You Don't Have to Go Home, But You Can't Come Here

SCOTUSBLOG was not asleep at the switch last night - unlike most of the news media - and caught this late Friday night filing by the U.S. Solicitor General that opposes a petition to release into the United States the Uighur detainees now held at Gitmo.

The Obama Administration urged the Supreme Court on Friday to turn away the plea by 17 Chinese Muslim Uighurs for release from Guantanamo Bay for settling temporarily inside the U.S. The U.S. Solicitor General’s brief in opposition in Kiyemba, et al., v. Obama, et al. (08-1234) can be downloaded here. Although no longer considered enemies, their continued confinement at Guantanamo is constitutionally valid, the brief asserted.

The Uighurs, Solicitor General Elena Kagan wrote, “have already obtained relief. They are no longer detained as enemy combatants, they are free to leave Guantanamo Bay to any country that is willing to accept them, and in the meantime, they are housed in facilities separate from those for enemy combatants under the least restrictive conditions practicable.”

The Obama administration is now 100% in agreement with the previous Bush administration position on this matter, holding that the Uighur have no legal right to be released into the United States. The political irony of the situation is examined here.

If none of the detainees are admitted into the U.S., the chances are that no European country - like German, which apparently is now home to the largest Uighur community outside Asia - will accept them either. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has been trying to shop the Uighur detainees to Germany for some time now, but hasn't been able to close the deal. After Friday's filing, he ought to finally give up.

Incidentally, I can't help but notice that the Secretary of State is nowhere to be seen on this issue (although evidently the Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs is engaged on it). I can just imagine the scene at the cabinet meeting when action was assigned on the matter of persuading foreign governments to accept the Gitmo Gang.

POTUS: Ah, Hillary, what do you think about approaching our allies on accepting detainees that we can't admit to the United States?

SECSTATE: [long uncomfortable silence]

POTUS: Ah, do you think any of them will help us out on this?

SECSTATE: [sound of crickets chirping]

POTUS: I mean, if you, um, make a personal appeal .....

SECSTATE: [somewhere in the distance, a small dog whimpers]

POTUS: Ah ... Eric! This is really a law enforcement matter, I suppose. How about you handling the foreign angle on this one?

AG Holder: OK, yeah, sure. You da man.

It's Pronounced "PA-kih-stan"

I'm listening to an interview with General Petraeus, and his soft 'a' pronunciation of the word Pakistan ("Pock-i-stahn") is setting my teeth on edge. Americans should pronounce it this way, please.

This whole deal in which people pretend that a foreign word mispronounced in English is being correctly pronounced in whichever foreign language is pretentious and annoying.

Who Says Sexual Harassment Prevention Training Can't Be Fun?

Where was this guy when I had to sit through mandatory sensitivity training? The Department should seriously consider hiring him to deliver sexual harassment prevention training in my workplace - not that we need it, you understand, since we're all perfect gentlemen at all times, but just for the pleasure of having mandatory training that isn't deadly boring and/or seething with hostility.

From the Popehat group blog, here's the three-part account of a lawyer hired to deliver sexual harassment prevention training to the employees, supervisors, and police of a small city:

day one

day two

day three

A few random quotes from the linked posts:

Apparently everyone in this city likes to go “GIRL, you’re looking FINE, SHOW me!”, and then the other employee turns around in place, and the first one goes “WOOOOOO!” It is probably impossible to break them of this, at least with the amount of time and the tools and use-of-force limits I am presented with.

After I prepared this presentation and reviewed the available summaries and caselaw for interesting examples and cautionary tales, I thought I would be impossible to shock. Boy, was I wrong. Midway through the morning an employee described an incident so completely cringingly inappropriate that Andrew Dice Clay would be going “hey man, not cool, not cool,” and then described how supervisors laughed it off. I have my work cut out for me.

So far, in response to my leading questions designed to create the illusion of audience participation, only one person has suggested that yeah, it would be cool to have team-building in a strip club.

Cops don’t like it when you tell them it is potentially problematical for them to post porn all over their locker rooms.

They especially don’t like it when you ask them if they’d be cool with lots of gay porn all over their locker room.

Here’s the breakdown: 80% of my audience knows this stuff already, or even if they don’t, would never act in a way that could violate sexual harassment law because they were raised to act decently. 10% of my audience lacks common sense about how to act and has forgotten their prior training, and requires the training to remind them how not to act, but will do fine after the training. The other 10% is unable to retain simple instructions and lacks the inclination or capacity to act decently even when someone explains to them what “decently” looks like. They will do bad stuff, or not, depending on opportunity, boredom level, and happenstance. They will do so whether or not I train them. That 10% pays my mortgage.

Judging by the laughter today when I explained stuff they shouldn’t do at work, the cops have been spending pretty much all day Monday describing who they nailed over the weekend.

Big Foot Coming Down in Islamabad

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McClatchy has a story today on the Obama administration's plans for new construction at the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan (pronounced "Puck-e-staan," I think).

See: Iraq redux? Obama seeks funds for Pakistan super-embassy, but ignore the hyperventilating headline. The new facilities are merely replacements for worn-out embassy office and residential buildings that were first built in the 1960s and which are far too small to meet current needs. Nothing "super" is in the plans, not as I read the publically available sources of information.

The Global and Mail carried the same story today, but with a little bit more detail. See: Islamabad to get giant U.S. embassy; Massive expansion demonstrates significance of Pakistan, but sure to raise anti-U.S. sentiment.

Some key quotes from the McClatchy story:

The White House has asked Congress for — and seems likely to receive — $736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Islamabad, along with permanent housing for U.S. government civilians and new office space in the Pakistani capital.

-- snip --

Other major projects are planned for Kabul, Afghanistan; and for the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Peshawar. In Peshawar, the U.S. government is negotiating the purchase of a five-star hotel that would house a new U.S. consulate.

-- snip--

In Baghdad and other dangerous locales, U.S. diplomats have sometimes found themselves cut off from the population in heavily fortified compounds surrounded by blast walls, concertina wire and armed guards.

"If you're going to have people live in a car bomb-prone place, you are driven to not have a light footprint," said Ronald Neumann, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and the president of the American Academy of Diplomacy. Neumann called the planned expansions "generally pretty justified."

In Islamabad, according to State Department budget documents, the plan calls for the rapid construction of a $111 million new office annex to accommodate 330 workers; $197 million to build 156 permanent and 80 temporary housing units; and a $405 million replacement of the main embassy building. The existing embassy, in the capital's leafy diplomatic enclave, was badly damaged in a 1979 assault by Pakistani students.

-- snip --

A senior State Department official confirmed that the U.S. plan for the consulate in Peshawar involves the purchase of the luxury Pearl Continental hotel. [TSB Note: the word "luxury" is overstating it by a large measure. The Pearl Continental would make a middle-grade Holiday Inn, at best.] The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

The Pearl Continental is the city's only five-star hotel, set in its own expansive grounds, with a swimming pool. It's owned by Pakistani tycoon Sadruddin Hashwani.

I really like Ambassador Neumann's statement, "If you're going to have people live in a car bomb-prone place, you are driven to not have a light footprint." Truly, when the U.S. government sends more than 1,000 employees to live and work in places as dangerous as Islamabad, Peshawar, Karachi and Lahore, we do indeed need to come down with a heavy security footprint and the usual aesthetic niceties be damned.

My personal philosophy of embassy physical security - incongruous as it may be to have a philosophy of such a thing - is that it should be blended into the landscaping and architecture, hidden from view. It should be, as Lucius Annaeus Seneca said of art, an imitation of nature. Nevertheless, if there was ever a place where the subtle approach ought to be ditched in favor of obvious and overt protection, it is Pakistan today. $736 million can buy us a lot of Old School protection.

He's Addicted (to Public Service)

The former Mayor of Washington, DC, and current City Council member, Marion S. Barry, who is easily the most entertaining figure in local politics, escaped from the consequences of his actions once again when a judge refused to send him away for violation of his most recent legal probation.

Accused Conspirator in U.S. Embassy Dar es Salam Bombing Brought to Trial in NYC

Here are a few quotes from the U.S. Department of Justice press release (Accused East Africa Embassy Bomber Held at Guantanamo Bay to Be Prosecuted in U.S. Federal Court):

Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian national who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility since September 2006, will be prosecuted in federal court in the United States pursuant to the March 12, 2001 superseding indictment currently pending against him in the Southern District of New York.

-- snip --

Ghailani was first indicted on Dec. 16, 1998, by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York for conspiring with Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda to kill Americans overseas and for his role in the Aug. 7, 1998, bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salam, Tanzania, which killed at least eleven people and caused injuries to at least 85 people.

-- snip --

Among other things, the superseding indictment alleges that Ghailani assisted in the purchase of the Nissan truck as well as the oxygen and acetylene tanks that were used in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania. He is further alleged to have participated in loading boxes of TNT, cylinder tanks, batteries, detonators, fertilizer and sand bags into the back of the truck in the weeks immediately before the bombing. Ghailani departed Africa for Pakistan the night before the bombing.

-- snip --

Ghailani was charged with the following substantive offenses: murder in violation of the Law of War, murder of protected persons, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, and destruction of property in violation of the Law of War and Terrorism. He was also charged with conspiracy to commit all of the above offenses, as well as providing material support to terrorism. On Oct. 3, 2008, these charges were referred to trial by military commission.

There is some precedent for bringing captured terrorists to trial in the U.S. In 2002, the federal government sought the death penalty against Zacarias Moussaoui, the "19th hijacker" on 9/11, but a jury voted to give him a sentence of life in prison instead.

I hope Ghailani's jury will be a little more hard-nosed, but, who knows?

We're Number 4!

Number 4 on the list of best (U.S. Government) places to work in 2009, that is.