Martin Scheinin, a Finnish professor of international law, holds the cumbersome title of "Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights while countering terrorism" of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. From May 16-25, he visited the United States to "undertake a fact-finding exercise, and a legal assessment of United States law and practice in the fight against terrorism, measured against international law."

On May 29, he issued some preliminary findings. I haven't seen much of anything on the progressive blogs about his report, so I am going to quote extensively here. We need to know how we look to the rest of the world.

This afternoon I joined a constituent delegation organized by Peace Action West that met with Dan Bernal, director of Rep. Nancy Pelosi's district office, and Melanie Nutter, deputy director, in the San Francisco office.

Not surprisingly, we wanted to know where the Democrats left their spines when they gave Bush his Iraq supplemental funding.

As we expected, we were politely stonewalled. It is amazing the degree of weakness Democrats in power are willing to embrace. This guy clung to their sad inability to deliver like a limpet. It sounded something like this: "Really, we did our best but the mean Republicans wouldn't go along -- yet." (To be fair, that's my paraphrase, not his words.) The first part is for grown-ups like the media; the "yet" was for us, slightly irritating constituent peace activists.

Still the meeting was not completely uninteresting...

Thomas Burke, a lawyer who worked on our lawsuit about the no-fly list, wrote today to let me know that he is now trying to find out what the U.S. government is doing with yet another huge list of "suspected terrorist" names. Assisting the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR), he has sued the Treasury Department for denying access to public records about the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) watchlist of some 6,000 people and entities, mostly overseas, all labelled dangerous suspected terrorists, drug traffickers, and other "specially designated nationals."

This is not harmless bureaucratese...

Crossposted at Happening Here.

Journalist Sarah Olson, who just fought off a subpoena herself, speaks at a City Hall press conference.

Josh Wolf has been locked up for 169 days. As of today, Wolf became the longest-imprisoned journalist for contempt of court in U.S. history. He is a San Francisco video blogger who filmed some of a mini-protest march in the Mission district in July, 2005. (I live in this neighborhood; I wrote about the events at the time here.) A TV station bought some of his footage. You can see that story here.

So far so good. And then ...

Cross posted at Happening Here

LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa with SF mayor Gavin Newsom

In the San Francisco Chronicle, political reporter Carla Marinucci describes the fallout from Mayor Gavin Newsom's admission that he'd had an affair with an employee who was also the wife of his campaign manager (now hastily departed) as "a mushroom cloud over his promising political career." She quotes an unidentified Republican political consultant:

"This guy is no longer a credible candidate to be governor of California,'' said one of the Republican strategists. "It's an extraordinary good day for (Los Angeles Mayor) Antonio Villaraigosa ...

Well maybe.

Democratic party heavy hitters came to my 'hood this morning to launch the local subset of the fall California campaign. This doesn't happen a lot. I live in San Francisco's Latino district; the rally site at 16th and Mission is not only day laborer terrain, but also drug dealer crossroads and leftist land. It's much more gritty than pretty.

Alerted by Calitics, I charged off at 9:30 to what was billed as a 9:30-11am rally. Not surprisingly, I was more than on time. Just to be clear I should say I'll be voting for Angelides and probably walk a few precincts, but I don't have a huge attachment to this race (my political work this cycle will be outside California.)

The crowd, not counting TV cameras and reporters, was very sparse, about 100 people, mostly from organized labor, SEIU, UFCW, a few UFW, Bricklayers. The only identifiable community organization that had sent folks was ACORN.

My little neighborhood sure got the full alignment of big wigs. Pictures below the fold.

This country desperately needs a more active citizen peace movement. If we are to have a chance to end the Administration's policy of force and violence everywhere, if we think attacking Iran is not just a bad idea, but a recipe for disaster, aroused  people need to get out and organize for new policies, for peace. War Times/Tiempo de Guerras is one free tool to help activists build the demand for peace.

Do this and you'll be participating in an innovative grassroots lobbying effort.

We may think that Mothers Day comes along on Sunday, but it is celebrated on May 10 in much of South America, Mexico, India, Pakistan and the Arabian Peninsula. So here in San Francisco, homeless advocates and students from Graduate Theological Union held a procession and speak out for homeless mothers, especially victims of wars, in the War Memorial Veterans Building Garden in Civic Center. The event was dominated by huge plaster puppet "saints" made by students in a class taught by Sally Hindman of the Center for Arts, Religion and Education. The activist San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness and senior artists from West Oakland's St. Mary's Center helped organize the small demonstration and prayer service.

The event was a small but very San Francisco-like mixed bag in the noonday sun.

By now most people know that the "immigration reform" bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, HR 4437, would call for building a 700 mile wall along the boarder with Mexico and would criminalize all undocumented persons found in this country.

In addition to these provisions, the bill is full of more obscure tweaks to immigration, refugee and asylum procedures, all of which will make it harder for newcomers to stay in compliance with the law, as well as often separating families and creating arbitrary inequities. Not surprisingly given the right-wing Republican origins of the bill, many of these regulations not only give force to a racist fear of the browning of the U.S., but also will work to hurt the opportunities available to gay and lesbian would-be immigrants.

In consequence, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force denounces the Sensenbrenner bill as

"mean-spirited election-year pandering to the `send them home' crowd and scapegoating of yet another group in our country perceived to be unpopular and powerless."

• Unity in opposition to any partial legalization legislation that would create different tiers of rights for immigrants.

• Unity in demanding a path to citizenship for all who want it and the same rights and protections enjoyed by anyone else in the country.

• Unity between the various communities of immigrants.

Would you be even more worried if you learned that the government's famous "no fly list" could be easily circumvented by any moderately computer savvy terrorist?

Yesterday I got a look at an ambitious peace movement organizing project that aims to influence war and peace discussion through the caucus system used by political parties in Minnesota.

The local round of the caucuses that choose delegates to party conventions and propose candidate endorsements takes place next Tuesday, March 7. St. Paul activists held a session in a public library basement to get people primed to carry a peace message at those meetings.

Folks are going to have to get really used to understanding that we are outsiders. That isn't the end of the world. When the country was founded, a majority were outsiders -- not white, male property owners. The outsiders have progressively forced their way inside. The current Right wants to shove a lot of us back out. So we have to organize like outsiders, expecting very little from the Democrats except when we make them behave.

Sure, it is awful. But there really is no choice.

Two federal agencies agreed Tuesday to pay the American Civil Liberties Union $200,000 to settle a lawsuit brought to uncover information about the government's no-fly list, which bars suspected terrorists from airliners.

The government will compensate the ACLU for attorneys' fees, settling a lawsuit initiated by two San Francisco peace activists who were detained while checking in for a flight three years ago....Yahoo News-AP

When London subways were bombed last summer, one of the most discussed and most frightening things about the attack was that, according to London police, the suicide bombers were "clean skins," anonymous young British Muslims who no one had ever suspected of terrorist connectons. The Home Secretary Charles Clarke said they had "simply come out of the blue."

On top of 52 people randomly getting killed and 700 more injured, the shocking anonymity made for a chilling atmosphere. Terrorists could be growing up in odd corners, unknown to the police and unsuspected by their neighbors. The enemy lurked among us, we, the good people, the safe people.

Now it comes out that the British intelligence service had "bugged Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, a second bomber, for two months as they talked about Khan's desire to fight in what he saw as the Islamic holy war." They dropped the surveillance because they thought Khan was a con man.

Here's a sample about the appearance of Ali Hamza Ahmad Sulayman al Bahlul who refused to cooperate with the proceedings:

Al Bahlul ... declared: "With these nine causes, I am boycotting all sessions, even if I am forced to be present." He lifted the paper that he had been scribbling on. "I will raise this paper, and this word is 'boycott.' I am boycotting every session. This boycott is the result of circumstances that I believe, and it doesn't matter if you believe them." Then, in English, he repeated the word "boycott" three times.

More after the fold ....