The American Civil Liberties Union disclosed yesterday that it filed a lawsuit three weeks ago challenging the FBI's methods of obtaining many business records, but the group was barred from revealing even the existence of the case until now.

The lawsuit was filed April 6 in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, but the case was kept under seal to avoid violating secrecy rules contained in the USA Patriot Act, the ACLU said. The group was allowed to release a redacted version of the lawsuit after weeks of negotiations with the government.

"It is remarkable that a gag provision in the Patriot Act kept the public in the dark about the mere fact that a constitutional challenge had been filed in court," Ann Beeson, the ACLU's associate legal director, said in a statement. "President Bush can talk about extending the life of the Patriot Act, but the ACLU is still gagged from discussing details of our challenge to it."

» Patriot Act Suppresses News Of Challenge to Patriot Act (washingtonpost.com)

    

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday voted 5-4 to uphold Pennsylvania congressional districts drawn by the Republican-controlled Legislature to put Democrats at a disadvantage, but it left open the door to future lawsuits alleging gerrymandering.

Democrats claimed that the Pennsylvania districts, configured to reflect population losses in the 2000 census, "sacrificed every traditional districting principle -- slashing through communities, splitting precincts, municipalities and counties and producing a map that can only be described as a contorted mess." But a federal court upheld the configuration in a decision that the high court affirmed yesterday.

Four justices, led by Antonin Scalia, would have used the Pennsylvania case to declare that complaints of partisan redistricting could never be brought before federal courts, no matter how much a new configuration favored one party or the other.

Scalia, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Clarence Thomas would have overturned a 1986 decision in which the court held that some partisan gerrymandering could be so extreme as to violate the "equal protection of the laws" guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

But Scalia couldn't persuade a fifth justice to sign his opinion, so yesterday's ruling goes into the Supreme Court record as a so-called "plurality" opinion, with limited application as a legal precedent.

    

A damning new report reveals that the Bush administration has quietly removed 25 reports from its Women's Bureau Web site, deleting or distorting crucial information on issues from pay equity to reproductive healthcare.

If you'd logged onto the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau Web site in 1999, you would have found a list of more than 25 fact sheets and statistical reports on topics ranging from "Earning Differences Between Men and Women" to "Facts About Asian American and Pacific Islander Women" to "Women's Earnings as Percent of Men's 1979-1997."

Not anymore. Those fact sheets no longer exist on the Women's Bureau Web site, and have instead been replaced with a handful of peppier titles, like "Hot Jobs for the 21st Century" and "20 Leading Occupations for Women." It's just one example of the ways in which the Bush administration is dismantling or distorting information on women's issues, from pay equity to reproductive healthcare, according to "Missing: Information About Women's Lives," a new report released Wednesday by the National Council for Research on Women.

    

WASHINGTON - Zell Miller, Georgia's maverick Democratic senator, says the nation ought to return to having senators appointed by legislatures rather than elected by voters.

Miller, who is retiring in January, was first appointed to his post in 2000 after the death of Paul Coverdell. He said Wednesday that rescinding the 17th Amendment, which declared that senators should be elected, would increase the power of state governments and reduce the influence of Washington special interests.

"The individuals are not so much at fault as the rotten and decaying foundation of what is no longer a republic," Miller said on the Senate floor. "It is the system that stinks. And it's only going to get worse because that perfect balance our brilliant Founding Fathers put in place in 1787 no longer exists."

    

The Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR) today renewed its call for the firing of a Boston-area radio
talk show host after a newspaper report showed that his anti-Muslim remarks
were even more offensive than first thought.

CAIR made its original demand last Friday after receiving a complaint from
a concerned listener who said WTKK-FM (http://www.969fmtalk.com) host Jay Severin urged the killing of American Muslims. Quotes from a tape of the actual
program obtained by the Boston Globe show that Severin called Muslims a "fifth
column"* in America and seemed to confirm the report that he wanted them
killed. (WTKK denied CAIR's request for a tape of the program.)

    

PROSSER, Washington (AP) -- Secret Service agents questioned a high school student about anti-war drawings he did for an art class, one of which depicted President Bush's head on a stick.

Another pencil-and-ink drawing portrayed Bush as a devil launching a missile, with a caption reading "End the war -- on terrorism."

The 15-year-old boy's art teacher at Prosser High School turned the drawings over to school administrators, who notified police, who called the Secret Service.

    

BOISE, Idaho, April 23 -- Not long after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a group of Muslim students led by a Saudi Arabian doctoral candidate held a candlelight vigil in the small college town of Moscow, Idaho, and condemned the attacks as an affront to Islam.

Today, that graduate student, Sami Omar al-Hussayen, is on trial in a heavily guarded courtroom here, accused of plotting to aid and to maintain Islamic Web sites that promote jihad.

As a Web master to several Islamic organizations, Mr. Hussayen helped to maintain Internet sites with links to groups that praised suicide bombings in Chechnya and in Israel. But he himself does not hold those views, his lawyers said. His role was like that of a technical editor, they said, arguing that he could not be held criminally liable for what others wrote.

The new Pentagon papers
By Karen Kwiatkowski
...
I spent time that summer exploring the neoconservative worldview and trying to grasp what was happening inside the Pentagon. I wondered what could explain this rush to war and disregard for real intelligence. Neoconservatives are fairly easy to study, mainly because they are few in number, and they show up at all the same parties. Examining them as individuals, it became clear that almost all have worked together, in and out of government, on national security issues for several decades.
...
Before the Iraq invasion, many of these same players labored together for literally decades to push a defense strategy that favored military intervention and confrontation with enemies, secret and unconstitutional if need be. Some former officials, such as Richard Perle (an assistant secretary of defense under Reagan) and James Woolsey (CIA director under Clinton), were granted a new lease on life, a renewed gravitas, with positions on President Bush's Defense Policy Board. Others, like Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz, had apparently overcome previous negative associations from an Iran-Contra conviction for lying to the Congress and for utterly miscalculating the strength of the Soviet Union in a politically driven report to the CIA.

Neoconservatives march as one phalanx in parallel opposition to those they hate. In the early winter of 2002, a co-worker U.S. Navy captain and I were discussing the service being rendered by Colin Powell at the time, and we were told by the neoconservative political appointee David Schenker that "the best service Powell could offer would be to quit right now." I was present at a staff meeting when Bill Luti called Marine Gen. and former Chief of Central Command Anthony Zinni a "traitor," because Zinni had publicly expressed reservations about the rush to war.

    

On April 8 the Bush Administration quietly pushed the current archivist, John Carlin, a Clinton appointee, to step down. To replace him, Bush will nominate Allen Weinstein, a historian who has been criticized for failing to abide by accepted scholarly standards of openness (more details will appear in an upcoming Nation profile).

NEW YORK, April 7, 2004 -- It's the oldest story in the world: what goes up, comes down. All the bluster, PR, "positive" press, bullying, distortion, deception, and military tough-guyism cannot keep a flawed policy afloat. The invasion of Iraq, sold as the "liberation of the Iraqi people," was always a movie with a bad script, flawed characters, and no third act.

Despite all the Bremer ballast served up about how only a handful of Saddam-worshipping, al-Sadr-loving, Al-Qaeda-following fanatics stand in the way of a US-imposed democratic paradise, the reality on the ground suggests otherwise. A Sunni-Shia opposition movement is emerging, and gathering steam.

What a difference a year makes. On 9 April 2003, Firdus (Paradise) Square was abuzz with excited Iraqis determined to pull down a vast bronze statue of their dictator.

With American help, the giant bronze edifice was pulled to the ground and the troops looked on as the jubilant crowd beat Saddam's statue with their shoes.

It looked and sounded like liberation.

But 9 April 2004 and the square is empty.

The statue has been replaced by a modern sculpture plastered with pictures of the radical young cleric Moqtada Sadr, leader of the Shia militants.

The small park around the statue is untended and choked with litter.

There are no celebrations here - quite the reverse in fact.

There is barbed wire rolled out across every road leading into it, and American troops with Bradley fighting vehicles are on patrol.