During a hearing last month Lord Justice Moses, one of the Court of Appeal judges, asked Alun Jones QC, representing the US government, about its treatment of Gavin, Tollman's nephew. Gavin Tollman was the subject of an attempted abduction during a visit to Canada in 2005.

Jones replied that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. "The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared," he said.

He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him: "If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse — it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s."

Myanmar's government ordered the expulsion of the United Nations' top diplomat in the country today, after his office issued a critical statement urging the ruling generals to heed the voices of protesters.

The diplomat, Charles Petrie, was handed a letter ordering his expulsion at the end of a meeting with government officials today in Naypyidaw, the country’s capital.

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On Oct. 24, Mr. Petrie's office issued a statement urging the government to listen to dissenting voices in Myanmar and warning of a "deteriorating humanitarian situation." It concluded with a reference to the protests, which erupted after a fuel price hike in August and developed into a wider movement calling for political change, before troops moved in to suppress them in late September.

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"Many of the issues that were raised over the last two months by monks and others were exactly the same issues that we were trying to raise for the last four to five years," he said.

More than 100 monks have marched in central Burma, the first time they have returned to the streets since last month's bloody crackdown on protests.
The monks chanted and prayed as they marched through Pakokku, the site of an incident last month that triggered pro-democracy protests nationwide.

The government said 10 people died during the crackdown, but diplomats believe the toll was much higher.

Thousands more - many of them monks - were thought to have been detained.

Separately, the Human Rights Watch organisation has accused the Burmese army of forcibly recruiting children to cover gaps left by a lack of adult recruits.

Since last month Ko Latt, 28, his friends Arca, Eye, Sun and Superman, and scores of others like them have been the third pillar of Burma's Saffron Revolution. While the veteran democracy activists, and then the Buddhist monks, marched in their tens of thousands against the military regime, it is the country's amateur bloggers and internet enthusiasts who have brought the images to the outside world.

Armed with small digital cameras, they have documented the spectacular growth of the demonstrations from crowds of a few hundred to as many as 100,000. On weblogs they have recorded in words and pictures the regime's bloody crackdown, in a city where only a handful of foreign journalists work undercover. With downloaded software, they have dodged and weaved around the regime's increasingly desperate attempts to thwart their work. Now the bloggers, too, have been crushed. Having failed to stop the cyber-dissidents broadcasting to the world, the authorities have simply switched off the internet.

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The realities of political oppression made life difficult. A blogger who posted a photograph of a demonstration found herself arrested, questioned and her computer seized.

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The regime responded, first by blocking individual Burmese blogs, then, last Wednesday, by blocking all of them. But the overseas sites were beyond its reach, so on Friday it switched off the internet altogether. Now e-mails can be sent only within Burma; the only pages that web browsers can view are those of the official websites.

The only solution now would be to dial up ISPs overseas but the cost of international calls makes this prohibitive. As Superman puts it: "Now Burma is like the Stone Age."

Should U.S. Muslims Carry a Special ID? Charles Firth of the Australian TV program Chasers War on Everything asks Americans whether Muslims should have to carry special ID cards, have "security numbers" tattooed on them, and be incarcerated for the rest of the war.

Fifty-six senators voted to cut off debate, and move forward to a vote on the bill itself, a step known as cloture. But under Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to invoke cloture.

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The legal concept of habeas corpus ("You have the body" in Latin) dates back to medieval England, and is meant to protect people from being locked up indefinitely without a court review. Last year, Congress passed and President Bush signed an act eliminating the right of habeas corpus for non-Americans who are labeled "enemy combatants" in the continuing campaign against terrorism.

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Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, said it was "deeply disappointing" that a Senate minority had blocked efforts to restore the right of habeas corpus. "We can and should bring terrorists to justice but we can do it without sacrificing the values upon which our nation was built," he said.

Previously

In a recent blog posting, a German operator of a Tor anonymous proxy server revealed that he was arrested by German police officers at the end of July. Showing up at his house at midnight on a Sunday night, police cuffed and arrested him in front of his wife and seized his equipment. In a display of both bitter irony and incompetence, the police did not take or shut-down the Tor server responsible for the traffic they were interested in, which was located in a data center, over 500km away. In the last year, Germany has passed a draconian new anti-security research law and raided seven different data centers to seize Tor servers. While back in 2003, A German court ordered the developers of a different anonymity network to build a back-door into their system.

This is HR 2826, the House bill to restore habeas corpus. Please call your representative and tell them to support it. You might also remind them that the 4th Amendment says:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

And that their recent dicking around with the FISA bill is a gross violation, and that the violations by the White House and the DOJ are criminal activities that should be prosecuted appropriately.