Open Thread Sunday 4/12/09

By Abu Noor Al-Irlandee

Here are some items to think about and discuss inshAllaah:

*  Remember the Boumediene v. Bush case?  This is the case in which the Supreme Court established that the detainees at Guantanamo had a right to a habeas corpus hearing, overcoming the arguments of the Bush administration that they had no rights at all.   John McCain called the decision which held that people kidnapped by the U.S. and held for years had at least the right to some kind of hearing to claim their innocence, “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country,” but Senator Barack Obama had a different view.  He issued a decision commending the decision in Boumediene and later spoke eloquently on the Senate floor of the importance of habeas for those at Guantanamo, how it was vital to preserving our most cherished values and would actually make us safer as a country.

So it was a bit surprising when earlier this year, in a case involving Muslims kidnapped from around the world and brought to Bagram by the United States (which the U.S. started doing to avoid these men getting the habeas rights that the Supreme Court said they had at Guantanamo) the Obama Administration said it actually had the same position as the Bush administration:  that the U.S. could kidnap anyone it wanted, send them to Bagram, and hold them for years, and they had no right whatsoever to claim to anyone that they were innocent or challenge their detention in any way.   Earlier this month, Federal Judge John Bates, appointed by George W. Bush to the bench and not by any means a liberal judge, ruled against the Bush/Obama position and held that those kidnapped and held at Bagram must have some habeas right to challenge their detention just as those in Guantanamo do.  So, how does Obama's administration react to this — they are appealing the decision.  They are fighting to overturn the decision of the Bush appointee and will continue the fight to make sure they can kidnap anyone they want (of course so far they have done it only to Muslims) take them and hold them at Bagram as long as they want and that person has no rights whatsoever to challenge their detention or claim their innocence.  Read all about the details and find links to other commentary at Glenn Greenwald's blog. You can also read there about the Obama administration's embracing of the Bush position on state secrets to ensure that there can be no judicial review of the illegal wiretapping done under Bush.

*  In the context of that information about Obama policies at home and the escalating Afghanistan war abroad, read the text of Obama's speech to the parliament in Turkey, claiming the U.S.  “is not and never will be at war with Islam” and that he is bringing change regarding Guantanamo and torture.”  I'm sure people have some commentary on this speech.

*There has also been a firestorm of controversy about a new law in Afghanistan, which was initially signed by Karzai but after much international controversy, is now “under review” although the commentary and debate is being held without anyone actually seeing the law that is under discussion.  So it has been variously labelled as either the “Shi'a Family Law” by its defenders or the Marital Rape Law by its critics.  Both sides are claiming that the Afghan Constitution is on their side, and passing of the law threatens public support in Canada for ongoing Canadian troop presence in Afghanistan.

*Abdelaziz Bouteflika won reelection to a third term as President of Algeria after the Constitution was changed to allow him to run for a third term.  He got over 90 percent of the vote, he must be doing a fantastic job, right?

*And finally, there has been a firestorm of controversy on the right over President Obama apparently making ruku' to the Saudi King, but apparently this is a tradition of U.S. Presidents (at least in recent times).

*Newsweek magazine has gotten a lot of discussion going with its cover story this week, “The End of Christian America,” which contains the following numbers:

According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)

An inquiry and request that came to MM:

Hello, Thank you for your wonderfully informative blog!

I'm an academic in America conducting feminist research on how American foreign policy affects popular support for terrorism. My theory is that America’s hegemonic activity fuels popular support for terrorism, but I need data to support that hypothesis.

I plan to conduct a large international survey in order to collect that data. Before I conduct the survey, however, I need to devise a survey instrument that is non-biased (non-western, non-white). I strongly believe that the biggest reason that America is losing the war on terror is that we aren’t listening to the people that matter the most—everyone else. The same principal applies to my survey: it won’t do any good if I’m not asking the right questions.

So I’m asking for your help. I’ve put together a pre-survey questionnaire to help fashion a survey that hopefully will ask the right questions― one that takes race, religion, and gender issues into consideration rather than just making the same old geopolitical assumptions that political scientists in my field tend to make. I’m particularly interested in incorporating the views of women, non-whites, and people living outside of America and Western Europe. The final survey will go out once the pre-survey data has been collected and analyzed.

The survey can be accessed at

http://www.johnmaszka.com/SURVEY.html

Anything else you want to talk about?