When a renowned abortion doctor opened a clinic in Ocala, Florida, he was seen as a public pest. So local authorities used the courts to get rid of him.

Thefts from other countries pale in relation to the looting of Russia, with
the indispensable assistance of the "Offshornaya Zona." The 1995 "loans for
shares" scheme transferred state ownership of privatized industries worth
billions of dollars to companies whose offshore registrations hid true owners.
More billions were stolen around the time of the August 1998 crash.

Insider banks knew about the coming devaluation and shipped billions in
assets as "loans" to offshore companies. The banks' statements show that their
loan portfolios grew after the date when they got loans from the Russian
Central Bank, which were supposed to stave off default. After the crash, it was
revealed that the top borrowers in all the big bankrupt banks were offshore.
For example, the five largest creditors of Rossiisky Credit were shell
companies registered in Nauru and in the Caribbean. As the debtors' ownerships
were secret, they could easily "disappear." Stuck with "uncollectable" loans
and "no assets," the banks announced their own bankruptcies. Swiss officials
are investigating leads that some of the $4.8 billion International Monetary
Fund tranche to Russia was moved by banks to accounts offshore before the 1998
crash.

The biggest current scam is being effected by a secretly owned Russian
company called Itera, which is using offshore shells in Curaçao and
elsewhere to gobble up the assets of Gazprom, the national gas company, which
is 38 percent owned by the government. Itera's owners are widely believed to be
Gazprom managers, their relatives and Viktor Chernomyrdin, former chairman of
Gazprom's board of directors and prime minister during much of the
privatization. Gazprom, which projected nearly $16 billion in revenues for
2000, uses Itera as its marketing agent and has been selling it gas fields at
cut-rate prices. Its 1999 annual report did not account for sales of 13 percent
of production. As its taxes supply a quarter of government revenues, this is a
devastating loss. Itera has a Florida office, which has been used to register
other Florida companies, making it a vehicle for investment in the US economy.

Best known as a place where the Air Force shoots satellites into orbit, the
Eastern Space and Missile Center--just south of the Kennedy Space Center in
Florida's Brevard County--would appear to fo

Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-US terrorists, destroy
every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush
Administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as
an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation
still takes seriously.

That's the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the
Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators
of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by
Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes
the United States the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that "rogue regime"
for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by
the Taliban's estimation, are most human activities, but it's the ban on
drugs that catches this administration's attention.

Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading
anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which,
among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies
in Africa in 1998.

Sadly, the Bush Administration is cozying up to the Taliban regime at
a time when the United Nations, at US insistence, imposes sanctions on
Afghanistan because the Kabul government will not turn over Bin Laden.

The war on drugs has become our own fanatics' obsession and easily
trumps all other concerns. How else could we come to reward the Taliban,
who has subjected the female half of the Afghan population to a continual
reign of terror in a country once considered enlightened in its treatment
of women?

At no point in modern history have women and girls been more
systematically abused than in Afghanistan where, in the name of madness
masquerading as Islam, the government in Kabul obliterates their
fundamental human rights. Women may not appear in public without being
covered from head to toe with the oppressive shroud called the
burkha , and they may not leave the house without being accompanied by
a male family member. They've not been permitted to attend school or be
treated by male doctors, yet women have been banned from practicing
medicine or any profession for that matter.

The lot of males is better if they blindly accept the laws of an
extreme religious theocracy that prescribes strict rules governing all
behavior, from a ban on shaving to what crops may be grown. It is this
last power that has captured the enthusiasm of the Bush White House.

The Taliban fanatics, economically and diplomatically isolated, are at
the breaking point, and so, in return for a pittance of legitimacy and
cash from the Bush Administration, they have been willing to appear to
reverse themselves on the growing of opium. That a totalitarian country
can effectively crack down on its farmers is not surprising. But it is
grotesque for a US official, James P. Callahan, director of the State
Department's Asian anti-drug program, to describe the Taliban's special
methods in the language of representative democracy: "The Taliban used a
system of consensus-building," Callahan said after a visit with the
Taliban, adding that the Taliban justified the ban on drugs "in very
religious terms."

Of course, Callahan also reported, those who didn't obey the
theocratic edict would be sent to prison.

In a country where those who break minor rules are simply beaten on
the spot by religious police and others are stoned to death, it's
understandable that the government's "religious" argument might be
compelling. Even if it means, as Callahan concedes, that most of the
farmers who grew the poppies will now confront starvation. That's because
the Afghan economy has been ruined by the religious extremism of the
Taliban, making the attraction of opium as a previously tolerated quick
cash crop overwhelming.

For that reason, the opium ban will not last unless the United States is
willing to pour far larger amounts of money into underwriting the Afghan
economy.

As the Drug Enforcement Administration's Steven Casteel admitted, "The
bad side of the ban is that it's bringing their country--or certain
regions of their country--to economic ruin." Nor did he hold out much
hope for Afghan farmers growing other crops such as wheat, which require
a vast infrastructure to supply water and fertilizer that no longer
exists in that devastated country. There's little doubt that the Taliban
will turn once again to the easily taxed cash crop of opium in order to
stay in power.

The Taliban may suddenly be the dream regime of our own war drug war
zealots, but in the end this alliance will prove a costly failure. Our
long sad history of signing up dictators in the war on drugs demonstrates
the futility of building a foreign policy on a domestic obsession.

President Bush's first list of nominees to the US Circuit Courts of Appeal, unveiled on May 8, was deceptively conciliatory and seeded with hard-to-oppose minorities and women, stealth conservatives and even a Clinton holdover, Roger Gregory, who has been sitting temporarily on the Fourth Circuit during the stalled appointments process. Gregory, a black lawyer, was a bone tossed to the left, but Bush's list contains enough red-meat conservatives to please his loyal base. Republicans already control eight of the thirteen courts of appeal and could dominate three more if Bush is permitted to fill even some of the current thirty-one vacancies. On the Fourth Circuit, where Republican judges now hold a 7-to-6 majority, and the Fifth, where they maintain a 9-to-5 edge, there are five and three vacancies, respectively.

For the Fourth Circuit, the farthest right of them all, Bush named two judges who should have no problem fitting in. Terrence William Boyle, a federal district judge in North Carolina and former aide to Jesse Helms, is so off the charts that in a recent voting rights case, Hunt v. Cromartie, the Supreme Court slapped him down two times in a row for ruling in favor of white voters trying to weaken black Congressional districts. The other Fourth Circuit nominee, Dennis Shedd, a federal judge in South Carolina, was a top aide to Senator Strom Thurmond. Both men have the support of Jesse Helms, who blocked all Clinton's North Carolina nominees to the Fourth Circuit on the ground that it didn't need any more judges. On the contrary, as a result of Republican obstructionism the federal courts have 100 vacancies and a backlog of 50,000 civil and 48,000 criminal cases at the district level. Now the brakes are off, and the GOP is rushing to pack the Fourth Circuit so it will remain a conservative bastion for years to come.

Two other Bush first-round nominees to the District of Columbia Circuit Court, Miguel Estrada and John Roberts, could shore up the GOP dominance of that body. Estrada is a Honduran immigrant who attended Harvard Law School. At age 39 he'll sit on a circuit with a tradition of promotion to the Supreme Court. Now a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, he has left few footprints on the public record, but he's considered an Antonin Scalia clone. Roberts, a Washington lawyer, represents Toyota in a case challenging the Americans With Disabilities Act.

Among the women on Bush's list, Edith Clement, a federal judge in Louisiana and a member of the conservative Federalist Society, will add little diversity to the conservative Fifth Circuit. Defense lawyers consider her a hanging judge who always sides with prosecutors. And she has a record of "judicial junketeering"--accepting trips from conservative foundations and corporations that purvey a free-market economic philosophy.

For the Sixth Circuit, Bush nominated Jeffrey Sutton, also an active member of the Federalist Society, whose influence permeates the Administration's panel of judge-pickers. Sutton is a leader in the states' rights campaign and successfully argued a recent Supreme Court case that took away the right of disabled workers to sue state governments for discrimination.

The religious right will have a friend on the Tenth Circuit bench if the nomination of Michael McConnell, a University of Chicago-trained professor at the University of Utah College of Law, goes through. McConnell has argued pro-school prayer briefs before the Supreme Court and is antichoice.

The circuit courts are a crucial battleground in the Administration strategy of entrenching conservative policies in this country. As the Rehnquist Court steadily pares its docket--last year it issued only seventy-four signed opinions, compared with 107 in 1991-92--the circuit courts have become mini-Supremes, final arbiters on many important, enduring issues in their districts. Take the Fifth Circuit's drastic restriction of affirmative action in Hopwood v. Texas. The Supreme Court declined review, so that case is now the law in the three states (Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi) that make up the Fifth Circuit. The High Court also let stand the Sixth Circuit's decision in Equality Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, Inc. v. City of Cincinnati, which effectively ignored the Court's holding, in Romer v. Evans, that gays and lesbians may not be excluded from the protection of antidiscrimination laws. Greenville Women's Clinic v. Bryant, in which the Fourth Circuit upheld onerous state licensing requirements--which apply to no other physicians--for abortion providers, still stands.

Much has been made of the need for ideological balance on the Supreme Court, but the argument applies with equal force to the federal circuit courts. Democratic senators should not just play blue-slip politics--vetoing nominees from their state whom they oppose--they should insist on hearings to review the state of the appellate judiciary circuit by circuit. The goal should be an intellectually distinguished bench and, at least, an ideologically balanced one. Nominees should be approved or rejected in this context. Democrats must also demand a full-blown, in-depth examination of each nominee's record (if this is "Borking," make the most of it). Only those candidates should be confirmed who have demonstrated a commitment to protecting the rights of ordinary Americans against powerful institutions, whether government or private, and to our national ideal of civil rights, women's rights and individual liberties; who respect Congress's power to legislate to protect the health and safety of workers, preserve the environment and enforce antitrust law.

Republicans are already crying obstructionism, cynically ignoring their own blockade of centrist Clinton nominees. With the Administration's intentions now on the table, those who will be hurt most by them--minorities, women, working people, the elderly, environmentalists--should launch a missive attack on Senate minority leader Tom Daschle and the nine Judiciary Committee Democrats (who if they stay united have the power to thwart Bush's court-packing scheme) telling them to stand firm. (For information on what you can do, go to www.thenation.com.)

There is probably no punishment more painful to Timothy McVeigh than the great joke just played by the cosmos. In his fantasy life McVeigh has fancied himself a sort of stoic samurai, avenging himself on the FBI for Waco and then committing hara-kiri by halting appeals. In one letter McVeigh referred to his impending execution as a version of "suicide by cop"; he has planned as his last words William Henley's war horse "Invictus": "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul." It's taken another spectacular FBI blunder to puncture McVeigh's grand delusion. Now Attorney General Ashcroft promises that McVeigh will be executed in Terre Haute on June 11 come hell or high water, but don't bet on it. McVeigh's game is to control his story by any means possible, and he may still play the only Invictus card left in his deck by initiating the appeals he previously rejected.

In the weeks leading up to the May 16 execution date, pundits predicted that McVeigh's execution would restore popular confidence in capital punishment. Instead, we have gotten a national teach-in on one of the defining evils of capital trials: the fallibility and corruption of law enforcement. If the FBI can "misplace" a cache of documents in the most notorious death-penalty case since the Rosenbergs, is it any wonder that nearly 100 factually innocent people have ended up on death row in recent years?

While McVeigh's case has in many ways been historically unique, in this respect it is typical. Back-drawer evidence is part of the everyday landscape of capital punishment in America. According to Columbia University professor James Liebman's remarkable study "A Broken System" (available online at justice.policy.net/jpreport), vital suppressed evidence has led to dismissal of one in five capital cases since 1973. (More than half of capital cases, Liebman found, are dismissed or retried for "grave constitutional error.") When it comes to capital punishment, the last-minute "oops" is the norm, not the exception. That so many executions go ahead anyway is only because of the current Supreme Court's cavalier attitude toward evidence discovered after a death sentence is pronounced. Justice Rehnquist complains of the "enormous burden that having to retry cases based on stale evidence" would demand.

Why did President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft delay McVeigh's execution? To "protect the integrity of our system of justice," in Ashcroft's words, which he defined as "a more important duty than any single case." In other words, official malfeasance, undisclosed evidence and public uncertainty all demanded a timeout. Fair enough.

In reality, though, in capital cases "the integrity of the system of justice" is already nonexistent. Just since January, judges in Louisiana, Texas, New York and Massachusetts have ordered the freeing of two innocent death-row inmates and four innocent lifers--their stories full of coerced confessions, doctored documents and suppressed evidence. Consider Ronnie Burrell, released from Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary in January, who came within two weeks of execution in 1996 for a murder he didn't commit. He had been arrested by a small-town sheriff trying to distract attention from his own corruption and was convicted on the purchased testimony of a career con man. All this came out only because his appeal was taken up by a Minnesota corporate lawyer in search of pro bono work who had a family connection to Louisiana.

Unlike Burrell, McVeigh's factual guilt is not in doubt (although the bomber's degree of culpability and mental state could yet form the basis for appeals of his death sentence). If the FBI's suppression of documents in his case, intentional or not, justifies a timeout, what about the rampant errors in dozens of frame-ups like Burrell's? Doesn't the systemic accumulated record of lost evidence, law-enforcement misconduct and outright factual innocence demand a timeout on all executions? In the final irony of the McVeigh case, which so often has managed to pull the system inside out, George W. Bush and John Ashcroft have now offered one of the best arguments yet for a national death-penalty moratorium.

We are, as a nation, about to experience the changing of two guards. First, Ira Glasser, having given a year's notice, is stepping down after nearly a quarter-century as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, "Liberty's Law Firm" as they like to call it. Second, Louis Freeh is leaving the FBI after serving eight years of a ten-year term as director.

There is, of course, a built-in tension between an organization dedicated to protecting and expanding rights, like the ACLU, and an institution like the FBI, too often bent on invading them. Thus when Director Freeh began agitating for the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, providing for the placement of surveillance-friendly equipment in all new telephones, it was Glasser who pointed out that it was like requiring builders to put microphones in buildings to make it easier for the cops to listen in.

Despite occasional differences over this and that, we will miss Ira's energetic and articulate defense of free-speech values, his "First Amendment absolutism," his stewardship of an organization dedicated to eternal verities in a postmodernist culture.

Freeh is a more problematic proposition. He came to the FBI after the bureau's assault in April 1993 on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and he never fully cleared that air. His public laundering of differences with President Clinton and Attorney General Reno during the year of impeachment was troubling--the head of the nation's secret police has too much behind-the-scenes power to play political-manipulation games without dangerous risks to democratic governance. Also troubling was his decision to leave office two years short of a term deliberately calculated to avoid changing FBI directors and Presidents simultaneously, the Congressional desire being to insulate the bureau from partisan politics.

We wish Ira well in his post-ACLU career; we wish his successor, Antonio Romero, good luck in keeping a fractious community coherent without sacrificing First Amendment principle. We also look to the ACLU to help define the qualities and criteria the Administration, Congress and the people should look for in Freeh's successor. J. Edgar Hoover's name and shadow still dominate and darken the FBI. It's only because of organizations like the ACLU that his bureau did not do more damage.

For many indigent defendants, the right to a lawyer doesn't mean much.

The stage is set for a showdown over the fate of undocumented workers.

Let's start in North Side Chicago at the Shan Restaurant, a Pakistani bistro where South Asians like to hang out, among them Ifti Nasim, a 53-year-old Pakistani writer and radical who's also a leading light of Muslim gays, many of them mustered in the international gay Muslim organization Al-Fatiha. Nasim was sitting in the Shan on the night of March 12 when a man at the table called Salman Aftab began verbally hassling him for being "too visible" in his sexual orientation and an "embarrassment" to South Asians. Nasim apparently likes heavy jewelry and presented himself in drag on the cover of his latest book of poems.

Nasim says Aftab told him, "I'm going to stab you up the ass to tell God I'm getting rid of at least one sinner! I want to clean up the planet after your type!" Then, on Nasim's account, Aftab got a knife from the kitchen, yelled out "gandoo," meaning "faggot bottom," declared an Islamic "jihad" against Nasim and gay Muslims and lurched toward the poet. At which point two people in the restaurant restrained Aftab, and Nasim dialed 911.

The first Chicago cops on the scene reportedly told Nasim it looked to them like "an ethnic problem" and declined to take Nasim's complaint. Then police Sgt. Mary Boyle arrived and ordered Aftab to be arrested, charged with simple assault, a misdemeanor.

What bears upon the title of this column is that the Chicago police declined Nasim's request that they hit Aftab with a hate-crimes charge, to the great fury not only of many Chicago gays but of the local chapter of the ACLU. The Al-Fatiha Foundation has been urging gays across the United States to call Cook County State's Attorney Dick Devine to demand that hate-crimes charges be filed against Aftab on the grounds that the assault was motivated by Nasim's sexual orientation and ethnicity. The Chicago Anti-Bashing Network has made the same call, and has prompted the ACLU's Pamela Sumner to write a three-page, single-spaced letter to State's Attorney Devine detailing why she feels he should pursue hate-crimes charges in Nasim's case. Devine has refused to do so.

Now, CABN has done good work in Chicago on such issues as killings and torture by Chicago's cops. When I phoned the group to ask for Sumner's letter, CABN co-founder Andy Thayer told me he was well aware of my opposition to hate-crimes laws and indeed agreed that "the promotion of hate-crimes legislation has generally been a distraction from legal inequalities faced by lesbians and gays"; also that the "Democratic Party in particular has very cynically promoted hate-crimes legislation while conveniently ignoring the Defense of Marriage Act and the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that arguably contributed to the climate requiring hate-crimes laws." After voicing these sentiments, Thayer said he wants Aftab charged with a hate crime because the law is on the Illinois books (as are a lot of unjust laws) and it is a useful way to pressure Devine, who grandstands on his support for such laws.

But the more he talked, eloquently, about astounding cases of police killing (LaTanya Haggerty, shot to death) and police assault (Jeremiah Mearday, face beaten to a pulp) in which the Chicago cops had escaped charges, the more I thought he was making my case for me. Why fool with such laws, with their importing of thought crimes into the statute book, when the issues at hand concern murder, torture or, in Nasim's case, assault? Why is the ACLU's Sumner spending hours on a three-page letter urging hate-crimes charges against Aftab when there are such urgent matters of everyday business as men sitting on death row, put there by confessions elicited by torture?

And finally, why is Al-Fatiha wasting time on hate-crimes issues in Chicago when their Muslim comrades round the world are confronted by forces of intolerance even grimmer than Mayor Daley's Blue Knights? Seven Islamic nations prescribe the death penalty for homosexuality. But on the issue of the death penalty Al-Fatiha's founder and director, Faisal Alam, wrote earlier this year to Bill Dobbs of Queer Watch (the gay justice group that opposes the death penalty and hate-crimes laws) in mealy-mouthed terms, to the effect that "Al-Fatiha continues to maintain a level of discretion when it comes to dealing with what we perceive as 'political matters.'... Al-Fatiha maintains itself as a 'religious organization.'... So this means that we have actively taken a stance NOT to directly get involved with such situations."

Prosecutors are finding that hate-crimes charges sometimes have their uses. Take the case of James Cosner, 31-year-old self-described "revolutionary freedom fighter." On March 9 he took a hammer to a statue of Christopher Columbus in the Santa Cruz, California, city hall, severely damaging the statue while denouncing Columbus as a perpetrator of genocide. The statue is worth $100,000, according to a deputy DA in Santa Cruz.

Cosner is now being charged with vandalism. If convicted he could get up to three years in prison, but the prosecutor has added a hate-crimes enhancement--which could add another three years--from California's penal code.

So here's a fellow who did something that's a crime, with enough destruction to draw a felony charge. But suddenly that's not enough. Now we're into the issue of his motive, namely the avenging of Columbus's destruction of the Arawaks. In other words, he could get an extra three years because of his ideology, not because he made a mess of city property.

Earlier this year Oregon State Senator Gary George, a hazelnut farmer, introduced a bill making it a hate crime to smash a Starbucks window or sabotage a timber company. George told the press his real target was political correctness on hate crimes. "Even the Scriptures tell you not to judge a person's thoughts but their actions." His bill calls for an additional five years in prison for an offender whose crime is motivated by "a hatred of people who subscribe to a set of political beliefs that support capitalism." The bill was intended more to make a political point than as serious legislation. But I could see it romping through the Oregon legislature. This hate-crimes binge is playing with fire.