Following up on my post about Bobby Jindal being named Person of the Year by the India Abroad newspaper, a helpful anonymous source has emailed us a copy of the letter sent to the editor of India Abroad, expressing displeasure at their choice. What makes this story interesting is the list of signatories:

• Anurima Bhargava — Staff Attorney, NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund
• Vanita Gupta — Staff Attorney, NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, past winner of the Reebok Human Rights Award and India Abroad Publisher’s Special Award for Outstanding Achievement
• Shyam Maskai — attorney in private practice, former President of the South Asian Bar Association of New York
• Cyrus D. Mehta — leading immigration lawyer, TV commentator on immigration law issues, and member of the Executive Committee of the NYC Bar Association
• Purvi Shah — Executive Director, Sakhi for South Asian Women

Here is an excerpt of the full letter:

Dear Editor:

We attended the function on December 9 where Congressman Bobby Jindal received The India Abroad Person of the Year 2005 award. In his acceptance speech, Mr. Jindal paid tribute to the achievements of the Indian-American community, especially its first generation immigrants who, like his parents, have sacrificed much to enable the next generation to fulfill their dreams.

On December 16, a week after winning the award, Mr. Jindal voted in favor of The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005, H.R. 4437, which if passed into law, would destroy immigrant families by creating new grounds of deportability and gutting immigrants’ due process rights. Continue reading →

An erstwhile IIT prof is dead and several others remain injured, after a brazen terrorist attack at a conference which was being held at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore (Thanks Aj, for the link):

The suspected Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) terrorist entered the complex through the main gate, took out hand grenades and an automatic rifle and started firing indiscriminately at the scientists who had come to attend the International Conference on Operations Research Applications in Infrastructure Development —2005, according to eyewitnesses.

While Prof M C Puri succumbed to injuries at the M S Ramaiah Hospital, Dr Pankaj Gupta, Patellappa, an IISC employee, Dr Sangeetha, Dr Vijay Chandra and four others were injured. All the scientists had come from Delhi and other places to attend the international conference.

When security isn’t secure enough:

Only three private security guards were on duty when the incident occurred. They were not trained for this situation, according to sources.

More, this time from Rediff:

Sources said the possibility of terror attack could not be ruled out given the nature of the automatic weapons used in the attack. A state-wide alert has been sounded…

The officials are also trying to ascertain whether the underworld had any role in Wednesday’s incident as the main accused in the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts, Abu Salem is in Bangalore to undergo lie detector and brain mapping tests, sources said.

Continue reading →

(via Little Green Footballs) Now you can devote an entire blog to the depressing topic of modern day honor killings in the Pakistani hinterlands. In fact, LGF sorta fills this role. But this killing was particularly gruesome and makes me damn thankful on this Christmas eve for the society we’ve been blessed to have been born within –

MULTAN, Pakistan – A father angry that his eldest daughter married for love slit her throat as she slept, then killed three other daughters in a remote village in eastern Pakistan, police said Saturday. Nazir Ahmad, a laborer in his 40s, feared the younger girls, aged 4 to 12, would follow in their 25-year-old sister’s footsteps, police officer Shahzad Gul said.

There’s a sort of North Korean / Nazi / Stalinist sense of justice here – you don’t just bring down the perp but his / her family too. Not only to stomp out the meme but also to ensure that any future individuals are thoroughly disincentivized. Fascism comes in forms big and small.

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The parade continues. The U.S. News and World Report details the latest warrant-less activity by the U.S. government [via The Huffington Post]:

In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts…

Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree. News of the program comes in the wake of revelations last week that, after 9/11, the Bush White House approved electronic surveillance of U.S. targets by the National Security Agency without court orders. These and other developments suggest that the federal government’s domestic spying programs since 9/11 have been far broader than previously thought. [Link]

I am glad that the Feds are protecting against a nuclear threat in the D.C. area where my family lives. BUT, why can’t they just get a warrant so that it’s all legit?

At its peak, they say, the effort involved three vehicles in Washington, D.C., monitoring 120 sites per day, nearly all of them Muslim targets drawn up by the FBI. For some ten months, officials conducted daily monitoring, and they have resumed daily checks during periods of high threat. The program has also operated in at least five other cities when threat levels there have risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle.

Does the Bush Administration have any legal precedent on their side to conduct this type of activity?

[Georgetown University Professor David] Cole points to a 2001 Supreme Court decision, U.S. vs. Kyllo, which looked at police use — without a search warrant — of thermal imaging technology to search for marijuana-growing lamps in a home. The court, in a ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that authorities did in fact need a warrant — that the heat sensors violated the Fourth Amendment’s clause against unreasonable search and seizure.

When it comes to a nuclear threat I am all for aggressive policing. In light of this weeks revelations though, this seems to be just another power grab by the Executive Branch.

Continue reading →