Immigrant 'sanctuaries' rouse opponents' wrath

By David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau

July 25, 2010

Reporting from Washington

Critics of the Obama administration's decision to sue Arizona over its new law to control illegal immigration accuse the government of overlooking a more obvious target: the dozens of cities that called themselves a "sanctuary" for immigrants.

"Everyone has noticed the hypocrisy of the government going after Arizona and ignoring the sanctuary cities," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. "They have it exactly backwards. Arizona is applying federal law, and sanctuary cities are violating it."

Justice Department lawyers on Thursday asked a judge in Phoenix to block Arizona's law from going into effect on the grounds it interferes with federal immigration policy. The law is due to take effect in the coming week.

The Justice Department lawyers say the government wants to catch and deport criminal immigrants, but it does not wish to take custody of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who are otherwise abiding by the law.

Beginning in the 1980s, more than 40 cities and counties adopted ordinances or resolutions declaring they were sanctuaries for immigrants. Police and other city employees were told they should not ask about a person's immigration status, and they should not tell federal agents if they learned a person was here illegally.

More recently, many of these cities have backed away from such policies. But there continues to be debate over whether local officials have a duty to alert federal agents about illegal immigrants.

The Justice Department disputes the contention that its policy is hypocritical. "There is a big difference between a state or locality saying they are not going to use their resources to enforce a federal law, as so-called 'sanctuary' cities have done, and a state passing its own immigration policy that actively interferes with federal law," said Tracy Schmaler, a department spokeswoman.

Kris Kobach, the Kansas law professor who drafted the Arizona law, said he particularly objected to cities that have a policy of freeing criminals who are illegal immigrants without notifying federal immigration officials. "It's pretty clear they are breaking the law. And they are doing it with impunity," he said.

He pointed to a provision Congress added to the immigration laws in 1996. It says state and local agencies and their officials "may not prohibit or in any way restrict" their employees from "sending" information about a person's immigration status to the agency then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But Congress did not set a penalty for violations. And since then, neither Republican or Democratic administrations have taken legal action to enforce it, according to government officials and immigration lawyers.

Michael Hethmon, a lawyer for the Immigration Reform Law Institute, blames politics and the unusual coalition supporting loose enforcement. "Neither employers nor the ethnic interest groups have wanted these laws enforced," he said. "It's about both immigrants' rights and cheap labor."

But the legal difficulty of enforcing immigration laws goes even further. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative, said the Constitution shields states and localities from federal dictates. "Congress cannot compel the states to enact or enforce a federal regulatory program," he said in a 1997 ruling.

Cities with sanctuary policies deny they shield known criminals from immigration agents.

The Los Angeles Police Department has had a policy for more than 30 years that prohibits officers from initiating contact with someone just to determine whether they are in the U.S. legally. LAPD officials have said the policy encourages illegal immigrants who witness crimes to assist police without fear of being deported.

In the last two years, U.S. immigration officials have launched a new alert system that they believe can solve the problem of deporting criminal immigrants. It also has potential to defuse much of the controversy over "sanctuary" cities. Known as "Secure Communities," it permits federal immigration authorities to scan fingerprints of newly arrested suspects. Los Angeles County participates in the program.

Officials at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement downplay the significance of "sanctuary" policies. "None of these municipal laws have yet interfered with our ability to make our streets safer," said Matt Chandler, an agency spokesman.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immigration-sanctuary-20100725,0,4873906,print.story

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Asylum's broad reach

July 25, 2010

On first reading, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling issued earlier this month seemed absurd: Immigration judges should reconsider whether women from Guatemala constituted a "particular social group" whose members could face persecution simply for being female, in which case they would be eligible for political asylum in the United States.

Wait just a minute, we thought. Sure, Guatemala is a horribly violent country, and sure, we believe in providing sanctuary to the truly persecuted whose governments do not protect them. But could all female Guatemalans really be eligible for asylum as this would suggest? What about Guatemalan men, who are killed at six times the rate of women? Are Guatemalan women really more persecuted than the women of Juarez, Mexico, where about 400 have been killed over 15 years, or those of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where rape routinely has been used as a weapon of war? And how could the United States be expected to absorb millions of women — half the nation of Guatemala — and, by extension, other vulnerable women from all across the globe?

As with so many things, however, this ruling was not quite what it seemed to be. On closer examination, it turned out to be less revolutionary and less sweeping than it had appeared. Though this one is unusually and perhaps impractically broad, it would not be the first time a court considered gender-based asylum claims; judges already had granted this status to women in Africa who fear genital mutilation and those in China who face forced abortions, and even to Guatemalan women who have suffered spousal abuse. More important, even if Guatemalan women were to be deemed a particular social group by the courts, their petitions still would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. People are not granted asylum just because they belong to a group; they must prove a personal, well-founded fear of persecution and lack of government protection. In short, it was unlikely to open the door to a tsunami of new Guatemalan immigrants.

In 2009, the U.S. granted asylum to 22,119 people. About 25% of them came from China, followed by Ethiopia and Haiti with 5% and 4.5%, respectively, and Guatemala in eighth place with 2.3%, or 513 people. The government tracks applications and adjudication by country, not by reason, and therefore does not have the information necessary to evaluate whether previous designations of a social group have led to significant increases in asylum applications, officials say. Some asylum advocates and former immigration judges say that based on anecdotal evidence — and the experiences of other countries — they don't think it has.

In most cases, a person seeking asylum in the United States must be in the country already or at a U.S. port of entry to make the request. The president reserves the right to make exceptions, as in the case of Cuba or Iraq. Under international conventions and U.S. law, an asylum applicant must have a well-founded fear of persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. While the first four groups are relatively easy to identify, courts have struggled to define what constitutes a particular social group. Asylum attorneys have sought to include various threatened groups that don't neatly fit into the other categories — homosexuals, Romas (or Gypsies, as the courts have called them) and women who may be subjected to violence directed at them solely because of their gender, such as genital cutting. Membership in such a group, assuming the courts accept it, is necessary but not sufficient grounds for gaining asylum.

In this case Lesly Yajayra Perdomo, who came to the United States illegally at the age of 15 to join her mother and was issued a deportation notice 12 years later, argued that she faced persecution if returned to Guatemala, where women are killed at a high rate with impunity. An immigration judge declined to find that she belonged to a particular social group, and the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected her claim that "all women in Guatemala" should be considered a protected social group. The federal appeals court, however, said that was inconsistent with previous opinions by both the immigration board itself and the appeals court, and sent the case back to the lower court to review whether Guatemalan women could indeed be considered "a cognizable social group" and, if so, whether Perdomo could demonstrate fear of persecution "on account of" her membership.

We certainly don't want to minimize the threats to women in Guatemala, or around the world, for that matter. Generally speaking, women don't have the political and economic clout or the firepower that men have, and there are plenty of situations in which women are subjected to crimes simply because they are women: spousal abuse, forced marriage, forced sterilizations, sex trafficking and honor killings, to name a few. The problem in this case is that Guatemala is dangerous not just for women but for everyone. The homicide rate for women is somewhat higher in Guatemala than in the rest of Latin America, and that is disturbing. But the homicide rate there last year (which was more than three times Mexico's) was substantially worse for men than women: 709 women were killed compared with 6,498 men. And though many of the slain men quite likely were involved in gang violence and criminal activities themselves, impunity is rampant across the board — about 98% for the killing of women, according to the U.S.-based Guatemala Human Rights Commission, and just slightly less than that for men.

Too many cultures see violence against women as a prerogative, not a crime. The United States must continue to fight against this and offer protection to the most endangered people, but it cannot be expected to provide refuge to all women at risk. Though it is important to broaden the umbrella to include groups of persecuted people who don't fall into the prescribed categories, the designation of all Guatemalan women is simply too broad. On points like this, either the U.S. attorney general or the U.S. Congress could help by clarifying what constitutes a protected social group. The solution to the broader problem of violence against women, however, is not just to accept victims into the United States but to forcefully address the cultural biases and lack of justice in the countries where it is taking place. One way to do this would be for Congress to pass the bipartisan International Violence Against Women Act, which seeks to make the issue a priority for the Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development. This would direct U.S. support and assistance to educational, economic and other programs that address the root causes of violence against women, and build up rule of law to hold abusers accountable.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-asylum-20100725,0,2004244,print.story

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From the New York Times

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U.S.-S. Korean War Drills Begin

The United States and South Korea on Sunday kicked off their largest joint war game in years, with a nuclear-powered American aircraft carrier prowling off the east coast of South Korea while North Korea threatened to retaliate with its nuclear weapons and reportedly put its military on an alert for war.

Rising tensions demonstrated how tenuous peace remained on the divided peninsula after the Korean War was temporarily halted in a ceasefire between the U.S.-led United Nations forces and the communist troops from North Korea and China 57 years ago on Tuesday.

The current spate of tension was sparked when a South Korean warship was blown up in March, killing 46 sailors. A team of investigators from South Korea, the United States and other countries that joined the U.N. forces during the war determined in May that North Korea torpedoed the ship.

Sweden, which did not join combats of the war, participated in the part of the investigation that concluded that the torpedo was "manufactured by North Korea," but not in the intelligence analysis that determined that the torpedo was fired by a North Koran submarine.

North Korea has called the investigation a "fake." China, a North Korean ally in the war, also rejected it. Meanwhile, the United States and South Korea announced new sanctions against North Korea last week when their foreign and defense ministers traveled together to the inter-Korean border in a symbolic gesture of confronting the North.

On Sunday, in a show of their combined military power, a fleet of U.S. and South Korean naval ships and submarines sailed into waters off the east coast of South Korea, led by the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS George Washington, one of the biggest ships in the U.S. Navy . Japan, a historical rival of the two Koreas but an ally of South Korea and the United States in their confrontation with North Korea, dispatched military observers in the four-day exercise.

The drills mobilized 20 ships, 8,000 troops from both allies and an unusually large number of warplanes: more than 200 aircraft, including the F-22 Raptor fighter, which joins an exercise in South Korea for the first time.

The exercises this week are the first in a series of U.S.-South Korean maneuvers to be conducted in the coming months. U.S. officials warned last week that political pressure arising from the succession of power from the ailing North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il , to his youngest son, Kim Jong-il, might prompt the regime to attempt further military provocations.

On Saturday, North Korea vowed to launch a "sacred war" against the United States and South Korea at "any time necessary," and counter their “largest-ever nuclear war exercises" with its own "powerful nuclear deterrence."

Radio Free Asia reported that the North has put its military and hunger-stricken people on high alert. North Korea uses tensions with the Americans to boost solidarity at home and justify its development of nuclear weapons.

It will likely test short-range missiles and fire artillery in waters near the disputed western sea border and might even attempt a test of its long-range missile and a nuclear device, said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea analyst at Dongguk University in Seoul. North Korea is also enriching uranium to boost its nuclear capabilities.

"North Korea will try to fend off the mounting joint pressure from the United States and South Korea by retching up tensions in stages," Mr. Kim said. "For now, both Washington and Seoul seem to believe that they got nothing big to lose by continuing the pressure. What worries me is that the tension is not just between the two Koreas but also between the biggies, the United States and China." China turned unusually vocal in confronting the United States and criticizing its joint military maneuvers with South Korea, prompting the allies to relocate their drills from the sensitive Yellow Sea.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26korea.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Race: Still Too Hot to Touch

If Tom Wolfe had set out to write a “Bonfire of the Vanities” on modern Washington, a farce about lives and races colliding, he couldn't have done much better than to invent the unlikely story of Shirley Sherrod .

An African-American bureaucrat in the Georgia office of the Agriculture Department, Ms. Sherrod became an instant celebrity last week because of a speech she gave to a N.A.A.C.P. convention in March in which she explained the evolution of her attitudes on race. A conservative blogger triumphantly circulated an edited clip in which Ms. Sherrod seemed to suggest that she had declined to help a white farmer in need of aid. (She hadn't, to which the farmer attested.) From there, Ms. Sherrod was renounced by a jittery N.A.A.C.P., exploited by right-wing commentators, and fired and then unfired from her job, before at last receiving a conciliatory call from the president of the United States.

In many ways, Ms. Sherrod's ordeal followed a depressingly familiar pattern in American life, in which anyone who even tries to talk about race risks public outrage and humiliation.

We might have hoped that the election of a black president would somehow make the subject less sensitive and volatile, in the way that John F. Kennedy 's election seemed to allay the last, lingering tension between American Catholics and the country's Protestant establishment. But as the week's events made clear, Mr. Obama's presence alone isn't going to deliver us from a racial dialogue characterized by cable-TV conflagration — and it may even complicate the conversation.

If Mr. Obama's campaign was about “hope,” then it was, in some part, the hope for a more nuanced kind of dialogue. A telling moment was in 2007 when then-Senator Joe Biden , in summarizing Mr. Obama's appeal as an African-American, condescendingly described him as “clean” and “articulate.” It was the kind of comment that at another time, with another black leader, might have led to Mr. Biden's undoing.

Instead, Mr. Obama shrugged the whole thing off, saying no apology was needed. The next year, he chose Mr. Biden as his running mate.

In this way, Mr. Obama seemed to signal a new paradigm for black-white discussion — one in which a public figure could use language outside the defined limits of acceptability and expect to be judged in some larger context. In other words, the promise of Mr. Obama's candidacy wasn't a post-racial society where no one was going to notice the color of your skin; it was a society where you could talk about race — no matter what color you were — without automatically being called a racist.

And yet any hope that Mr. Obama's election might magically erase the tension of recent decades has faded, as the N.A.A.C.P. and the Tea Party traded accusations over race. Black leaders have discovered that you still can't raise legitimate questions about racism without being accused of “playing the race card.” And a large element of the Tea Party movement that is simply angered over government spending finds that in much of the public's mind, it is still linked to its most extreme, antebellum elements.

And then there is the case of Ms. Sherrod, which seemed to bring together all the familiar elements of racial dysfunction in the society: bigotry and hypersensitivity, gross distortions and moralizing.

In some ways, Mr. Obama's election seems to have further confused the conversation. Some white conservatives may be in no mood to feel contrite about the nation's racial legacy now that a black man is sitting in the Oval Office. Civil rights groups, meanwhile, are struggling with the question of how to fight racism in a nation led by a president with an African last name.

Al Sharpton , who considers himself a black leader of Mr. Obama's generation, has made the case that many of his older colleagues are preoccupied with protesters in the Tea Party and not focused enough on the opportunities that come with governing. “Some people are just used to fighting the power, rather than using the power to win,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview. “You don't get control of the White House and two governors and the Justice Department, and then start arguing with people carrying signs.”

Why haven't we moved beyond the old, stultifying debate in the age of Obama?

One reason may be that Mr. Obama himself tries to avoid discoursing on the issue, in the way that Bill Clinton relished. The president is mired in a miserable economy that is endangering his party's hold on power; White House aides don't want him to appear distracted by a debate that may seem superfluous to many Americans. And to those aides, perhaps, Mr. Obama's appeal among white voters as a biracial politician has been helped by the fact that he doesn't talk much about it.

Before he entered political life, of course, Mr. Obama wrote expansively about his racial identity in a memoir. As a candidate for president, beset by controversy over the race-infused comments of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright , Mr. Obama delivered a less personal but deeply thoughtful speech about the racial grudges and suppositions that permeated the two cultures, white and black, into which he was born.

As president, however, Mr. Obama's instinct, much to the irritation of older black leaders, has been to avoid any lengthy discussion of racial identity or animus. (It was Mr. Biden, and not the president, who spoke for both men when he said recently that they did not consider the Tea Party movement to be grounded in racism.)

President Obama did comment tartly on the arrest of his friend Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and then held the famous “beer summit” in the Rose Garden. Inside the White House, however, Mr. Obama's foray into that debate, while trying to focus public attention on health care reform , was considered a calamitous mistake.

Perhaps the president's reluctance reflects the particular perils faced by any president who represents an American minority — the reasonable fear that he will be perceived, however unfairly, as chauvinist or parochial.

The historian Robert Dallek , a biographer of John F. Kennedy, posits that whatever effect Mr. Kennedy might have had on American attitudes about Catholicism was cemented not by his election in 1960, but by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. It wasn't until that moment, Mr. Dallek says, when Mr. Kennedy proved that he could be relied on to protect the national interest as a whole — a judgment that extended, perhaps, to American Catholics generally.

Looked at this way, perhaps Mr. Obama is not just a president in the thrall of economic crisis, but a black leader in search of his defining moment, as well. The conflagrations continue, while we wait.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/weekinreview/25bai.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Drivers on Prescription Drugs Are Hard to Convict

The accident that killed Kathryn Underdown had all the markings of a drunken-driving case. The car that hit her as she rode her bicycle one May evening in Miller Place, N.Y., did not stop, the police said, until it crashed into another vehicle farther down the road.

The driver could not keep her eyes open during an interview with investigators, according to the complaint against her, and her speech was slow and slurred. But the driver told the police that she had not been drinking; instead, the complaint said, she had taken several prescription medications, including a sedative and a muscle relaxant.

She was charged with vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence of drugs — an increasingly common offense, law enforcement officials say, at a time when drunken-driving deaths are dropping and when prescriptions for narcotic painkillers, anti-anxiety medications, sleep aids and other powerful drugs are rampant.

The issue is vexing police officials because, unlike with alcohol, there is no agreement on what level of drugs in the blood impairs driving.

The behavioral effects of prescription medication vary widely, depending not just on the drug but on the person taking it. Some, like anti-anxiety drugs, can dull alertness and slow reaction time; others, like stimulants, can encourage risk-taking and hurt the ability to judge distances. Mixing prescriptions, or taking them with alcohol or illicit drugs, can exacerbate impairment and sharply increase the risk of crashing, researchers say.

“In the past it was cocaine, it was PCP, it was marijuana ,” said Chuck Hayes of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “Now we're into this prescription drug era that is giving us a whole new challenge.”

The police also struggle with the challenge of prosecuting someone who was taking valid prescriptions.

“How do we balance between people who legitimately need their prescriptions and protecting the public?” said Mark Neil, senior lawyer at the National Traffic Law Center, which works with prosecutors. “It becomes a very delicate balance.”

Some states have made it illegal to drive with any detectable level of prohibited drugs in the blood. But setting any kind of limit for prescription medications is far more complicated, partly because the complex chemistry of drugs makes their effects more difficult to predict than alcohol's. And determining whether a driver took drugs soon before getting on the road can be tricky, since some linger in the body for days or weeks.

Many states are confronting the problem as part of a broader effort to keep so-called drugged drivers, including those under the influence of marijuana and other illegal drugs, off the road.

“We have a pretty clear message in this country that you don't drink and drive,” said R. Gil Kerlikowske , President Obama 's top drug policy adviser, who wants to reduce drugged-driving accidents by 10 percent over the next five years. “We need very much to have a similar message when it comes to drugs.”

There is no reliable data on how many drivers are impaired by prescription drugs, but law enforcement officials say the problem is growing so quickly that states are putting hundreds of police officers through special training to spot signs of drug impairment and clamoring for better technology to detect it.

Even the prevalence of drug-impaired driving is unknown, since many states combine the arrest data with that for drunken driving. Mr. Kerlikowske points to a 2007 survey by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration , which screened 5,900 nighttime drivers around the country and found that 16.3 percent tested positive for legal or illegal drugs.

The tests could not determine which drivers were impaired by drugs, but Mr. Kerlikowske said the results suggested a problem that had “flown below the radar” for too long.

“You don't want to scare people,” he said, “but you certainly want to make them aware of the dangerousness. You can be as deadly behind the wheel with prescription drugs as you can with over-the-limit alcohol, and you are responsible for your own actions.”

In interviews, law enforcement officials around the country said anyone who drives while taking prescription drugs is at risk of arrest, not only those who drive recklessly. In one recent case near Bangor, Me., a pickup truck on a rural road was not swerving, speeding or otherwise hinting that its driver was impaired. A police officer stopped the truck because of its noisy muffler, then saw that the driver's eyes were bloodshot and his speech slurred.

A Breathalyzer test found that the driver, Chester Annance, had not been drinking. Yet he was arrested based on the officer's suspicion that he was on drugs, and a blood test later found opiate painkillers in his system.

Mr. Annance was convicted this month of driving under the influence of drugs. He received seven days in jail, a three-year license suspension and a fine. He is appealing the conviction.

“You don't need to wait for a crash to happen before you charge someone,” said R. Christopher Almy, the district attorney in Bangor.

Defense lawyers say that in their zeal to make a statement about drug-impaired driving, the police are casting too wide a net and unfairly punishing people who are taking prescriptions as directed.

Tara Jenswold-Schipper, an assistant attorney general in Wisconsin, said she usually stuck to cases where drivers had mixed drugs, exceeded the proper dose or taken controlled medications without a prescription.

In one such case in that state, a former physician slammed his S.U.V. into a Honda Accord in April 2008, killing the pregnant driver and her 10-year-old daughter. Prosecutors said the physician, Mark Benson, had high levels of the sleep aid Ambien in his system, as well as Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, and oxycodone, an opiate painkiller. Mr. Benson was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Defendants can try to prove that they did not realize their medication would affect their driving, prosecutors said, but that argument may not hold up if the bottle had a warning label.

“Would you go home and start a chain saw and cut down a tree?” said Lt. Col. Thomas C. Hejl, the assistant sheriff in Calvert County, Md. “Why should you get behind the wheel of a vehicle when the same medication has the same side effects?”

Unable to prove impairment with blood tests, prosecutors in drugged-driving cases rely heavily on the testimony of “drug recognition experts,” law enforcement officers trained to spot signs of impairment in drivers. But there are only about 7,000 such officers nationwide, Mr. Hayes said, not nearly enough to respond to every traffic stop that may involve drugs.

“When they are involved,” he said of the experts, “our chances of convicting people are much higher.”

But persuading a jury to convict someone of impaired driving due to prescription drugs remains difficult except for the most egregious cases, said Douglas F. Gansler, the attorney general in Maryland.

“Because most people on the jury will also likely be taking prescription drugs for some ailment,” Mr. Gansler said, “whether it's Lipitor or allergy pills or whatever it might be, they might think, ‘I don't want that to become criminal.' ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/us/25drugged.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Fear of Freedom

A prisoner who begs to stay indefinitely at the Guantánamo Bay detention center rather than be sent back to Algeria probably has a strong reason to fear the welcoming reception at home.

Abdul Aziz Naji, who has been held at Guantánamo since 2002, told the Obama administration that he would be tortured if he was transferred to Algeria, by either the Algerian government or fundamentalist groups there. Though he offered to remain at the prison, the administration shipped him home last weekend and washed its hands of the man. Almost immediately upon arrival, he disappeared, and his family fears the worst.

It is an act of cruelty that seems to defy explanation.

Mr. Naji, 35 and born in Algeria, was picked up by the police in Pakistan in May 2002 and turned over to the Americans on suspicion of being a terrorist. He admitted working for the humanitarian wing of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani terrorist organization, but the Bush administration never charged him with a crime, explained why he was being held, or demonstrated any connection to terrorist acts.

The Obama administration, which is trying to reduce the population at Guantánamo, battled Mr. Naji's lawyers all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to send him to Algeria. Mr. Naji argued that once he was in his home country, he would be tortured, either by the government on suspicion of being a terrorist, or by fundamentalist groups pressuring him to join their cause.

The court, which issued a terse order rejecting his plea, apparently accepted the Obama administration's assurance that the Algerian government promised not to torture Mr. Naji. Under a 2008 Supreme Court decision , the government is given broad discretion to decide when to accept such promises from a foreign government.

Mr. Naji asked for political asylum in Switzerland, but within hours of the court's order, he was on a plane bound for Algeria. The court refused to accept a similar plea from another Algerian at Guantánamo who does not wish to go home, Farhi Saeed Bin Mohammed, who has not yet been returned but could be at any time. Four other Algerian prisoners have made similar claims.

Algeria may well have promised not to torture the two men, but it is hard to take that promise seriously, or to know whether it has already been broken. Government officials there say they are not detaining Mr. Naji, but have not accounted for his whereabouts, which they need to do promptly.

The State Department's human rights report on the country , issued in March, said that reports of torture in Algeria have been reduced but are still prevalent. It quotes human rights lawyers there as saying the practice still takes place to extract confessions in security cases. People disappear in the country, the report said, and armed groups — which obviously made no promises to the administration — continue to act with impunity.

We support the administration's efforts to close Guantánamo, and understand the concern that if there is a more heavily Republican Congress next year, doing so may become harder. That is no reason to deliver prisoners to governments that the United States considers hostile and that have a record of torture and lawlessness.

The government refuses to deport prisoners to Libya, Syria and other countries known for abuse. It could find a new home for the Algerians.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25sun1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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Unsafe at Any Meal

Monterey, Calif.

EVERY day, about 200,000 Americans are sickened by contaminated food. Every year, about 325,000 are hospitalized by a food-borne illness. And the number who are killed annually by something they ate is roughly the same as the number of Americans who've been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003.

Those estimates, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , suggest the scale of the problem. But they fail to convey the human toll. The elderly and people with compromised immune systems face an elevated risk from food-borne pathogens like listeria, campylobacter and salmonella. By far the most vulnerable group, however, are children under the age of 4. Our food will never be perfectly safe — and yet if the Senate fails to pass the food safety legislation now awaiting a vote, tens of thousands of American children will become needlessly and sometimes fatally ill.

Almost one year ago, the House of Representatives passed the Food Safety Enhancement Act with bipartisan support. A similar bill, the F.D.A. Food Safety Modernization Act, was unanimously approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in November. This legislation would grant the Food and Drug Administration, which has oversight over 80 percent of the nation's food, the authority to test widely for dangerous pathogens and improve the agency's ability to trace outbreaks back to their source. Most important, it would finally give the agency the power to order the recall of contaminated foods — and to punish companies that knowingly sell them.

This bill is supported by an unusual set of advocacy groups: the American Public Health Association, Consumers Union, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Grocery Manufacturers Association, among others. Last week, a poll for Consumers Union found that 80 percent of Americans want Congress to empower the F.D.A. to recall tainted foods.

You'd think that a bill with such broad support, on a public health issue of such fundamental importance, would easily reach the floor of the Senate for a vote. But it has been languishing, stuck in some legislative limbo. If it fails to gain passage by the end of this session, Congress will have to start from scratch again next year.

Food processors reluctant to oppose the bill openly will be delighted if it dies a quiet death. That's because, right now, very few cases of food poisoning are ever actually linked to what the person ate, and companies that sell contaminated products routinely avoid liability. The economic cost is instead imposed on society. And it's a huge cost. According to a recent study sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the annual health-related cost of food-borne illness in the United States is about $152 billion.

Without tough food safety rules, a perverse economic incentive guides the marketplace. Adulterated food is cheaper to produce than safe food. Since consumers cannot tell the difference between the two, companies that try to do the right thing are forced to compete with companies that couldn't care less.

So the law of the jungle prevails, as Upton Sinclair noted more than a century ago. In those days, many companies had no qualms about selling children's candy colored with lethal heavy metals and rancid food laced with toxic chemicals to disguise the stench; such abuses were widespread. And some of the strongest support for President Theodore Roosevelt's food safety crusade came from processors (like the H. J. Heinz Company) that were outraged by the unfair advantage their competitors gained by selling cheap, dangerous, adulterated food.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 helped to eliminate many unsafe practices. But the recent centralization and industrialization of the American food system poses new kinds of threats.

Today, a problem at a single factory can swiftly lead to an outbreak that extends nationwide. Last year's peanut butter recall illustrates what can go wrong. Executives at the Peanut Corporation of America knew that peanut butter from their filthy, rodent-infested plant was testing positive for salmonella — but shipped it anyway, for months.

Thousands of different products, manufactured by more than 200 companies, including candies and cookies marketed to children, were potentially tainted thanks to that one plant. And in the end, roughly 20,000 Americans got salmonella; about half of them were under the age of 16 and one-fifth were younger than 5.

The enormous rise in imported food also exposes American consumers to food safety lapses overseas. In recent years, China has been responsible for food scandals that bring to mind the United States in the days of Upton Sinclair: Chinese companies have been caught adding lead-based whiteners to pasta and selling beverages made with industrial alcohol. Two years ago, almost 300,000 Chinese infants were sickened by baby formula that had been adulterated with melamine, a cheap but toxic chemical. The overuse of antibiotics and pesticides in Chinese agriculture is rampant.

Despite those food safety problems, China has become the largest exporter of food to the United States after Canada and Mexico. About 60 percent of the apple juice in America — like peanut butter, a product consumed largely by children — now comes from China. This is yet another reason that passage of the F.D.A. modernization act is so urgent; it would, for the first time, subject foods from overseas to the same standards as those produced in the United States.

Last year, President Obama called for measures that would “upgrade our food safety laws for the 21st century,” and this bill is a good first step. The president has asked lawmakers to pass the legislation, saying that it would provide “the federal government with the appropriate tools to accomplish its core food safety goals.”

For months, however, the Internet has been rife with wild rumors and accusations: that the bill is really a subterfuge cleverly designed to eliminate small farms and strengthen the grip of industrial agriculture; that it would outlaw organic production; that it would hand over the nation's food supply to Monsanto.

Those arguments may be sincere. But the bill very clearly instructs the Food and Drug Administration to focus its enforcement efforts on plants that pose the greatest risk of causing large-scale outbreaks. And the bill's wording can still be clarified so that mom-and-pop producers aren't threatened by heavy-handed government regulations.

What the legislation actually seeks is some restraint on unchecked corporate power. We've seen what happens when Wall Street is allowed to regulate itself and when the oil industry is allowed to regulate itself. How could it possibly make sense to let the food industry continue to write its own rules?

I've come to know families that were devastated by a food-borne illness. A great deal of harm, inflicted on some of the weakest members of society, can be avoided with a few simple reforms. Nobody should lose a child because the Senate lacks the will and the leadership to act.

Eric Schlosser is the author of “Fast Food Nation” and a co-producer of the documentary “Food, Inc.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25schlosser.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Google News

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At least 51 bodies found in mass graves in Mexico

By the CNN Wire Staff

Mexico City, Mexico (CNN) -- Authorities in the Mexican border state of Nuevo Leon have finished excavating and are trying to identify 51 bodies they found in nine hidden mass graves, state media said.

The graves could be connected to drug gang violence, Nuevo Leon Governor Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz told the state-run Notimex news agency.

Investigators found charred remains, incinerated bone fragments and stains of fire on the ground where bodies were presumably burned in steel drums, Notimex said.

Teams from the state attorney general's office and the Mexican army used dogs and heavy machinery in their 72-hour search of the area, Notimex reported Saturday.

Investigators believe some of the bodies had been dumped within the past 15 days, said Alejandro Garza y Garza, Nuevo Leon attorney general.

Garza said Friday that the bodies were in an area spanning 3 hectares (about 7 acres) in the municipality of Juarez outside the state capital of Monterrey. Investigators were still searching for additional graves Friday, he said, according to Notimex.

The bodies were mostly males between ages 20 and 50, Notimex said, and many of them had tattoos.

Forensic investigators are performing DNA tests to identify the victims, Notimex reported.

Similar mass graves have been discovered in the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Guerrero and Quintana Roo since late May. Authorities have linked them to Mexico's ongoing drug war.

Nuevo Leon, which borders Texas, has seen a spike in drug violence this year due to an intensifying rivalry between former partners: the Gulf cartel and a group know as the Zetas.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/07/25/mexico.mass.graves/?hpt=T2

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From Fox News

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Operation Purple: Camp for Soldiers' Kids

Posted By Peter Doocy

July 24, 2010

Ten thousand kids from military families have been enlisted this summer for "Operation Purple". Their mission: to attend a free week of camp at one of 68 locations nationwide...and have lots of fun!

The campers are all aged 7-17, and many of their parents are fighting for our freedom on the front lines in Iraq and Afghanistan. The National Military Family Association goes out of their way to make sure the kids enjoy traditional camp activities like ziplines, high-ropes courses, and a variety of sporting events. Even so, the campers are constantly thinking of their parents.

Jaelin Livett, 10, says, "I worry he'll get hurt-that I might never see him again," about his father serving in Iraq.

Makayla Lewis, 8, has a dad in Afghanistan, and she says, "I worry about him...like...if somebody shoots him or something, or throws a bomb at him."

Jaelin, Makayla, and about one hundred other campers at their North East, Maryland location salute their heroic parents on a "Wall of Honor," where they draw pictures of their moms and dads overseas. They also participated in a "Military Family Feud," where the campers were surveyed about the best part of having a parent in the Armed Services.

Among the top answers? Number 1: "Traveling the world". Number 2: "Get Sweet Camo(flauge)". Number four was "Military Discounts", seven was "Parents Never Out of a Job," and eight was "Meeting Important People".

The free-of-charge summer camp is known as "Operation Purple" because purple is the military designation for a joint effort, according to Bailey Bernius from the National Military Family Association.

Bernius explains that throughout the week, counselors make sure campers understand that even though they aren't on the front lines like their parents, they serve too. She says, "the whole purpose of this camp program is to let kids know that we appreciate their service, and even though its a different type of service than their parent, we still want to recognize the fact that they are also serving in a different way."

Every camper wears a t-shirt with the motto "Kids Serve Too," on the back. When asked to explain what that means, Dylan Sparks, 9, said, "we serve because we have to deal with the parents deployed. And its kinda hard because we have to do a lot of work to help the parents who aren't deployed... Because its like a missing part of a puzzle."

Insightful children like Dylan also made clear that it is great to be surrounded by so many other military kids, who know how tough it can be around the house with one-or both- parents in harms way.

For children who are forced to live with the stress of worrying for their parents safety, "Operation Purple," is a fantastic outlet. But, they are in desperate need of a sponsor, or else they might be forced to shut down next summer. Anyone interested in donating should go to www.militaryfamily.org [2]

http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/07/24/operation-purple-camp-for-soldiers-kids/

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