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Jesse Jackson says Saddam hanging will make violence worse
NEW YORK — The execution of Saddam Hussein will not make the United States safer and will only increase the violence in Iraq, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said.
“Killing him intensifies the violence, reduces our moral authority in the world,” said Jackson, who has traveled to the Middle East on peace missions. “Today we are not more secure. We’re less secure. We’ve missed a moment to appeal to those in Iraq to break the cycle of violence.”
The deposed Iraqi leader was hanged Dec. 30, three years after being captured. He was buried the following day, and there was no immediate sign of a feared Sunni Muslim uprising in retaliation for the execution, although outside the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Ramadi loyalists marched with Saddam pictures and waved Iraqi flags.
Jackson, who spoke after preaching at the Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem, said Osama bin Laden, not Saddam, was behind the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
“Saddam Hussein didn’t hit us. Bin Laden hit us,” he said. “Iraq didn’t hit us. The Taliban hit us.”
Jackson said the United States was complicit in the trial and execution of Saddam by the Iraqis “because we held him in our custody, and the government in Iraq today is a government subsidized by the U.S.”
“We encouraged his being hung,” Jackson said. “He is now a trophy of a war that had nothing to do with 9/11. The number of deaths are increasing. The violence is expanding. Our moral authority is eroding.”
American deaths in the Iraq war reached the sobering milestone of 3,000 on Dec. 31 even as the Bush administration sought to overhaul its strategy for the unpopular conflict, which shows little sign of abating.
Court restores inmates’ voting rights
SAN FRANCISCO — A state appeals court is restoring the voting rights of about 100,000 local jail inmates across the state who are serving a year or less for felony convictions.
The state said it would not appeal the decision handed down by the 1st District Court of Appeal. The affected inmates were eligible to vote until last year, when the state disenfranchised them.
For three decades, California’s secretary of state had interpreted that the state constitution barred voting by those in state prisons and those on parole.
The appeals court said in its decision that the state wrongly changed the policy last year to include people convicted of felonies but sentenced to a year or less in a local county jail.
The League of Women Voters brought the case on behalf of three San Francisco County jail inmates.
Reid: U.S. seeks good ties with Ecuador
QUITO, Ecuador — Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said that the United States wants to strengthen relations with Ecuador’s leftist President-elect Rafael Correa and respects his intention to not extend the U.S. military’s use of a coastal base.
Reid and a bipartisan delegation of five other senators met for almost an hour with Correa, who takes office on Jan. 15, and expressed a desire to build better bilateral relations.
Asked about Ecuador’s involvement in the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act, a package of trade benefits that Washington offers in exchange for counter-drug cooperation, Reid said President Bush supports an extension.
Congress has renewed the agreement under which products from Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador can enter the North American market until June 2007.
“From my perspective, Ecuador has fulfilled all of the requirements for the extension,” Reid said. “The people of Ecuador should feel comfortable that it will be extended.”
Correa has said he will not sign a free trade agreement with the United States but will seek extended trade preferences under the anti-drug agreement. Trade talks between the U.S. and Ecuador derailed in May, after Ecuador canceled the operating contract of California-based Occidental Petroleum Corp.
He told reporters that he had a cordial meeting with the U.S. politicians, during which he reiterated his pledge to not extend the U.S. military’s use of the Manta air base on the Pacific coast for drug surveillance flights when a treaty expires in 2009.
Defense seeks new trial in FAMU hazing case
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Two Florida A&M University fraternity members are seeking a new trial after their conviction last month on hazing charges involving a Georgia man.
Lawyers for Kappa Alpha Psi brothers Michael Morton, 23, and Jason Harris, 25, filed motions last week objecting to some decisions made by Judge Kathleen Dekker during jury selection and the judge’s definition of “serious bodily injury,” a key element in the crime of felony hazing.
The two were convicted Dec. 15 of hazing Marcus Jones, who was seeking to join the fraternity.
Jones, of Decatur, alleged he was beaten by canes and hit with boxing gloves so hard he temporarily lost some hearing and needed surgery on his buttocks. The fraternity brothers were the first to be tried for felony hazing, put into law in 2005.
Chuck Hobbs, Morton’s attorney, said attorneys for both sides had agreed on a jury of three black people and three white people, but on the day of the trial two black jurors were excused and replaced by white jurors. Attorneys were concerned about the racial makeup of the jury because all of the defendants are black. The victim is also black.
Attorneys for the defendants also objected to Dekker having given jurors a definition for serious bodily injury, a term that isn’t defined in law.
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