Issue 333
April 22, 2005
The following article appeared on boston.com on April 19,
2005:
Hussein
death urged if convicted
But Iraqi
leader opposes capital punishment
By Jamie
Tarabay, Associated Press
BAGHDAD --
The largest political bloc in the Iraq government yesterday demanded the
execution of Saddam Hussein if the ousted leader is convicted of war crimes,
and said President Jalal Talabani should step down if he objects.
''This is
something that cannot be discussed at all," said Ali Dabagh, a spokesman
for the clergy-led United Iraqi Alliance, which holds 140 seats in Iraq's
275-member National Assembly. ''We feel he is a criminal. He is the number one
criminal in the world. He is a murderer."
Talabani, a
former Kurdish rebel leader, told the British Broadcasting Corp. yesterday that
signing a death warrant for Hussein would be contrary to his beliefs as a human
rights advocate and opponent of capital punishment.
''I
personally signed a call for ending execution throughout the world, and I'm
respecting my signature," Talabani told the BBC. He conceded, however,
that he was probably alone in the government in holding this view.
''No one is
listening to me, to be frank with you," Talabani said. ''My two partners
in the presidency, the government, the House, all of them are for sentencing
Saddam Hussein to death before the court will decide."
Hussein and
his top lieutenants will be tried before the Iraqi Special Tribunal established
in late 2003. The tribunal has given no official dates for starting the trials,
although national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie said this month that
Hussein could go on trial by year's end.
The death penalty was reintroduced in Iraq in
August 2004 for crimes including murder, endangering national security, and
drug trafficking. But it is only meant to be a temporary measure in the effort
to stamp out the country's insurgency.
A senior
Iraqi official was assassinated as he drove home in Baghdad yesterday, Interior
Ministry officials said. Major General Adnan Qaraghulli, an adviser to the
defense minister, was killed along with his son when gunmen ambushed his car.
In a
separate development yesterday, hundreds of Iraqi security forces launched an
operation to root out Sunni insurgents at the tip of Iraq's so-called Triangle
of Death, but found no hostages despite reports that up to 100 Shi'ites may
have been seized.
Iraqi forces
fanned through the dusty streets of Madain and took positions on rooftops in
the town south of Baghdad, while Sunni leaders dismissed the reports of a
hostage crisis as a hoax.
The US
military, whose forces stood by in case they were needed, called the operation
in Madain a significant step forward in the training of Iraqi forces, which is
key to America's exit strategy in the two-year-old war.
''The city
is now under full control," interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's office
said, adding that 10 suspected insurgents were arrested and large amounts of
weapons seized.
Madain is an
agricultural town of about 1,000 families, evenly divided between Shi'ites and
Sunnis, located at the northern edge of a region considered to be a stronghold
of the Sunni insurgency. When an AP photographer joined hundreds of police
entering the town yesterday, they met no resistance and found no hostages.
National
Security Minister Qassim Dawoud had warned parliament on Sunday of attempts to
draw the country into sectarian war. Yesterday, he pledged to ''chase down
terror everywhere" and said Iraqi forces had discovered mines, ammunition,
and bomb-making equipment along with six completed car bombs in Madain.
Those
detained included four ''sword men" believed to have conducted killings
for the insurgents, said Rubaie, the national security adviser. Cells for holding prisoners were also found,
he said.
Six Iraqi
police and special forces battalions, each of which typically includes about
300 troops, participated in the operation, the Interior Ministry said.
Fewer than
200 US troops were on standby but they were not needed, the US military said.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on latimes.com on April 19, 2005:
Mother
of Jackson's Accuser Ends Testimony
By Sally
Connell and Michael Muskal
Times Staff
Writers
SANTA MARIA,
Calif. — The mother of the boy who testified that he was molested by Michael
Jackson completed her testimony this morning, leaving it up to the jury to
decide whether she was a victim or a con artist, the clashing portraits that
emerged from her five days on the stand.
The woman's
time on the stand was one of the most dramatic periods in the prosecution's
case, which Dist. Atty. Thomas Sneddon announced would likely conclude at the
end of next week, the ninth since opening statements.
For more
than 20 hours of often rambling testimony and pointed, sometimes brutal
cross-examination, the woman gestured, pleaded with jurors and explained how
she felt watched and threatened by Jackson aides who wanted to control her
family.
Defense
attorney Thomas A. Mesereau Jr. today hammered at the themes he has stressed
for days, that the greedy woman often lied to officials and used her children
to get money from a variety of targets, including celebrities, the government
and private businesses.
The woman
was followed by three Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department officers, and a
brief appearance by the woman's mother, the grandmother of the accuser. The
lawyers also had a short private meeting to determine the order of the
remaining witnesses in the prosecution's case.
In his last
fight with the woman today, Mesereau questioned whether her injuries were the
result of domestic abuse or from guards at an El Monte-area shopping center in
1998. The woman insisted that it was the guards who beat her, but the defense
attorney kept up his attack on the origin of the photographs introduced by the
prosecution.
The woman is
crucial to the prosecution's charge that Jackson conspired to kidnap, extort
and falsely imprison her family after a British documentary embarrassing to
Jackson was aired in 2003. Jackson, 46, is also charged with molesting her son,
then 13, and administering alcohol to aid in the commission of a felony.
It was the
airing of the documentary that began the series of events that led to the trial
of the singer who calls himself the "King of Pop." Jackson and the
boy appeared, holding hands, as the star said he slept with boys in a
non-sexual manner. Fearing the documentary would hurt Jackson, his aides
pressed the accuser and his family to participate in a rebuttal video that
praised Jackson for his generosity and support, the woman said.
The woman
testified that she participated in the rebuttal video because she was told by
Jackson aides that unnamed killers would visit her family. She also testified
that she learned that she and her relatives were under surveillance by
investigators working with Jackson's former lawyer.
The
prosecution today played more surveillance tapes made by a private
investigator's office hired by a former lawyer for Jackson. In the grainy
video, the mother's two sons are shown picking up uniforms from a dry cleaners.
The mother is seen in a car and later on the balcony of an apartment.
Were you
aware you were being taped? Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Ron Zonen asked this
morning on redirect.
"Sometimes
I would see them, sometimes I wouldn't," the woman answered.
After the
rebuttal video was completed, the woman testified that Jackson aides told her
she did a poor job, so they wanted her and her family to travel to Brazil and
they arranged travel documents. Among the 28 overt acts mentioned in the
indictment was also the shuttering of her apartment without her permission by
Jackson aides.
In a
cross-examination marked by fireworks, Mesereau was at times sarcastic and
unrelenting in pressing the woman. Superior Court Judge Rodney S. Melville
several times warned both attorneys to act more professionally. He told the
woman to restrain her drama and meandering speeches that included several
comments linking Jackson to little boys. Those remarks were stricken from the
record.
Today,
Mesereau returned to the 1998 events at the shopping center that included a JC
Penney store where the son was accused of shoplifting. He, his father and his
brother then fled to the parking lot, where guards confronted them. The mother
appeared and later alleged that she and her son were severely beaten by guards.
The mother testified that two years later she was paid $32,000 of a $152,000
civil settlement. The rest of the money went to her ex-husband, lawyers and the
boys.
Mesereau has
charged that the JC Penney incident was part of a series of scams by the mother
using the children to get money. Under cross-examination, the mother admitted
that she had lied twice in her deposition when she said her husband had never
abused her or her son.
Honing in on
the domestic abuse issue, Mesereau asked if the pictures of the beaten woman
and her injured son were really of violence from the store guards or from her
ex-husband. He noted that she didn't go to a civil attorney until a year after
the event, so the pictures seemed lost out of time.
The woman
insisted the pictures had been taken by a photographer right after the
incident, when she faced criminal charges. The pictures were ordered by her
criminal attorney, she said.
The criminal
charges against her and her family were dropped.
The
questions about the incident were part of the promise Mesereau made in his
opening statement to portray the woman as a scam artist. Before she took the
stand, she invoked her 5th Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid
discussing allegations of welfare fraud.
But in his
opening, Mesereau also said he would show that the mother used money raised for
her cancer-stricken son by celebrities and comedians. Under cross-examination,
the mother denied misusing any money, even though she was the sole signatory to
one bank account. She blamed her ex-husband for any difficulties over the
money. Earlier, she blamed the ex-husband for arranging a favorable newspaper
article that helped raise money.
She again
insisted today that she had never sought funds from Jackson.
After the
woman finished, her mother took the stand and corroborated details her daughter
had given. Testifying in Spanish, the grandmother said she helped her daughter
get the children back from Neverland in March, 2003. The mother told a Jackson
aide that her parents were ill and the children were needed at home.
"I
faked my illness to get my children back from Neverland," the grandmother
said.
She also
said the children were driven back by people associated with Jackson.
Mesereau
objected at times to the grandmother's long-winded answers, but did not ask any
questions on cross-examination.
The deputies
testified about technical issues involved in the search that yielded the
surveillance tapes from the private investigator's office.
A fourth
person, a retired Sheriff's Department detective, testified about finding four
vintage nudist magazines and some books during the 2003 search of Neverland.
Under cross-examination, she said there was nothing illegal about the
materials.
In the
afternoon, Michael Davy, a former attendance administrator at the school
attended by the accuser and his brother, testified that the boys had been
missing from the school during the early 2003 period. He said he called the
boys' mother and explained the procedure for checking students out of the
school.
Jackson aide
Vincent Amen, armed with notes from the mother, then came to the school and
checked out the boys. Amen, an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, filled
out a report saying the family was moving to Arizona< Davy said. He also
paid for textbooks the boys owed.
Under
questioning from Mesereau, Davy agreed that the accuser was a discipline
problem.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on CNN.com on April 21, 2005:
Culkin
plans to testify for Jackson
Ex-guard
says staff was told to keep accuser at Neverland
SANTA MARIA,
California (CNN) -- Former child movie star Macaulay Culkin plans to testify on
behalf of Michael Jackson in the singer's trial on child molestation charges, a
source close to the case told CNN.
But Culkin's
publicist, Michelle Bega, who said last month the actor had no plans to
testify, would not confirm any change in his position.
"There
is no change, and there is no comment," she said.
The
testimony could rebut claims by former Jackson employees who say they saw the
pop star inappropriately touch Culkin in the early 1990s when he was a frequent
guest at Jackson's Neverland ranch.
Culkin, now
24, has denied that anything of a sexual nature took place between him and
Jackson. In an interview on CNN's "Larry King Live" in May 2004, he
defended the entertainer and described him as a friend.
"Nothing
happened," Culkin said.
The trial
judge has allowed prosecutors to present witnesses to support their contention
that Jackson had a pattern of singling out and grooming young boys -- including
Culkin -- for sexual abuse.
The evidence
related to five boys, although only one of them actually testified. Allegations relating to the other four,
including Culkin, came from third-party witnesses who said they saw
inappropriate behavior.
Former guard
testifies
In trial
testimony Wednesday, a former guard at the ranch said the security staff was
ordered not to allow the singer's teenage accuser to leave the ranch in early
2003.
The notice
was posted on a guardroom message board around the time that prosecutors allege
Jackson's associates held the teenager and his family against their will.
"We
weren't to allow him off property without some sort of permission from the
supervisor," said Brian Barron, a Guadalupe police officer who moonlighted
as a guard at Neverland for five years.
Barron said
a notation that the boy was not allowed off the property was written on a
message board in the guardhouse at the main entrance sometime in January or
February 2003.
Under
defense questioning, however, Barron said it was policy at Neverland not to
allow children to leave the ranch if they were visiting without their parents,
and notations often were made in the guest log to that effect.
Asked if the
accuser's parents were at Neverland at the time, he said, "I don't think
so."
Barron also
said he never saw criminal behavior at Neverland and that as a sworn police
officer would have taken action if he had. He said the rest of the staff at the
ranch was aware that he was a police officer.
Barron
described Jackson as a hands-on manager, saying the staff would be "on
pins and needles" when he was at the ranch and there was "much more
work to be done."
"He's
very much like a perfectionist," Barron said.
Barron also
testified that the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department had asked him to
work undercover as a confidential informant at Neverland after investigators
raided the ranch in November 2003.
He refused
and quit his moonlighting job after a discussion with the chief of his
department, Barron said.
The
prosecution has alleged that in February and March 2003, after the singer and
boy were shown holding hands in a television documentary, Jackson and members
of his entourage conspired to control and intimidate the accuser's family into
helping with damage-control efforts, holding them
against their will at Neverland and a Los Angeles hotel.
Barron said
he seldom saw Jackson's accuser -- now 15 -- when the boy stayed at the ranch,
but when he did, he never saw any indication the boy did not want to be there.
Barron also
said on a visit in June 2002, the accuser crashed a golf cart into a fountain
and was warned that if he didn't slow down, the golf cart would be taken away.
Gatehouse
logs
Defense
attorney Robert Sanger took Barron through logs kept at the gatehouse in which
the arrivals and departures of Jackson's guests were noted.
The
notations in the logs showed that on February 12, 2003, the accuser and his
mother, brother and sister left the ranch at 1:30 a.m. in a Rolls Royce driven
by Jackson's ranch manager.
The mother
had previously testified she was uncomfortable being at the ranch because she
felt intimidated by Jackson's associates and she had persuaded the ranch
manager to take the family back to Los Angeles.
Interpreting
the logs for the jury, Barron said that there was no indication anyone was
notified or called after the family's departure in the middle of the night.
The accuser
and his family returned to Neverland several days later, after repeated phone
calls from a Jackson associate, Frank Tyson, urging them to come back, the
mother testified.
A grand jury
indicted Jackson, 46, last year on charges of molesting the boy, giving him
alcohol and conspiring to hold him and his family captive in 2003. Jackson has
pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Testimony on Culkin
Among the
witnesses who testified about Jackson's relationship with Macaulay Culkin was
Phillip LeMarque, a former chef at Neverland.
LeMarque
testified that in 1991 he was "shocked" to see Jackson's hand shoved
up Culkin's shorts when he walked in on them playing a video game in the middle
of the night, when Culkin was 10 or 11.
At the time,
LeMarque said he was delivering an order of french fries that Jackson had
ordered.
"I
almost dropped the french fries," he said.
LeMarque
said he did not report what he saw to the police or anyone else at the time,
"because nobody would ever believe" his story.
A former
maid, Adrian McManus, also testified she once saw Jackson put his hand on
Culkin's leg and buttocks and kiss him on the cheek while they were sitting
together in Neverland's library.
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on nytimes.com on April 20, 2005:
2
Reporters Suffer Another Court Setback
By Adam
Liptak
Two
reporters facing up to 18 months in jail for refusing to testify about their
sources lost another round in the courts yesterday. The reporters, Judith
Miller of The New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, now have only
one appeal left, to the United States Supreme Court.
The
decision, by the full federal appeals court in Washington, declined to
reconsider a unanimous decision of a three-judge panel of the court.
The earlier
decision, in February, required the reporters to testify about conversations
they may have had with government officials concerning Valerie Plame, an
undercover C.I.A. agent whose identity was first disclosed by Robert Novak, the
syndicated columnist.
Seven judges
participated in yesterday's decision, which noted only that a majority of the
court's active judges had not voted in favor of a rehearing. Two active judges
did not participate, for unexplained reasons. One judge, David S. Tatel,
published an explanatory concurrence. None of the judges noted a dissent.
Speaking to
the Newspaper Association of America in San Francisco yesterday, Arthur
Sulzberger Jr., the publisher of The Times, emphasized the importance of
allowing reporters to keep their promises to confidential sources.
"This
is not a New York Times or a Time magazine issue," Mr. Sulzberger said.
"What's at stake here is journalism at the grass-roots level."
The two
reporters have remained free while they pursue their cases in the appeals
court. Under the usual procedural rules, they could face jail as soon as a week
from now, when the appeals court will issue its mandate and return jurisdiction
in the case to the trial court.
But legal
experts say the reporters may try to make a deal with the special prosecutor in
the case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, or ask one of the courts involved to issue a
stay. In exchange for their continued freedom, the reporters may agree to move
quickly enough for the Supreme Court to be able to decide whether to hear the
case before its summer recess.
Mr.
Fitzgerald has consistently urged the courts to take quick action, adding in a
recent filing that his investigation into the disclosure of Ms. Plame's
identity is all but complete. A spokesman for Mr. Fitzgerald declined to
comment yesterday.
Judge Thomas
F. Hogan, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, ordered
the reporters jailed in October unless they agreed to testify. Judge Hogan said
a 1972 decision of the Supreme Court, Branzburg v. Hayes, provided reporters
with no First Amendment protection when grand juries sought their sources.
In a speech
in Montana, Judge Hogan suggested last week that he expected the Supreme Court
to hear the case, according to reports in the local newspapers there.
In his
concurrence, Judge Tatel, who also participated in the February decision,
suggested yesterday that the reporters' arguments were best addressed to the
Supreme Court.
"Only
the Supreme Court can limit or distinguish Branzburg," Judge Tatel wrote.
But Judge
Tatel conceded that decisions of his own court's interpreting Branzburg were
"somewhat conflicted." Other federal appeals courts, too, have read
Branzburg in various ways, and the Supreme Court often accepts cases to resolve
conflicts among federal appeals courts.
"The
courts are all over the lot," said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a Los Angeles
lawyer who filed a brief supporting the reporters on behalf of 25 news
organizations. "This case has nationwide implications, and given what's at
stake here for the public - not just the journalists - it seems like an ideal
case for the court to take."
Judge Tatel
also defended much of the secrecy attached to the case, including his decision
to redact eight pages that were part of his concurrence in February, which
presumably set out grand jury evidence supporting the need for the reporters'
testimony. Lawyers involved in the case have speculated that the pages
described Mr. Novak's mysterious role in the matter, and they have argued that
the secrecy that has permeated
the case
violated the reporters' due process rights.
Judge Tatel
disagreed.
"Telling
one grand jury witness what another has said," he wrote, "not only
risks tainting the later testimony (not to mention enabling perjury or
collusion), but may also embarrass or even endanger witnesses, as well as
tarnish the reputations of suspects whom the grand jury ultimately declines to
indict."
* * * * *
The
following article appeared on nytimes.com on April 19, 2005:
Justice
on Trial in Russia
The trial of
the former Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky is nearing a verdict. Assuming,
as everyone does, that he will be found guilty of fraud and tax evasion and
left in prison, let's take stock: Russia has one fewer oligarch. Most of his
Yukos company, which used to pump 2 percent of the world's oil, has been
gobbled up by companies connected to the state.
Russia's
image and the standing of President Vladimir Putin have taken a major beating
because the trial had the air of politically motivated vengeance and looting.
Investor confidence has been shaken. So was it worth it?
Since his
arrest 18 months ago, Mr. Khodorkovsky has played the role of a classic victim
of Russian authoritarianism, of an honest businessman victimized by a predatory
regime. But the story of how the oligarchs came about is somewhat different,
and in many ways, Mr. Khodorkovsky was the template for the breed. A member of
the Communist Youth League when the Soviet Union began to fall apart, he
quickly proved adept at taking
advantage of the free-for-all that followed. He became one of the new
entrepreneurs selected by Boris Yeltsin in 1995 for an outrageous deal in which
businessmen were handed vast control over Russia's natural resources in
exchange for financing Mr. Yeltsin's political survival. The beneficiaries
became fabulously wealthy, and Mr. Khodorkovsky was arguably the most
successful. At the time of his fall, Yukos was among the most respected
businesses in Russia, both for its performance and its
propriety.
Still,
Russians have never made peace with the notion that a handful of men, most in
their 30's, were suddenly rendered so rich and powerful. Worse, some, Mr.
Khodorkovsky prominent among them, began seeking ways to translate their wealth
into political power. Certainly the government has a right and an obligation to
restore its authority over an economy that had fallen prey to gangster
capitalism and corruption, and especially over
strategic
resources like oil and gas. Viktor Yushchenko, the reformist new president of
Ukraine, has also made it his priority to renationalize some of the Ukrainian
holdings from a handful of tycoons who secured them through shady political
maneuvers.
But such a
process can be useful only if it represents the ascendancy of law over
banditry. That is especially critical in a country like Russia, where the rule
of law is so little known and so badly understood. We criticized this trial not
necessarily because we believe that Mr. Khodorkovsky is innocent, or that
oligarchs should be immune from the law, but because it was not a fair trial,
and a fair trial would have been so valuable to the development of Russia. Mr.
Khodorkovsky might well have gone free because the law is so vague and
inconsistent and because, in the end, it was the government that handed him his
riches. But the gains for the rule of law would have been great.
There is
still time for the judge to redeem the process with a verdict that is perceived
to be just. We hope that the new Ukrainian government learns from the Khodorkovsky
trial that real justice is the only way to redress injustice.
* * * * *
Eroding
the Death Penalty
None of the
32 murderers sentenced to death in New York has been executed in the decade
since the state reinstated capital punishment. Yet last week, the gnawing
concerns of state lawmakers, including some who voted for the 1995 law,
prompted them to effectively kill the death penalty for this year, and perhaps
longer.
Many
Californians, lawmakers as well as voters, share those concerns about fairness
and fallibility. They worry as well about the inequalities that riddle the
death penalty in a state as large and diverse as ours.
Death
penalty foes predict that the de facto moratorium the New York state Assembly
imposed will "ripple" to other states. California should be next.
This state
has the nation's largest death row, with 640 inmates. So large, in fact, that
taxpayers pony up $114 million every year to house them at San Quentin, on top
of the extra costs to prosecute them and provide for required appeals. The
state's condemned population is so large in part because voters and lawmakers
have allowed prosecutors to seek death sentences in more circumstances than
allowed in most other states.
That
latitude has produced glaring disparities. Wealthy (and often white) defendants
who can afford experienced lawyers end up at San Quentin less often than poor
defendants (often Latino or African American) who are stuck with lawyers
assigned by the county. Prosecutors in some conservative, rural counties more
readily ask juries for death than those in many urban counties. In some
counties, prosecutors haven't tried a capital case in years.
The
California Supreme Court reviews every death sentence to ensure the defendant
got a fair trial. Because that appeals process routinely takes a decade or
more, California has executed only 11 defendants since reinstating the death
penalty in 1977.
The high
court approves the overwhelming majority of death sentences, but in March it
balked. A majority of justices overturned a 1991 death sentence in a Los
Angeles case because the county prosecutor had convinced separate juries that
two defendants each landed the fatal blow in a hatchet murder. That 14 years
passed before the court rightly declared this case a travesty adds to
voluminous evidence of the death penalty's unfair and capricious application.
State
lawmakers last year chartered a commission to examine capital punishment with
an eye toward recommending reforms. That panel expects to begin its research
and deliberations in the coming months. A moratorium similar to that in New
York (and one adopted earlier in Illinois) should be among its first actions.