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Wolfowitz gets authority for military tribunals
US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as “appointing authority” for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaida and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers, and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Wolfowitz will exercise key powers in the commission process. After the chief military prosecutor drafts charges against a detainee, Wolfowitz will have the authority to approve those charges and send the detainee to trial.
As appointing authority, he also will select military officers to sit on commissions. If commission members cannot resolve matters related to procedures, motions or facts, Wolfowitz will make the final decision.
Rumsfeld will remain involved in the process, especially at the later stages. (CNN)

NJ judge unseals transcript in controversial terror case
Mohamed Atriss spent six months in the Passaic County Jail based on accusations by county prosecutors that he had ties to terrorism — allegations prosecutors called so sensitive that they had to be kept secret from Atriss despite his constitutional right to confront evidence against him.
Today, the superior court judge who took the secret evidence last November unsealed the hearing transcript, revealing that the allegations were based largely on inaccurate information that Atriss and his lawyer said they could have rebutted, if only they had been allowed to see it.
Atriss said he may file a civil suit against county authorities. “To think they kept me in jail on this!” he said with tears in his eyes.
According to the transcript, prosecutors told Judge Marilyn Clark that Atriss co-owned a check-cashing business in Jersey City with a man “classified by the FBI as a terrorist.” In an interview today, U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said the man named in the transcript was never classified as a terrorist but was a subject in a 1996 FBI investigation of a terrorist group.
Atriss said he and the man were in business together for a brief time in 1987. He said prosecutors would have discovered that if they had searched state business records. (Washington Post)

Flier from senator angers Muslims
Senator Guy W. Glodis has angered Muslims and a civil rights group over a flier he sent to fellow senators that says terrorist attacks could be deterred if convicted Muslim extremists were buried with pig entrails.
The flier, which Glodis’ 39 colleagues received Wednesday, said an execution of Muslim extremists in the Philippines was ordered by General John Joseph “Black Jack’’ Pershing before World War I, in which the terrorists were shot with bullets dipped in pigs’ blood, then buried with ‘’pigs’ blood, entrails, etc.’’ According to the flier, contact with the blood and entrails of pigs “instantly barred’’ Muslims from paradise, dooming them to hell. It said news of the burial deterred other terrorist attacks for “the next forty-two years.’’
“I am outraged and I am offended, and I think that the senator owes an apology to his Muslim constituents,’’ said Raeed N. Tayeh, public affairs director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, in Washington, D.C.
Islam does not teach that people would be barred from heaven by being buried with pigs, Tayeh said.
“It’s a canard, it’s a lie, a fable,’’ he said. ‘’It is one of those urban legends that keeps getting passed on like a terrible chain letter. God admits people to heaven based on their actions. This is what Muslims believe.’’
“This is just a sad commentary on the ignorance of people who are entrusted to represent Americans, that they would pass around such offensive, distasteful, and slanderous garbage to members of an esteemed body such as the Massachusetts Senate,’’ Tayeh said.
(Boston Globe)

CAFTA Call to action, New Orleans
The sixth round of negotiations for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) will take place in New Orleans, from Monday, July 28 to Friday, August 1, 2003. The talks began January, 2003 and nine rounds of negotiations are expected to conclude around December, 2003.
CAFTA is a trade agreement being negotiated by government representatives from United States and Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. It is modeled after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). President Bush has voiced his support for CAFTA and hopes to have an agreement sealed as quickly as possible, in part to move the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations forward faster. Stopping CAFTA is an important step in defeating the FTAA.
Events in New Orleans begin on Saturday, July 26th, with a march against the arrival of CAFTA delegates. Other events planned include an anti-capitalist snake march during the summit itself, teach-ins and discussions, a concert benefiting potential legal fees, and affinity-group actions. (New Orleans Anti-Capitalist Bloc)

San Francisco anti-war protesters have charges dropped
The district attorney’s office today dismissed infractions against 407 people arrested in March in antiwar protests here and also indicated that it would not pursue charges against all but about 20 of the others who were arrested.
Mike Menesini, an assistant district attorney, said the decision, which lawyers for the protesters estimated would affect about 2,300 people, was made “in the interest of justice.”
Mr. Menesini said the decision was based largely on the difficulty in prosecuting individuals in what were essentially mass arrests. He said the Police Department had indicated that it could not “establish the facts necessary to convict any of these individuals” because the arrest reports were too general.
Bobbie Stein, a lawyer with the National Lawyers Guild, which has represented most of the arrested protesters, said she met today with Mr. Hallinan and was assured that the remaining cases would not be pursued. She said Mr. Hallinan had come to realize that the arrested protesters were prepared to fight every effort to prosecute them, even relatively minor infractions, such as jaywalking. (New York Times)

Bush protested by thousands on west coast fundraising tour
Demonstrators greeted President George W. Bush during a lunchtime campaign fundraiser in the Bay Area. Then, at suppertime, a larger crowd, estimated as high as 10,000, protested against the Bush in LA.
CODEPINK women in San Francisco and Los Angeles delivered Bush a “pink slip” as he dropped in on California to collect his payback from the profits of military spending and tax cuts.
In Los Angeles, the women of CODEPINK hung a 30 foot satin “pink slip” reading “Bush/You Lied/Your Fired” off the Century Plaza Hotel while Bush collect campaign contributions in the ballroom below. Outside thousands of protesters cheered and demonstrated against the continuing conflicts and loss of life in Iraq. Dressed in pink the women wore sashes reading “Bush Lied”, “Education, Not Occupation” and “Where are the weapons of mass destruction?”
In San Francisco, members of CODEPINK staged a one-hour protest inside the hotel where Bush was holding his fundraiser. They wore pink ball gowns with sashes with slogans written on them.
The women were not kicked out of the hotel, because they were hotel guests. “We kicked in the money for a shared hotel room so that we could exercise our free speech rights in the hotel during the fundraiser. It’s offensive that people paid $2,000 per plate for the fundraiser when hundreds of thousands of dollars are being cut from education, health, and social services programs by the Bush Administration,” Buffa said. (Indymedia)

Bioweapon labs will bring threat of lethal viruses to urban America
A network of high-security laboratories for storing and investigating some of the most lethal viruses known to mankind is being built across the US, leaving communities in uproar. They not only fear the risk of the viruses escaping, but also contend that the program, part of the $6 billion Project BioShield, is a stunning case of overkill. For none of the germs to be studied is related to bioweaponry.
In the tiny town of Hamilton, Montana, campaigners worry that they will become a terrorist target if the proposed laboratory goes ahead. In New York State, congressmen have already blocked a proposal to house a laboratory on Plum Island, off Long Island. In Davis, California, home to a major branch of the state university system, activists have sued the university for failing to abide by state environmental regulations in making its application to house nasties ranging from Ebola to hanta virus and tick-borne encephalitis.
This is not just a matter of nimbyism. The protesters cannot understand why they should risk exposure to the tiny clutch of diseases requiring the construction of maximum-security “level 4” biosafety facilities -- there are just five of them -- when none has any known practical utility as a guerrilla weapon. The diseases the national security people are most worried about -- anthrax, smallpox and plague -- are either level 2 or level 3, and plenty of laboratories at those levels exist already.
Most experts agree that the level 4 facilities would probably be pretty safe, since they are made of numerous isolation chambers that researchers would enter in moon-style protective gear. Whether they are suitable for urban areas such as Davis is a matter of debate, however. One biolab designer, Jim Orzechowski of the Canadian firm of Smith Carter Architects and Engineers, told the Los Angeles Times less than reassuringly last week: “We’re getting as close to fail safe as possible. As fail safe as the space shuttle.” The space shuttle has had two catastrophic failures in 17 years. (Independent Digital (UK))

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