weapon of choice [change or continuity]

WP: Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, last enemy combatant held in the US, to face trial after seven years in captivity
Marri could face up to 15 years in prison on allegations of conspiracy and providing material support to terrorists. The Qatar native journeyed to Illinois, purportedly to begin work on a master's degree, a day before terrorist strikes hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001.

Marri's legal status had been closely watched in part because human rights advocates used him as a test case before the Supreme Court. They hope to repudiate a policy that allowed the government to indefinitely detain legal U.S. residents suspected of conspiring with al-Qaeda without charging them with a crime...

The indictment covers only two pages, although Marri's defense team will press government lawyers to fill in more details about their case in the months ahead.
NYT: ...which the Obama administration is arguing should put an end to a Supreme Court case, a move criticized by some
Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University, noted that winning at the Supreme Court would affirm extraordinarily broad detention powers for a president — “a position they might not have wanted to take in the first place,” he said.

But losing would also put the government in a difficult spot, said Stewart Baker, a former Bush administration official in the Department of Homeland Security. The administration may be leery of broad detention power but might still want to use it in the most extreme cases. “Hanging on to the possibility of using this theory in a new and different emergency,” he said, “is the sort of thing that prudent government lawyers are inclined to do.”
New Yorker: what to do with new enemy combatants?
A number of national-security lawyers in both parties favor the creation of some new form of preventive detention. They do not believe that it is the President’s prerogative to lock “enemy combatants” up indefinitely, yet they fear that neither the criminal courts nor the military system is suited for the handling of transnational terrorists, whom they do not consider to be ordinary criminals or conventional soldiers. Instead, they suggest that Obama should work with Congress to write new laws, possibly creating a “national-security court,” which could order certain suspects to be held without a trial.

One proponent of this idea is Neal Katyal, whom Obama recently named to the powerful post of Principal Deputy Solicitor General, in the Justice Department. Katyal is best known for his victory as the lead counsel in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006)... [I]n October he posted an article on a Web site affiliated with Georgetown Law, in which he argued, “What is needed is a serious plan to prosecute everyone we can in regular courts, and a separate system to deal with the very small handful of cases in which patently dangerous people cannot be tried.” This new system, he wrote, would give the government the “ability to temporarily detain a dangerous individual,” including in situations where “a criminal trial has failed.” There are hundreds of legal variations that could be considered, he said. In 2007, Katyal published a related essay, co-written with Jack L. Goldsmith, a conservative Harvard Law School professor who served as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Justice Department. The essay argued that preventive detention, overseen by a congressionally authorized national-security court, was necessary to insure the “sensible” treatment of classified evidence, and to protect secret “sources and methods” of gathering intelligence. In his Web post, Katyal wrote, “I support such a security court.”
FP: "Abu Ghraib's Extreme Makeover"

NYT: Obama reveals plan for phased Iraq withdrawal
The plan will withdraw most of the 142,000 troops now in Iraq by the summer of next year, leaving 35,000 to 50,000 to train and advise Iraqi security forces, hunt terrorist cells and protect American civilian and military personnel. Those “transitional forces” will leave by 2011 in accordance with a strategic agreement negotiated by President George W. Bush before he left office.

“Let me say this as plainly as I can,” Mr. Obama said. “By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.”
LAT: the withdrawal plan for dummies
NYT: the budget and the war
[A January report] from the Congressional Budget Office estimat[ed] how much the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts would cost from 2010 through 2019 under two assumptions. In one, the number of troops deployed in the two countries draws down fairly quickly, to about 30,000 by 2011. In the other, levels drop to 75,000 by 2013. Both cases represent a huge reduction from the roughly 180,000 troops there now. But the difference in the cost is breathtaking: the office estimates that Congress would have to appropriate $388 billion for the case of a quick withdrawal and more than double, $867 billion, for the slower one.

Because of the huge range of possible costs, and because the logistics of withdrawal are complicated and expensive, “the basic elements of that estimate are still unresolved,” said John M. Spratt Jr., a South Carolina Democrat who is the House Budget Committee chairman and a House Armed Services Committee member...

President Obama may find it hard to keep the withdrawal to a prescribed timetable, and even if he can, the savings may be a drop in the bucket economically. But if he keeps the bands playing and strikes the right note in his speeches, he just may have a chance to persuade Americans that the end of a long war means better times are on the way.
CSM: so with all this talk about withdrawal, what's the insurgency up to these days?
Ongoing violence in outlying provinces such as Diyala and Nineveh indicates that although violence has fallen and some normalcy is returning to Baghdad, the fringes of Iraq – the rural towns, farming villages, and desert outposts – have become the new fronts in the fight against the insurgent threat as extremists have fled cities and are hiding in the country's remote corners...

Still, while fighting insurgents outside major cities has often proved something of a "whack-a-mole" scenario, US forces here say they're finally beginning to make progress thanks in large part to increasingly capable Iraqi security forces and an emboldened local population...

Now after US forces clear an area, the Iraqi Army, police, or neighborhood watch groups known as Sons of Iraq set up checkpoints along the road to ensure that insurgents don't return. While roadside bombs and harassment of the local population continue, US forces say the situation has dramatically improved.

NYT: IEDs increasingly a threat in Afghanistan
More than 175 American and allied troops were killed by roadside bombs in Afghanistan last year, more than twice as many as the year before, and American commanders say the 17,000 extra troops ordered to Afghanistan by President Obama last week will offer additional targets...

Senior military officers say Afghanistan’s topography and primitive infrastructure play to the insurgents’ advantage. Unlike Iraq, where more of the streets are paved, Afghanistan has a network of undeveloped roads where it is far easier to lay traps...

The improvised bombs — buried in roads, packed into cars or bicycles and hidden in trash cans or animal carcasses — are made from materials readily available in war zones, whether abandoned bombs, construction explosives or fertilizer. They are the weapon of choice for an insurgency: cheap and easy to build, but hard to detect and counter.

The Pentagon created the counter-I.E.D. organization in 2006, and its budget has ranged from $3.5 billion to $4.4 billion annually, but that does not include costs for armored vehicles and other systems. In part because new jamming technology has foiled some weapons triggered remotely by cellphones or garage-door openers, insurgents in Afghanistan are turning to more primitive methods, using wire or even rope as the trigger.
LAT: Afghan president to move up elections from August date...
NYT: ...as US training for Afghans using Russian helicopters reveals the challenges both behind and ahead
The program, which is projected to cost American taxpayers $5 billion into 2016, is aimed at giving Afghanistan the ability to defend itself from the skies and one day allowing the Americans to leave. But for now it reflects all the problems of getting Afghan forces to stand on their own...

Americans have in the past been taught to fly MI-17s, mostly for military exercises to teach them how to counter enemy aircraft. (The MI-17 is used all over the world, including by Iran and North Korea.) The Afghan program is modeled after an earlier American effort to build up the Iraqi Air Force, which also includes some MI-17s. But the Russian helicopters, which make up the bulk of the Afghan fleet, have an ironic resonance in a country where in the 1980s the United States supplied guerrillas with Stinger missiles to shoot Soviet helicopters down.

These days, the American pilots encounter some resentment from the Afghans who have been flying the Russian helicopters for decades — Colonel Bakhtullah has been a pilot since 1981 — and wonder why they must take instruction from Americans who just learned to fly the helicopters in a four-week course at Fort Bliss, Tex. The Americans say that the Afghans have not had a real air force since the Russians left two decades ago, and that they were often improperly trained in the first place.

NYT: cease-fire in Pakistan's Swat Valley
LAT: but none in sight in Islamabad
Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif may well be the most popular politician in Pakistan. So the Supreme Court's decision Wednesday banning him from holding elective office has set the stage for what could be a bitter showdown between his backers and the already shaky government of President Asif Ali Zardari...

Analysts characterized Wednesday's court ruling as a drawing of battle lines between Zardari's Pakistan People's Party and its onetime ally, Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N. The two parties teamed up last February to take on Musharraf, soundly defeating his party in parliamentary elections and ousting him from office six months later. But having gained power, they fell out with each other...

The prospect of a resurgent Sharif, who has the loyalty of many religious conservatives, may make some officials in Washington nervous. Zardari's government is considered much more Western-friendly, whereas Sharif, as prime minister in the 1990s, defied U.S. admonitions and presided over Pakistan's first nuclear test.

LAT: India brings charges against suspected Mumbai "smiling assassin," as Pakistan seeks domestic trials
Authorities on Wednesday filed charges of murder and "waging war" on India against who they say is the lone known surviving gunman in the Mumbai attacks, which killed more than 170 people in November... The others charged include two suspected Pakistani soldiers and Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Islamist militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which India says was behind the attacks, as well as senior Lashkar members Zaki-ur Rehman Lakhvi, Zarar Shah and Abu Hamza.

LAT: paramilitary mutiny in Bangladesh leaves 76 dead, 72 missing
The dispute reportedly erupted Wednesday inside the Dhaka headquarters of the Bangladesh Rifles paramilitary force during a meeting between junior members and their superiors, who are with the nation's army...

Bangladesh, an impoverished Muslim-majority nation with a population of 153 million, has a history of coups and of deep-seated corruption. The country ranks 147th out of 180 nations on watchdog Transparency International's corruption perception index.

Analysts say resentment has run deep among the Rifles for years because they are paid less than the military and must take orders from army officers. In addition to higher pay, leaders of the rebellion demanded that they be allowed to participate in lucrative United Nations peacekeeping operations.
WP: now back to the barracks, although the problem is far from over
The government decided at a late night Cabinet meeting Saturday to form a special tribunal to try those behind the mutiny, ruling party spokesman Syed Ashraful Islam said. Islam said initial evidence suggested the guards who rebelled may have had outside assistance. He did not elaborate...

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, who took office in January, sought to act decisively and quash questions about stability in the poor South Asian nation during the first major challenge her administration has faced. Hasina ended the revolt in two days by persuading the guards to surrender Thursday with promises of an amnesty coupled with threats of military force.

NYT: US training Palestinian security forces in the West Bank
Some 1,600 have been through American-financed courses in Jordan. In coordination with Israeli defense officials, Palestinian troops and police officers have taken over much of the patrolling in the West Bank cities of Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem and parts of Hebron.

Last month, as Israel carried out a war in Hamas-ruled Gaza, some in the Muslim world called on the West Bank to stage a violent uprising in protest. But while there were demonstrations, no such uprising occurred, partly because the Palestinian Authority troops maintained tight order.

All the while, these state-of-the-art facilities were being built, employing hundreds of Palestinian workers. The Presidential Guard College here has been functioning for several weeks, while the National Security Force Operations Camp elsewhere in Jericho will open at the end of next month. Along with police training facilities here supported by the European Union, they represent a new phase in the security plan: sophisticated training under Palestinian command has begun in Palestinian territory.
WP: Syria-based Hamas leader slips into Gaza in midst of discussions with Fatah...
Hamas' leadership is divided between the Gaza Strip, which the group rules, and its top officials living in Damascus. Abu Marzouk is number two in the Hamas hierarchy. He was born in Gaza and grew up in a refugee camp in the southern part of the strip, but hasn't been back in several decades. The purpose of his visit was unknown. Hamas denied he entered Gaza and Abu Marzouk's Gaza relatives say they had not seen him.

Hamas leadership has been holding talks in Cairo seeking reconciliation with its Fatah rival. Both sides are working toward forming a unity government but have been unable to bridge their gaps...

On Monday, international donors will meet in Egypt for a conference on Gaza's reconstruction. The Palestinians are seeking $2.8 billion. Solana said Saturday the donor money will be sent to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, bypassing Hamas' Gaza leadership.
LAT: ...the success of which is important to leaders in the West Bank, Gaza and Egypt
A key question to be answered as negotiations proceed in the coming weeks is how much Hamas is willing to relax its tight political control over Gaza or modify its militant stance against Israel in return for an arrangement easing the flow of reconstruction aid to the enclave's 1.5 million people...

Reconciliation would serve both groups' aims and perhaps remove a major obstacle to rebuilding Gaza: an Israeli blockade backed by Egypt that has kept the enclave's borders all but sealed since Hamas took over Gaza. Without open borders, heavy construction materials cannot enter the strip.

Egypt has pushed hard to bring Hamas and Fatah together, hoping to restore a Palestinian Authority role in policing Gaza's borders. That would enable Egypt to reopen its crossing with Gaza without violating a border control agreement with Israel.

More broadly, a rapprochement of the Palestinian rivals would help revive Egypt's shaken position as a regional power and an influential voice in the Middle East.
AJE: meanwhile, rockets keep flowing into Israel from Gaza
AJE: and an Israeli order to demolish homes in Jerusalem leads to debilitating West Bank strike
A general strike to protest against Israel's plans to evict 1,500 Palestinians from their homes in the Silwan district of Jerusalem has paralysed much of the occupied West Bank. Shops and schools were closed and the streets were deserted as the strike was observed on Saturday...

Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital and has annexed the Arab east of the city. Some 500,000 Israelis live there in settlements. Under international law, east Jerusalem is considered to be occupied and the city has not been recognised by world powers as the Israeli capital.

WP: Hariri assassination trial to start in the Netherlands
Despite the start of proceedings in the Netherlands, it is still not known who will be accused in the suicide truck bombing that killed [former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik] Hariri and 22 other people on a seaside street in Beirut on Feb. 14, 2005.

Also unknown is the most politically explosive question _ whether the proceedings will implicate Syria's government, which many Lebanese believe was behind the murder of a man who broke with Syria to oppose its long military dominance of Lebanon. Syria has denied involvement.

Most likely the first defendants before the court will be four pro-Syria generals who led Lebanon's police, intelligence service and an elite army unit at the time of the assassination. They are the only people in custody, though they have not been formally charged.

LAT: United Arab Emirates hosts massive arms fair for the region

NYT: new leader brings new strategy to violent Russian republic of Ingushetia
The new president, Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, has ordered security barriers removed from most government offices, reasoning that authorities should not need protection from their own people. He rents a modest house from a retired state prosecutor, expressing some discomfort with the gold-domed presidential palace.

And in a region where criticism of the government has been all but forbidden, Mr. Yevkurov seems to be soliciting it. In his first 100 days in office, he met at least seven times, three times in private, with a human rights activist who dogged his predecessor, and he established a telephone line for citizens to air their grievances.

Whether this new approach can bring Ingushetia under control is another question — and a crucial one for Russia. Soon it will be spring, marking a new season of war between armed Ingush militants and the federal forces struggling to control them. Left to deteriorate, Ingushetia could become another Chechnya, spreading chaos on Russia’s southern border.

NYT: Kosovo war crimes trial finds 5 Serbs guilty, minus wartime president Milan Milutinovic
Citing their reasons for acquitting Mr. Milutinovic, the judges said that in practice “it was Milosevic, sometimes termed the Supreme Commander, who exercised actual command authority” over Serbian troops and security police officers in 1999.

The judges convicted the five others for their roles in “a broad campaign of violence directed against the Kosovo Albanian population,” which at the time made up 90 percent of Kosovo. They said Serbia had initiated a state-organized campaign to keep control over Kosovo through deporting or forcibly transferring a large part of the population of about two million.
NYT: Bosnian Serb leaders threaten secession, highlighting tensions
Bosnian Serb officials, Western diplomats and the police said the crisis began last week when the country’s state police agency sent a report to the State Prosecutor’s Office with allegations involving the Serb Republic’s prime minister, Milorad Dodik.

The case outlined in the State Investigation and Protection Agency report related to corruption, fraud and misuse of finances involving several important government contracts in the Bosnian Serb Republic. They included allegations concerning a $146 million government building in Banja Luka...

Mr. Dodik expressed indignation last weekend, saying he was the victim of a witch hunt aimed at undermining him and the Bosnian Serb Republic. “Even the little faith I had in the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is now lost due to this farce with the criminal charges against me,” he said last week. “They have made this country pointless.”

WP: Rwandan army withdraws from month-long joint military offensive with DR Congo, despite unclear success
The operation has merely scattered the 6,000 or so Hutu rebels belonging to the FDLR farther west. Only one rebel leader -- a spokesman -- has been captured, while two dozen others, including some wanted for participating in the genocide, remain in the bush or are in the Congolese capital of Kinshasa or Europe. The task of disarming the rebels is now up to the infamously inept Congolese army, which once collaborated with the Hutu rebels, and an overstretched U.N. peacekeeping force.

Human rights groups warn that the FDLR could regroup within weeks and launch reprisal attacks against villagers as it seeks to retake lost ground that includes the lucrative mineral mines it has controlled for years...

Although the 17,000-member U.N. peacekeeping force was largely left out of the operation, it is now rushing to secure strategic areas that the Rwandan troops cleared of rebels before they return. The peacekeepers are also supposed to assist the Congolese army as it continues to hunt down rebels -- many of whom are now in small pockets of 20 and 30 -- across the dense forests of eastern Congo.
BBC: Hutu rebels retaking Congolese territory already?

CSM: UN tribunal convicts three RUF commanders for crimes against humanity, including amputation, murder, enlistment of child soldiers and sexual slavery...
But the ripples of the international tribunal's decision on Wednesday in Freetown, Sierra Leone – finding rebel leaders Issa Sesay, Morris Kallon, and Augustine Gbao guilty on more than a dozen counts each of crimes against humanity – are already reaching around the continent and the world. Coming just a week before the expected arrest warrant for Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, and in the middle of the ongoing trial of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, this trial sets a very tough tone about the consequences of cruelty in wartime.
WP: ...in the first forced-marriage conviction in an international court of law
CSM: Sudan's Bashir ups diplomacy in bid to stall ICC warrant ruling
[W]hile Bashir may actually have the numbers on his side, with much of the developing world voicing concern that the ICC has overreached its mandate, the ICC is showing no signs of relenting.

"The only alternative the judge can look at is to stagger or to postpone the decision to issue an arrest warrant," says Godfrey Musila, a legal expert at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, South Africa (formerly known as Pretoria). "What Sudan is doing is trying to get enough diplomatic voices on its side, but the idea is not to affect the decision of whether to issue an arrest warrant or not, but when to do it."

Coming just a week after the Khartoum government signed a "confidence-building" agreement to start talks with the key Darfur rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, Bashir's diplomatic roadshow is a clear last-minute dash to stall the inevitable.
BBC: clashes in southern Sudan between army and militias in Malakal

WP: Somali government and major insurgent group agree to a cease-fire
Some of the worst fighting in Mogadishu has taken place in recent weeks. Islamist insurgents battled government and African Union troops for two consecutive days this week and the independent Elman Human Rights Organization said at least 49 civilians were killed... The Islamic Party opposes the presence of AU troops in Somalia and has vowed to fight them until they leave the Horn of Africa nation.
FP: still, what on earth to do with Somalia?
The hardest challenge of all might be simply preventing the worst-case scenario. Among the best suggestions I’ve heard is to play to Somalia’s strengths as a fluid, decentralized society with local mechanisms to resolve conflicts. The foundation of order would be clan-based governments in villages, towns, and neighborhoods. These tiny fiefdoms could stack together to form district and regional governments. The last step would be uniting the regional governments in a loose national federation that coordinated, say, currency issues or antipiracy efforts, but did not sideline local leaders...

A more radical idea is to have the United Nations take over the government and administer Somalia with an East Timor-style mandate. Because Somalia has already been an independent country, this option might be too much for Somalis to stomach. To make it work, the United Nations would need to delegate authority to clan leaders who have measurable clout on the ground. Either way, the diplomats should be working with the moneylords more and the warlords less.

But the problem with Somalia is that after 18 years of chaos, with so many people killed, with so many gun-toting men rising up and then getting cut down, it is exceedingly difficult to identify who the country’s real leaders are, if they exist at all.
GQ: leaders may be difficult to find, but pirates are out, commanding attention
With their black scarves covering their faces and submachine guns slung over their arms, Somalia’s pirates are the real Jack Sparrows of the twenty-first century, minus the eyeliner. One young woman who lives near Boosaaso bragged about going to a pirate wedding that lasted two days. A band was flown in from neighboring Djibouti. There was nonstop dancing and an endless supply of goat meat. “They drive the best cars, they throw the best parties,” she gushed. “We all want to marry them.” She claimed that her own pirate boyfriend had just given her a small gift—$350,000 in cash. For young Somali men, pirate life is becoming too much to resist. Fishermen all along the coast have traded in their ragged fishing nets for rocket-propelled grenades.

NYT: Kenya having a hard time, one year after violent protests
Ten million people face starvation, partly because farmers in crucial food-producing areas who fled their homes last year have not returned, instead withdrawing deeper into their ethnic enclaves, deeper into fear...

On Wednesday, United Nations officials called for the country’s police chief and attorney general to resign after a United Nations investigation revealed that more than 500 people had been killed by police death squads. One of the Kenyan whistle-blowers himself was shot to death after providing detailed evidence...

The only thing Kenya’s ruling class seems to agree on is refusing to pay most of its taxes, even though Kenyan politicians are already among the highest paid in the world, a stunning fact in one of the world’s poorest countries...

Kenya’s legendary safari business, an engine of the economy, has not bounced back either. Tourist arrivals were down about 35 percent in 2008 compared with 2007, leading to thousands of layoffs and a steady stream of unemployed youths marching back to the already teeming slums.

WP: worrying explosion at Guinnea-Bissau armed forces HQ wounds three

CSM: grim conditions for displaced Sri Lankans
NYT: Tigers offer truce, which government rejects...
With their guerrilla fighters pinned down by Sri Lankan troops in a small patch of jungle, ethnic Tamil separatists announced Monday that they were willing to accept an internationally brokered cease-fire, although they said they would not surrender their weapons as part of any truce...

In January 2008, the government pulled out of a cease-fire agreement that had been brokered by Norway in 2002, saying the rebels had used the period of the truce to rearm and regroup. Government leaders vowed to crush the rebels within the year.

Government troops have cornered the principal group of rebel fighters in a small strip of land on the country’s northeastern coast. The government says the Tamil Tigers, fighting from their last remaining enclave, now control less than about 33 square miles.
AJE: ...arguing it's days from winning

WP: North Korea claims US overstepping boundaries along demilitarized zone, while preparing to test-fire long-range missile

CSM: Chinese government seeks to close troublesome human rights firm

LAT: Mexico to send 5,000 more troops to Ciudad Juárez
Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said the added troops would give the military a higher profile by taking control of police functions, including street patrols. Currently, soldiers tend highway checkpoints, guard crime scenes and take part in special operations, such as house searches.

The city is without a police chief. Roberto Orduña Cruz quit last week after several officers were slain and someone posted threats saying more would be killed unless he stepped down...

A little more than 2,000 soldiers and 425 federal police officers are assigned to Juarez in addition to local police, army spokesman Enrique Torres said. He said the reinforcements could begin to arrive in two weeks.

Newsweek: explosion of private security in Brazil reflects international trend
Gardênia Azul, a flatland slum in the scruffy west end of Rio de Janeiro, isn't much to look at. But don't tell that to Juliana. She moved there from Cidade de Deus (City of God)... At least in Gardênia there were no teenagers with Kalashnikovs or vendors hawking cocaine in the street. To Juliana, a manicurist with a four-year-old son, those things matter. "We can walk the streets any time of day or night," she says. "I feel safe."

In Gardênia Azul safety is relative, and comes at a price... No one is fond of the militia, which is often the corrupt twin of legitimate law enforcement with rogue cops acting as judge, jury and occasionally executioner. (Juliana won't soon forget her neighbor's 16-year-old, who was shot dead for smoking marijuana, his body dumped in the main square.) But to millions of people trying to get by in some of the meanest streets in the hemisphere, life involves hedging your bets by grabbing at whatever safety net you can...

Analysts estimate that policing is a $100 billion to $200 billion global business and a growth industry in the developing world. In Russia, private cops outnumber regular ones by 10 to 1. So ubiquitous are they in South Africa, militias are even tasked with guarding regular police stations. Private security generates an estimated million jobs a year in India. Even Uganda has 20,000 private police on the streets, as many as Iraq had in 2006, at the height of the war.

CSM: Islamist militant group Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines masters the art of kidnapping, reaps some $1.5 million in ransom annually

WP: change of policy at Baltimore police made even more problematic by weak role of local media
In January, a new Baltimore police spokesman -- a refugee from the Bush administration -- came to the incredible conclusion that the city department could decide not to identify those police officers who shot or even killed someone. (Similar policies have been established by several other police departments in the United States as well as by the FBI.)

Anthony Guglielmi, the department's director of public affairs, informed Baltimoreans that, henceforth, Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld would decide unilaterally whether citizens would know the names of those who had used their weapons on civilians. If they did something illegal or unwarranted -- in the commissioner's judgment -- they would be named. Otherwise, the Baltimore department would no longer regard the decision to shoot someone as the sort of responsibility for which officers might be required to stand before the public.