Three separate stories tonight—one on television, two on radio—addressed the idea that the Bush Administration has created what many have called an Imperial Presidency—a presidency that believes itself above the US courts, above the necessity to honor long-standing government treaties, and above international law.

The first of the three stories was the much ballyhooed 60 Minutes segment about Murat Kurnaz, a German traveling in Pakistan who was nabbed three months after 9/11 and transported to Afghanistan where he says he was tortured severely. It seemed to matter little that the FBI, U.S. intelligence and German intelligence had reportedly concluded that Kurnaz was innocent of the terrorism charges brought against him. He was subsequently transferred to Guantanamo where charges against him fell further apart. In 2002, German intelligence agents wrote their government, saying, “USA considers Murat Kurnaz’s innocence to be proven. He is to be released in approximately six to eight weeks.” Instead, Kurnaz was kept in Guantanamo for an additional three and a half years.

When contacted, the US Department of Defense responded to 60 Minutes in letter form that called Kurnaz’ accusations outlandish and unsubstantiated.

The second two stories were on this week’s This American Life. In one episode, TAL tells about the more than a hundred foreign women who got married to Americans, then had their spouses die less than two years after the marriage. The US government responded to their grief and loss by curtly informed the widows “You’re no longer married to Americans. Your citizen application is denied. Now get out of the country.” The widows went to court over the matter, and the court told the government that it had to let the women stay. But the US government ignored the court and told them they have to leave anyway.

Story three was about an American couple who lived on the Canadian border and decided to build a retaining wall inside the ten-foot buffer zone that is on either side of the international boundary. The International Boundary Commission told the Americans that they couldn’t have the wall inside the buffer zone and would have to take it down. The Americans sued the Commission, the bi-national entity created by a 1925 treaty to inspect and oversee the US Canada border. And that’s when the Bush administration stepped in….

You can hear the rest on This American Life here. (The promos up now, and podcasts will be available of the program in a few days)

In a way this is all an old issue. We have long been aware that in instances ranging from FISA to signing statements, when the Bush administration doesn’t like a law or a legal ruling it pretty much does what it pleases regardless of restrictions placed on it by Congress or courts.

But the real question is, what will happen next January when we have a new president? Wll he or she keep the newly established Imperial presidency, or dismantle it.

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For those of you who want to take your minds off Baer Stearns and the fact that 2 million Americans will likely lose their homes before this mess is over, there’s always…..Tibet.

With China doing its best to keep any and all outsiders out of Tibet, emails from worried Tibetan expatriots and human rights activists familiar with the area are flying around the Web in an attempt to balance the highly controlled news flow skewed to present only the view China wishes to be seen. To combat the skewing, videos showing huge but peaceful protests are being spirited out via cell phone and posted on YouTube. (China has since cut access to YouTube.)

There are also the inevitable blogs and websites—all, of necessity, run by outsiders. Two of the newsiest sites that are drawing Tibet watchers are called Tibet Uprising and Students for a Free Tibet.

Here’s a snippet from one of the forwarded emails I’ve gotten on the issue. It’s written by Lhadon Tethong, a Tibetan and human rights activist who is presently living, like many exiled Tibetans, in Northern India:

My dear family and friends,

I’m not sure what to say to you right now.

Part of me wants to talk about the good side of all that is
happening, the bravery and the courage of the Tibetan people….

But then the other part of me is full of dread and fear for what will
happen now, for what is happening now. Will they smash the monasteries
as they again see the monks in the lead? Will they destroy the Bharkor
because it’s again a lightning rod for protest? Will they move all the
Tibetans out of Lhasa because they are in the way? Will they turn the
countryside into killing fields because nobody will know what happens
out there?

Here in Dharamsala we try to assure ourselves this won’t happen. That
the Chinese leadership won’t dare do this now. But I don’t trust them. I
will never trust them. All my life I’ve heard the stories of what the
Chinese government does to Tibetans who are too strong, too proud. They
try to break their spirit and take away their dignity. In the darkness
of the prisons and the jails they inflict such pain and
suffering…there is no way to comprehend it from this place.

China’s deadline for protesters to “surrender” has now expired. But it
was all a farce. Another carefully scripted ploy to make it look like
Tibetans had their chance before the Chinese authorities were forced to
take the most extreme measures.

Now all the foreigners are leaving. Soon, only the Tibetans will remain.
And, once again, it will be our people defenseless and alone left at
the mercy of one of the most deadly military forces on earth.

Meanwhile, on Sunday, the Dalai Lama held a news conference to express his concerns: “Please investigate…” he said, “if possible some respected organization, international organization carry entirely what is the condition, what is the situation in Tibet.”

(Is it just me, or does His Holiness look unusually buff in the above photo?)

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Senator Joe Biden, who along with John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, flew in to observe the parliamentary elections vote today in Pakistan, told reporters in Washington on Friday that if the elections can be shown to be “patently rigged,” he will propose that the United States cut off military aid to Pakistan.

Well, Joe, I think your cards are about to be called. All day there have been instances of widespread vote rigging, fraud and bribery, being reported on some of Pakistan’s most prominent blogs, like here at Teeth Maestro and here at Metroblogging Karachi.

I’ll have a brand new report on all this early tomorrow morning from a first-hand source, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, it looks like the opposition parties (Benazir Bhutto’s PPP and Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N), not that of Musharraf’s (PML-Q and his reactionary allies, MQM), are winning. So one of the questions hanging in the air is this one: Who is doing the rigging?

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Out of all the homages and the farewell essays pursuant to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto there are two that have stayed with me, one written by my friend Amy Wilentz, who went to school with Benazir, and kept in touch with her over the years. (Actually, Amy knew much of the family and even dated Benazir’s brother, Murtaza, Fatima Bhutto’s father, who was himself murdered in 1966, likely with Benazir’s complicity at least in the cover-up afterward.)

Amy writes in the Los Angeles Times of the last time she saw Benazir, 10 days before Bhutto’s return to Pakistan. It is a close-up and poignant glimpse of the personal woman behind the dynastic juggernaught.

It was nighttime as we spoke in her enormous fortress of a house in a gated community in Dubai. Outside, in the side yard behind walls and barriers, the guard dog barked. In the front receiving room was a little library stuffed with paperbacks, titles such as “Facial Workout,” “The Little Book of Stress,” “Eat to Beat Your Age” and Deepak Chopra’s “How to Know God.”

[snip]

On walls everywhere in her Dubai house were enlarged photographs of Zulfikar Bhutto. As prime minister, Benazir had been notoriously high-handed, but she had an unpretentious manner in private. For an Oxford and Harvard graduate, she was unembarrassed by her addiction to bestsellers, blockbusters and psychobabble books. When I asked if she was frightened of going back to Pakistan, she was matter-of-fact: “For all the lows in my life, those self-help books helped me survive, I can tell you. There’s a focus on the present; don’t worry about tomorrow. … When the time comes that I have to die, I’ll die.” When I left her late that night, she seemed lonely, standing on the doorstep in a pool of light, waving goodbye. She had lost so much in her struggle to become great, to take on what she thought of as her father’s mantle.

And then there is the essay that all Bhutto watchers have been waiting for, written by Benazir Bhutto’s harshest critic, the newspaper columnist who called Benazir the most dangerous woman in Pakistan. I’m talking of course about her niece, Fatima.

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The death of Benazir Bhutto is assuredly going to matter in the US presidential primaries that begin in Iowa next week. Exactly how much and to whom is as yet unclear. The majority of Americans know little of the nuances of Pakistani politics. And, for the most part, whatever knowledge voters gain in the coming days will be dependent on the information and spin they are fed by TVs nattering nabobs.

Last night, when talking about the meaning of Bhutto’s death, Wolf Blitzer in conversation with Dan Rather put forth a decidedly non-nuanced message that can best be summed up as follows: Terror central!!! Islamic extremism!!! Danger, danger, danger!!!

Of course, how events in Pakistan affect the US Prez race is, in the main, dependent on the candidates themselves, all of whom—Dem and Repub—have had something to say about the assassination and what it portends:

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As most of you know by now, former Pakistani Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday (today) as she left a political rally.

Benazir, despite her charisma and her passion, was a controversial and, in the eyes of many, a deeply problematic leader, both beloved and reviled, her two administrations marred by corruption. Her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, was arguably one of the most hated men in the country. (Fatima, Benazir’s niece, explains some of the issues in the WLA interview here.) Yet, however complex the feelings toward her, Benazir belonged to Pakistan, and her death leaves Pakistanis spinning and grief stricken.

Here’s what popular Pakistani blogger Teeth Maestro writes of these confusing moments as they continue to unfold. His words say much about the country’s roiling emotions, and about its attitude toward what it regards as U.S. meddling.

Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto has been killed in a suicide attack today in Rawalpindi outside the Liaquatbagh rally she addressed moments earlier. In all honesty, I was never a fan of her style of politics corruption but on hearing this sad news it leaves me and the entire nation in shock, quite literally forgiving her for everything, May Her Soul Rest in Peace.

As the country plunges into chaos with news of riots already afoot throughout Pakistan. Yes we will recover, yes the world will move on, but we will surely remember her ultimate sacrifice for Pakistan.

My analysis of who is to blame may be quite simple as we have been repeating the same thing over and over again - The Americans MUST stop their adventures and infiltrations into other countries and their war on terror has destroyed Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan stands on the edge ready to plummet into darkness. This war on terror is a war of the Americans and NOT our war.

We Pakistanis Plead with the movers and shakers in United States to Please For Gods Sake Leave US ALONE

Here and here and here are a few other links to top Pakistani bloggers. And here also Metroblogging Lahore pleads with everyone to stay home for safety’s sake as the country tips increasingly toward chaos. The words of the bloggers, in many ways, give a much fuller picture of what is going on inside Pakistan than anything you can get from CNN.

This event is loaded with implications for the U.S. and for the world—as well as for Pakistan itself. Naturally, all the presidential candidates, Republicans and Democrats, are rushing to make comments. (More on that later.)

But right now, our hearts simply go out to the Pakistani people in these dark hours.

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On Wednesday, Time Magazine named Vladimir Putin its Person of the Year because of Putin’s “extraordinary feat of leadership in taking a country that was in chaos and bringing it stability,” said Richard Stengel, Time’s managing editor.

Oh, please! That’s like saying a mom’s a good parent because she calmed her toddler down by knocking him to the floor then locking him in a closet.

Yes, sure, Putin deserves to be in the top 25, maybe even the top ten. But he just ain’t number one—either in a positive or negative sense of the honor.

Instead of putin I’d have gone for one of the following (in no particular order):

1. Google - Access to information is everything. And Google is the vehicle that guides and propels us through the maze that is the World Wide Web. It’s changed the way we think about information—and the way we think, period.

2. JK Rowling - She was in Time’s top five, (as well she should be) The woman has inspired more kids to read than anyone in my lifetime. I rather liked this option, but apparently Time didn’t. At least not enough.

3. Mark Zuckerberg (the Facebook guy) - What MySpace began, Facebook bettered many times over. It’s not so much him, per se, but the notion of social networking on the web that seems worth recognizing as an idea that’s changing the way we view community and has only begun to explode.

4. The WGA Striking Writers - The battle for the future of digital entertainment. Okay, it’s a long shot idea, but worth considering.

5. The monks of Burma - They demonstrated for all the rest of us the stunning power of moral authority.

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Okay, now your turn.

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I got a very nice note from Fatima Bhutto today telling me that the WitnessLA/Huff Post interview with her had been picked up by a quite number of papers in Pakistan.

“…the response has been overwhelming,” she wrote. “People have emailed me to say how much they enjoyed reading it. They were surprised” she added, “and isn’t this sad—that the interview was done for an American audience and by an American.”

Well, it was heartening to find that Pakistani readers were eager to read about Fatima’s interview for an American media outlet. But, yes, it was a bit depressing that so many Pakistanis were stunned that we might be interested.

In the past eight years, peoples of far too many countries in the world have come to believe that Americans see things only from our own point of view—and that the perspective of anything or anyone that falls out outside that point of view simply doesn’t matter. The perception was again reinforced in the past few weeks by the Bush administration’s ham handed dealings with Musharraf and the ongoing situation in Pakistan.

And it was this same issue of leadership myopia that was at the heart of the slap-fest that occurred yesterday between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

It began when Obama remarked that, should he become President, his childhood in Indonesia would be an asset. He suggested that it gave him a leg up in understanding the points of view of countries other than our own.

Hillary Clinton slapped back by declaring that one’s experience as a ten-year-old was not exactly equivalent to all the time she’d spent hobnobbing with world leaders.

Obama swung next with the observation that a long foreign policy resume guarantees exactly nothing when it comes to wise leadership. “There are a couple guys named Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who had two of the longest resumes in Washington and led us into the biggest foreign policy disaster of a generation,” Obama said at his next New Hampshire campaign stop. “So a long resume doesn’t guarantee good judgment.”

And God knows we could use some good judgment at the country’s helm,. We also need, as mentioned above, a president who has the ability to see beyond his or her own experience to accurately imagine how cultures and countries might perceive things. Both our security, and our ability to repair our badly damaged standing in the world depend upon it.

Whether, on the Democratic side of the presidential race, it is Clinton or Obama or Edwards or Biden who is the one most likely to posses this wider framework—plus strength, clarity of purpose, and all those other good things a President needs—is in the eye of the beholder. But more and more veteran foreign policy types seem to be leaning to Obama.

“In today’s globalized world,” he said in a foreign policy speech last spring,“ the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people. When narco-trafficking and corruption threaten democracy in Latin America, it’s America’s problem too. When poor villagers in Indonesia have no choice but to send chickens to market infected with avian flu, it cannot be seen as a distant concern. When religious schools in Pakistan teach hatred to young children, our children are threatened as well.”

The people who emailed Fatima Bhutto understand that interconnectedness all too clearly. Let’s hope we get a Democratic Presidential candidate who understands it too.

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NOTE: This is cross-posted at Huffington Post’s OFF THE BUS section.

Benazir Bhutto isn’t the only one in the family with an ardent following in troubled Pakistan. There is also her niece, 25-year-old, Fatima Bhutto, a newspaper columnist/author and, in the eyes of many, the crown princess of Pakistan’s most powerful political dynasty.

Now that Benazir is back under house arrest again and calling for General Musharraf to quit, I phoned Fatima in Karachi, and talked with her about her aunt’s extravagant political gamesmanship, about how Pakistanis will react if the U.S. attacks Iran, about which American presidential candidate looks like a winner from a Pakistani standpoint—and which Dem she personally wants to see win. [Hint: It’s not Hillary].

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CELESTE: How has the Bush Administration affected Pakistani politics?

FATIMA BHUTTO: A lot. Musharraf has been fighting the war on terror for the Bush White House, as if it was his own, and so he’s brought it to our doorstep. Prior to 9/11 and the war on terror, the religious parties in Pakistan really had no ground support. Out of 400 seats in parliament, they would take maybe four or five. They would never break double digits. But after 9/11, and after opening up our borders to American forces, and launching airstrikes, the religious right has tripled or quadrupled their support. Instead of getting four seats, they get 15 or 20 seats. And now we have a civil war going on in the northern part of our country.

CF: As you know, the US will elect a new president. Do Pakistanis pay much attention to American politics? And if so, who would they like to see in office?

FB: Actually, Pakistanis follow American elections very closely, because they affect us so much. But, if you ask most Pakistanis, they believe earnestly that Republicans are the best, because they’ll give us a lot of money, aide and weapons. The average person forgets that, in return, we have to do the American’s dirty work for them. I think what a lot of people are most upset about is right now is that Americans are threatening to cut aid. The average Pakistani doesn’t think about what we have to do to get that money.

CF: What about you? Who do you like?

FB: I have to say I like Obama a lot. His record is the best. He’s always been vocal about his opposition to the war in Iraq. And he’s speaking out against the Patriot Act. Frankly, he seems very good in a lot of ways. Whereas with Hillary, if you look at her record, it doesn’t support what she says now. If I could vote in the American elections, Obama would get my vote.

But even Obama has come out and said, if necessary, we will attack Pakistan. They’ve all said that — Republicans and Democrats. So Pakistanis feel the safest bet is the Republicans, because they will fund us and give us those F-16s that we paid for and never got. As, for the religious parties, they like the neocons because they lose a lot of their dynamism if they have no one to go up against. For them, the neocons are perfect.

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To understand the magnetic force the name “Bhutto” conjures in Pakistan, imagine the Kennedys, the Clintons and the entire Bush clan all rolled into one — with added doses of tragedy, corruption and political intrigue. The patriarch is the late Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s wildly popular former prime minister, and Fatima’s grandfather (who was hanged after a military takeover by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq). It’s important to know that Fatima’s father, Murtaza Bhutto, was an opposition member of parliament when older sister Benazir was last in power, and that he died in a hail of bullets under still-cloudy circumstances at the hands of the police force under his sister’s rule. Then later, Benazir retreated into exile amid big-money corruption charges that Musharraf has recently agreed to drop.

You also need to know that Columbia-educated Fatima is widely expected to leap into politics herself. But, if and when she ever does, it will assuredly not be under her aunt’s Pakistani People’s Party banner.

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CF: A lot of people have called for you to run for public office? Are you seriously considering it?

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As Benazir Bhutto continues to be on off-again-on-again house arrest, a restriction that interestingly doesn’t seem to hamper her from public speaking and organizing, some are suggesting that her conflict with Musharraf is a form of political theater taking place as the two work out a power-sharing deal that has, to a great degree, already been brokered by the Bush administration. Others say that, as of yesterday, the theatrical fight turned real and all bets are off.

Whatever the case, the so-called Emergency rule and the crack down on the rest of the country is very real and ongoing. Thousands of people have been arrested and more are still being arrested—most particularly lawyers, journalists, and other advocates and activists—their fates uncertain. To give you an idea of what it is like for an ordinary person to be slammed with the brutalities of Musharraf’s control move, I’m posting a very personal account written by a young Karachi-based lawyer named Omar. It was sent to me by one of his friends, a contact of mine who is also living in Karachi.

“He’s tremendously brave,” she wrote regarding Omar. “We’re all very worried about him. These are trying times we live in, we’re learning so much about each other…”

TUESDAY AFTERNOON NOTE: Unlike the self-induced typo above that I (sigh) just this minute eliminated, Omar’s occasional grammatical lapses are his own ESL blips within an otherwise articulate and impassioned narrative.

Okay, here’s OMAR’S STORY:

On November 5, 2007, for the first time in the history of Pakistan,” he writes,, “heavily armed police, intelligence and other law enforcement agencies laid siege on the courts of Pakistan. As usual, and like most lawyers, I arrived at 815 at the High Court of Sindh. I was greeted at the gate by a policemen brandishing his weapon at me and asking me why I had come to Court. I told him I was a lawyer upon which he asked me to show my identity. I complied. Hurling abuses at me he “advised” that I should return if I did not want to get a beating and go to jail. I looked at the usual guard of the court premises but his refusal to meet my eye convinced me that there was nothing he could do. I did not return and instead entered the court premises. I felt that if I returned, I will have betrayed my own principles of standing for justice and fair play. I sensed that they would be aggression from the police but why would they want to hurt a non-political, non-active and gentle person who did not believe in violence. A short while later the fallacy of my beliefs was to be exposed.

“While I was standing talking to my colleagues, we saw the police go wild at the orders of a superior officer. In riot gears, brandishing weapons and sticks, about a 100 policemen attacked us. Without an iota of exaggeration, these heavily armed policemen attacked unarmed and peaceful lawyers and seemed intensely happy at doing so. We all ran.

Some of us who were not as nimble on their feet as others were caught by the police and beaten mercilessly. We were then brutally forced and locked in police vans which are used to transport convicted prisoners.

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