THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† Is This Why We Fight? (second item): The Washington Post reports that female circumcision is widely practiced in the Kurdistan region of
Sheelan Anwar Omer, a shy 7-year-old Kurdish girl, bounded into her neighbor's house with an ear-to-ear smile, looking for the party her mother had promised.
There was no celebration. Instead, a local woman quickly locked a rusty red door behind Sheelan, who looked bewildered when her mother ordered the girl to remove her underpants. Sheelan began to whimper, then tremble, while the women pushed apart her legs and a midwife raised a stainless-steel razor blade in the air. "I do this in the name of Allah!" she intoned.
As the midwife sliced off part of Sheelan's genitals, the girl let out a high-pitched wail heard throughout the neighborhood. As she carried the sobbing child back home, Sheelan's mother smiled with pride.
"This is the practice of the Kurdish people for as long as anyone can remember," said the mother, Aisha Hameed, 30, a housewife in this ethnically mixed town about 100 miles north of
† Terrorists Brought To Justice (fourth item): Federal district judge, Richard J. Leon ruled that Yemeni Moath Hamza and Tunesian Hisham Sliti are enemy combatants who are being properly held at Guantánamo Bay, “the first clear-cut victories for the Bush administration in what are expected to be more than 200 similar cases,” reports The New York Times:
The ruling by a followed his decision last month in a separate case declaring that five Algerians had been held unlawfully at the detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for nearly seven years and ordering their release.
That case had been the only one to reach a full court hearing after a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court in June that said Guantánamo detainees have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in habeas corpus cases. …
The habeas rulings are being watched carefully, in part because decisions approving the holding of Guantánamo detainees could be used by the Obama administration as a legal justification to continue to hold some of them even if the prison in
Lawyers for both men said they were considering appeals.
† All The Print Not Fit As News: Washington lobbyist Vicki Iseman has filed a defamation suit against The New York Times for $27 million an article that she believes – along with the paper’s own ombudsman – gave the false impression she and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) had an affair in 1999, reports The Associated Press:
In February, as McCain was seeking the Republican presidential nomination, the Times reported that McCain aides once worried the relationship between Iseman and McCain had turned romantic.
The article said that both McCain and Iseman denied any romantic relationship, but the lawsuit says most readers would find that obligatory. …
Keith Werhan, a constitutional law professor at
Werhan also said the Times could be protected if it accurately quoted McCain's former aides about their perceptions of his relationship with Iseman.
“If all those statements are true, then it seems to me the Times is not at fault for reporting that,” Werhan said.
“It's essentially hard to win a defamation suit," Werhan added. “The idea is the First Amendment has its thumb on the press' side of scales.”
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