit it was a major gaffe to threaten pakistan with a us troop invasion
that is a ridiculous idea
even if we were to do anything in pakistan it would primarily be an aerial campaign, not a us troop invasion