The Rag Blog

UNITED NATIONS (Nov. 7) – Panama won a seat on the U.N. Security Council on the 48th ballot Tuesday after U.S.-backed Guatemala and Venezuela, led by leftist anti-American President Hugo Chavez, dropped out to end a deadlock.

Panama got 164 votes in the 192-member U.N. General Assembly, more than the 120 needed to win a two-year term starting Jan. 1 on the U.N.’s most powerful body. Venezuela got 11 votes, Guatemala 4 votes, and Barbados 1 vote.

RICHMOND, Va. (Nov. 7) – The FBI was investigating complaints about attempts to intimidate voters in the U.S. Senate race between GOP Sen. George Allen and Democratic challenger Jim Webb, the State Board of Elections said Tuesday.

Jean Jensen, secretary of the Board of Elections, said that her office has forwarded reports of several instances of phone calls to voters that apparently were aimed at misleading voters into staying home on Election Day or leading them to the wrong polling place.

Voters in the cities of Covington, Hampton and Colonial Heights and the counties of Accomack, Northampton and Fairfax reported getting deceptive telephone calls in the days before the election informing them that their voting place had changed, when they had not, Jensen said.

In Arlington County, resident Timothy Daly reported getting a phone message Sunday from the “Virginia Elections Commission” telling him that he was registered to vote in New York, and therefore couldn’t vote in Virginia.

“If you do show up, you will be charged criminally,” said the message, the text of which appeared on Daly’s affidavit to the Board of Elections.

Lawrence Peter Baumann, a Northampton County resident, said in his affidavit that he got a call on Friday from a woman claiming to be from the Webb campaign, and he assured her that he planned to vote for Webb.

EACH voter will have a favorite moment from the fabulous midterms of 2006. Forced to pick my own, I’d go for Lynne Cheney’s pre-Halloween slapdown of Wolf Blitzer on CNN. It’s not in every political campaign that you get to watch the wife of the vice president of the United States slug it out about lesbian sex while promoting a children’s book titled “Our 50 States: A Family Adventure Across America.”

The pretext for this improbable dust-up was a last-ditch strategy by the flailing incumbent Republican senator of Virginia, George Allen. Desperate to resuscitate his campaign, Senator Allen attacked his opponent, Jim Webb, for writing sexually explicit passages in his acclaimed novels about the Vietnam War. Mr. Webb fought back by pointing out, among other Republican hypocrisies, Mrs. Cheney’s authorship of an out-of-print 1981 novel, “Sisters,” with steamy sexual interludes suitable for “The L Word.”

When Mr. Blitzer brought up “Sisters” on live television, Mrs. Cheney went ballistic, calling Mr. Webb a liar. The exchange would have been a TiVo keeper had only the CNN anchor called Mrs. Cheney out by reading aloud just one of the many “Sisters” passages floating around the Internet: “The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve crossing a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were.” But you can’t have everything.

The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the “alternative interrogation methods” that their captors used to get them to talk.

The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation’s most sensitive national security secrets and that their release — even to the detainees’ own attorneys — “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.” Terrorists could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques and foil government efforts to elicit information about their methods and plots, according to government documents submitted to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26.

The battle over legal rights for terrorism suspects detained for years in CIA prisons centers on Majid Khan, a 26-year-old former Catonsville resident who was one of 14 high-value detainees transferred in September from the “black” sites to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents many detainees at Guantanamo, is seeking emergency access to him.

Last month’s mass firing of House Appropriations Committee investigators followed years of declining appetite for tough oversight and partisan squabbles that the investigators say often stalled their work.

Several members of the team, some of whom spoke on the condition that they not be identified by name, defend their record against committee spokesman John Scofield’s charge that recent work was not good. They suggest instead that majority Republicans had no appetite for oversight of the Bush administration.

The investigators said they identified billions of dollars in potential savings every year, particularly in the Defense budget, and that they heard no complaints until Chairman Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., dismissed 60 contractors on Oct. 16.

Joseph Stehr, a retired FBI agent who had been a member of the team off and on since 1985, said he remains stunned by Lewis’ action. “It reeks, it really does,” he said. “It just amazes me that after 60 some years, that just with the swipe of a pencil the thing could all go away.”

BAGHDAD, Nov. 4 — When armed insurgents moved into her southern Baghdad neighborhood last spring and started threatening Shiite families like hers, Umm Hussein called Iraq’s widely publicized 24-hour terrorism hot line. Nobody answered.

After several attempts over several days she finally got through and was assured that the police would follow up. “But nothing happened and no one ever came,” recalled Umm Hussein, who told her story on the condition that she be identified only by her Shiite nickname. Several days later she moved her family from their neighborhood, Hor Rijeb, to the relative safety of Zayouna, a mixed neighborhood in central Baghdad.

The hot line, she said, is “a joke.”

The National Tips Hot Line, as it is known, was founded in 2003 by the Coalition Provisional Authority, guaranteeing callers anonymity and collecting information about insurgent activity, bomb threats, kidnappings, killings and other major crimes. The hot line, which later became a joint coalition-Iraqi venture, was a foreign concept in a country that associated intelligence gathering by the state with brutal coercion.

Even for a people used to waking up to the sound of explosions, Iraqis were jolted by a Friday morning bombshell: the news, first reported on time.com, that Sgt. Santos Cardona, viewed here as one of the villains of Abu Ghraib, had been ordered back to their country. Although Iraqi and Arab media have been slow to pick up on the story (the news cycle here tends to be a day or two behind the U.S.) many in Baghdad read about it online, and word quickly spread. The reaction was predictable: total outrage.

“This is America spitting in our face,” said Imad al-Hashimi, a Baghdad paediatrician. “The sheer arrogance of it is unbelievable.”

It wasn’t until midday that the news began to circulate in the Green Zone, the Baghdad enclave that includes many key government offices, including that of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. There, it was greeted with incredulity—and warnings of a backlash. “The reaction in the street will be very bad,” warns Maryam al-Rais, a member of the Iraqi parliament. “This is just the latest in a long list of insults to Iraqi dignity by the Americans.”

Iraqi security forces closed two Sunni Muslim television stations for violating curfew and a law that bans airing material that could undermine the country’s stability, the Interior Ministry said.

Brig Gen Abdul-Karim Khalaf, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said on Sunday that the Al-Zawraa and Salahuddin stations were closed on the approval of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Khalaf said that the stations violated a curfew imposed in three provinces by speaking to people in the streets and airing their comments that were deemed to “incite violence.”