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Budget cuts force states to slash funding
for crucial programs
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San Francisco police dept. found to
hinder investigations
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Bush shows ‘pattern of hostility’ toward civil rights
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NATION BRIEFS
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ACLU challenges govt. secrecy on ‘no fly’ list

San Francisco, California, Apr. 22— Saying that federal officials violated privacy and public information laws, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California today filed a federal lawsuit challenging secret “no fly” and other transportation watch lists. In papers filed with the court, the ACLU said that at least 339 passengers have been stopped and questioned at San Francisco International Airport since September 2001.

“At the San Francisco airport alone, hundreds of passengers were stopped or questioned in connection with the so-called ‘no fly’ list,” said Jayashri Srikantiah, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. “If that number is any indication, it is likely that thousands of individuals at airports across the country are being routinely detained and questioned because their names appear on a secret government list.”

Filed in federal district court here, the ACLU lawsuit follows two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act requests filed in the last five months. The ACLU said the lawsuit was necessary because the government has refused to confirm the existence of any protocols, procedures, or guidelines as to how the “no fly” lists were created or to detail how they are being maintained or corrected and, importantly, how people who are mistakenly included on the list may have their names removed.

“The government has so far failed to disclose even basic information about the ‘no fly’ list, such as why names are added to the list, how incorrect names can be removed from such lists, and what the guidelines and restrictions are regarding the use of such lists,” Srikantiah said. “The public has a right to accountability about the ‘no fly’ list and other government watch lists.”

The ACLU lawsuit seeks immediate disclosure of the requested records. The ACLU filed the FOIA and Privacy Act requests on behalf of itself and peace activists Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon last November. Earlier in 2002, both women were told by airline agents that their names appeared on a secret “no fly” list at San Francisco International Airport (SFO). The women were briefly detained by San Francisco Police while their names were checked against a “master” list.

On Mar. 12, the ACLU of Northern California filed a records request with airport officials under the San Francisco Sunshine Ordinance and the California Public Records Act. On Apr. 8, airport authorities released nearly 400 pages of documents which confirm that approximately 339 air passengers, between Sept. 2001 and Mar. 2003, were stopped or questioned at SFO in connection with the “no fly” list and other watch lists.

An earlier Public Records Act request to airport officials had confirmed the existence of the “no fly” list, and that Gordon’s and Adams’ names had been checked against a “master” list, the ACLU said. The scant public information that is available about transportation watch lists confirms that the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) maintains at least two watch lists: the “no fly” list and a “selectee” list that establishes which air passengers are singled out for additional security measures.

Adams and Gordon, co-publishers of War Times, a newspaper that first began publication after Sept. 11, 2001, said they are deeply troubled by the secrecy of the watch list.

“We are deeply concerned about the government’s secret watch lists and the lack of government accountability,” said Adams. “We want to find out how our names appeared on a government watch list and how we can get our names off the list. But instead of answering our questions, the federal government has refused to release any information.”

Barbara Musante, a Bay Area computer consultant, and her husband Dennis Musante, a manager with Wells Fargo Bank, were also told by airline officials at SFO that their names appeared on a federal “no fly” list, according to the ACLU.

“To detain innocent people because their names are similar to someone who the FBI feels may be a danger to this country is frustrating and not acceptable,” said Barbara Musante.

Source: American Civil Liberties Union

Budget cuts force states to slash funding for crucial programs

By Roland Watson

Washington, DC, Apr. 24— In Missouri they are unscrewing every third light bulb. Prisons in Illinois are splitting prescription drugs in half. The Governor of South Carolina is urging others to follow his practice of reusing Post-it notes and saving paper clips.

Across the United States the worst budget crisis in half a century has forced states to scrimp for savings in a style reminiscent of the Great Depression. Together, the 50 state governments are facing deficits of $30 billion this year and $82 billion next.

Because all but Vermont are obliged by their own laws to balance their budgets, they have to find $112 billion-worth of savings in two years. California, which has the biggest deficit, is about to run out of money.

Tax rises would help to meet some of the need, but in many states moves to increase taxes have been defeated by legislatures or voters, leaving drastic cuts as the only way to make ends meet.

“The Big Turn Off” in Missouri, which has dimmed electric light by a third in most government buildings, is typical of the desperate scramble to save pennies. In Kentucky, every other ceiling light has been turned off in the State Capitol.

The Kansas Governor has asked agencies to drop the gold-embossed state seal from stationery, saving two cents a page. Agencies in Oregon are banned from color printing.

Such measures, although eye-catching, are largely symbolic, Scott Pattison, of the National Association of State Budget Officers, said. “They demonstrate that you are doing everything you can.” They are also aimed chiefly at administrative agencies, or at areas of spending where there are fewer votes, such as prisons.

Jail chiefs in Illinois are trying to cut their prescription drugs bill by ordering double-strength drugs and splitting them. In Virginia, prisoners are to receive only two meals a day on weekends. Kentucky has chosen an alternative route -- releasing prisoners early.

The sums involved make it impossible, however, for state governments to confine their cuts to politically marginal areas. In Oklahoma, teachers are mopping floors, driving school buses and cooking meals because support staff have been laid off. In Oregon, teachers worked for two weeks without pay to keep schools open. School districts in some parts of Colorado are operating four-day weeks. In Idaho, towns have held cake sales to keep teachers on staff.

Across the country, tens of thousands of poorer families are losing access to healthcare as capitals cut back on the Medicaid program. In Texas, 275,000 fewer children will receive healthcare.

California, which faces a $30 billion deficit, 30 percent of its budget, will have to start writing IOUs by the summer unless it finds a way of raising money. Alaska and Oregon face even bigger deficits as a proportion of their budget. Nevada, New York, Arizona, New Jersey, and Texas all face deficits of between 15 and 20 percent of their budgets.

The turmoil has yet to threaten President Bush. The White House has tried to keep the issue at arm’s length, refusing to bail out states and telling them it is their problem. Pattison said that voters tended to take their wrath out on state legislators rather than presidents for local problems.

Bush travels to Ohio today to bang the drum for his economic priority, his endangered package of federal tax cuts. The state demonstrates how state budget deficits could yet hurt him. Ohio is planning to cut 50,000 people from health coverage, the largest such cut yet.

If voters go into the presidential election year in 2004 with their education and healthcare systems in chaos, it may present Democrats with an opening.

Bush contends that a recession that began before he came to office, coupled with war, is behind the financial straits of states, as well as of the economy as a whole. States, too, share some of the blame for gorging on the 1990s boom with little regard to possible perils ahead. They cut taxes, increased spending and put some aside in reserves. But it was not nearly enough.

“States are really hurting,” Pattison said. “It is particularly bad because in the past they have relied on rainy-day funds to cushion the pain. Now it is nothing but painful cuts.”

Source: Times (UK)

San Francisco police dept. found to hinder investigations

Compiled by Kendra Sarvadi

Apr. 29— On Apr. 25, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi called on San Francisco police to appoint a lawyer to review more than 3,500 criminal cases, including homicides, that may have to go to trial again because police failed to fully disclose to the court the background of the officers involved in the case, including any potential misconduct.

Adachi said he supports an investigation into why, for the past five years, police had withheld personnel files from the court — information that defense attorneys are legally entitled to obtain in order to assess the credibility of a police officer testifying in a case.

The issue came to light when it was revealed that a report concerning disciplinary problems involving Officer Alex Fagan, Jr., was kept at a district police station and was never given to the attorney for a man bringing a civil suit against Fagan.

Adachi said that police might also have withheld evidence relating to civil cases and consequently could now be vulnerable to civil litigation from criminal defendants and plaintiffs who didn’t receive a fair trial.

“I’ve never seen anything like this — it’s much bigger than the issue of the police indictments,” Adachi said, referring to the now-dropped conspiracy-to-obstruct-justice charges filed against command-staff officers in regard to last year’s brawl involving three off-duty rookie cops, including Fagan, Jr.

Lieutenant Charles Keohane of the San Francisco Police Department’s legal division disputed Adachi’s claim that some 3,500 files would need to be reviewed, saying that a preliminary review of about 100 cases in which police had testified without providing their personnel dossiers had not indicated that the dossiers contained any damaging evidence that would warrant a retrial.

Watchdog group report charges SFPD with impeding investigations

Adachi’s request for an investigation came the day after San Francisco’s independent police watchdog agency issued a blistering report Wednesday charging that the Police Department routinely impedes investigations into citizen complaints of serious officer misconduct.

Some of the cases involve the deaths of suspects in custody and shootings by police.

The City Charter and the San Francisco Police Department require that officers promptly and fully cooperate with investigations by the civilian-run Office of Citizen Complaints (OCC). “Despite the unequivocal mandate, the department has hampered OCC’s investigations in significant ways,” the report states.

The agency found delays of a year or more in the release of routine documents, such as incident reports, daily arrest logs, and officer mug shots. It also reported that some officers fail to show up to interviews with OCC investigators.

“Delays in obtaining this information interfere with and often prevent OCC investigators from identifying officers and civilian witnesses who must be interviewed before memories fade or evidence disappears,” the report said.

The OCC also found that when the agency wraps up investigations, the department has been slow to respond, resulting in some officers who should be disciplined being let off the hook.

An analysis by the San Francisco Chronicle of OCC cases published last month found that between 1995 and 2001, the department had delayed 99 cases for so long that they had to be dropped because the one-year statute of limitations for disciplinary action on incidents of police misconduct ran out.

At the Police Commission meeting Wednesday night, Acting Chief Alex Fagan Sr. said, “I welcome the report. I made a commitment to resolve these issues. They are issues that are long-standing that have not been resolved to the satisfaction of the OCC or the Police Department.”

Many of the matters, he said, already have begun to be addressed within the department.

The new OCC report was requested by Supervisors Tom Ammiano and Jake McGoldrick, who called for a full accounting of how the city handles cases of alleged police misconduct.

The request came in the wake of a street fight last November involving three off-duty officers, including Fagan’s son, and two young men. The case led to the indictments of the elder Fagan, the police chief and other top brass for allegedly conspiring to cover up the incident. The district attorney eventually dropped the indictments against Fagan and Chief Earl Sanders; Superior Court Judge Kay Tsenin later tossed out the charges against the other top officers for lack of evidence.

The 20-year-old OCC, which handles about 1,000 complaints a year, can investigate allegations — but disciplining officers is left to the chief and the commission. In the report, the agency raised concerns that the department did not take seriously the sustained findings in the investigations and let officers go or did not take strong disciplinary action.

Sources: San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner

Bush shows ‘pattern of hostility’ toward civil rights

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Apr. 25-- The administration of President George W. Bush is steadily and systematically working to reverse longstanding civil rights policies and impede the enforcement of US civil rights laws, according to a new report released Thursday by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund (LCCREF).

“For defenders of civil rights, this is a perilous time,” warned the LCCREF, a coalition of rights and religious groups whose members include the National Council of Churches, the National Organization for Women, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, among other grassroots groups.

The groups charge that Bush and his aides appear determined to impose what the report called “a radical view of the Constitution in which states’ rights are paramount” both through the adoption of policies and regulations that undermine the basis on which federal civil-rights protections stand and by packing the federal appeals courts with “right-wing ideologues.”

“While the public’s attention has been focused on the threat of another terrorist attack after 9/11 and the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s efforts to undermine civil rights enforcement have received scant notice,” said Karen McGill Lawson, LCCREF’s executive director.

“As this report demonstrates, the combination of below-the-radar regulations, little-noticed litigation, and severe budget cuts illustrates a pattern of hostility toward core civil rights values and signals a diminished commitment to the idea of non-discrimination,” she added.

The report, entitled “The Bush Administration Takes Aim: Civil Rights Under Attack,” charges that the administration is not only rejecting the next generation of civil-rights protections, such as providing more sanctions for racial profiling by police, it is also actively eroding existing civil rights protections.

First, the administration is approving new regulations that weaken the civil rights of US workers by dismantling existing rules designed to reward companies that demonstrate compliance with civil-rights and other laws relating to worker safety, the environment, and consumer protection.

For example, immediately after assuming office President Bush began suspending the package of measures known as the “Responsible Contractor” rules that ensured that government contracts were awarded only to companies that enforced such laws. They were finally repealed altogether on Dec. 27, 2001, a date which, according to LCCR, suggested a deliberate effort to limit public scrutiny of a potentially controversial measure.

In the same way, the administration has reduced educational equity for women and girls through new Title IX policies and rejected changes in regulations that were designed to reduce racial disparities in federal sentencing rules.

Second, it has worked to reverse civil rights advances through litigation, most notably in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases in which the Justice Department filed amicus briefs aimed at persuading the court that the university’s admission policies were unconstitutional.

Similarly, the administration abruptly abandoned a decade of US government support for litigation designed to increase the representation of minorities and women among custodians working in New York City schools. Currently, some 96 percent of custodians are men and only a small fraction are members of minority groups. A similar reversal by Washington took place with respect to a case related to the Pittsburgh Police.

Finally, the administration has undercut anti-discrimination efforts through its budgetary decisions, according to the report. Key civil rights enforcement initiatives have been systematically under-funded, it said, while federal programs to promote education, housing, and health care for low-income minority communities are also languishing due to “Bush tax cuts and multi-billion increases for the Pentagon.”

“Civil rights are illusory in a society without quality public education, decent housing, and affordable health care for all citizens,” the report noted.

“Leading advocates in the new states’ rights movement now control or dominate all three branches of the federal government. They are prepared to move forward toward their extremist goals, even though those goals cannot be reconciled with the bipartisan civil rights consensus of the past fifty years,” the report warned.

Source: OneWorld.net