On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 09:27:50 -0400, you wrote:

today...

SURVEILLANCE MATTERS Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) (F.R. Page 35631) Closed meeting to discuss surveillance matters. Location: 1155 21st St., NW, 9th Floor Conference Room, Washington, D.C.. 11 a.m. Contact: Jean Webb, 202-418-5100 **CLOSED**

How about this news from China. Looks like Ashcroft has the same process underway here. Maybe it is modelled on our "partner in freedom", China. Papers, please!! http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501030623- 458835,00.html?cnn=yes Asia Hostages of the State A murder that shocked the nation exposes the brutality of China's system of extrajudicial detentions BY SUSAN JAKES / BEIJING CHINA PHOTO/REUTERS Sun Liusong's son, Sun Zhigang, was beaten to death in a detention center in March 2003 Had it ended differently, Sun Zhigang's life might have been a testament to his country's progress. The 27-year-old carpenter's son had worked his way out of a remote village in China's central Hubei province to a university in the provincial capital of Wuhan. He graduated with an arts degree, then later moved to Guangzhou, landing a job as a graphic designer and the chance to make a home in new China's glittering boomtown. But three weeks into his new life, Sun's luck ran out. On his way to an Internet cafi, he was stopped by police and asked for his ID. When Sun said he had left it at home, the police took him to a nearby station. By the next day when his boss and friends showed up with the necessary papers, Sun had been transferred to a detention center for vagrants. Two days later, on March 20, he was dead, the victim of a brutal beating in the center's infirmary. Last week, in a highly secretive trial, a Guangzhou court meted out harsh punishmentsincluding two death sentencesto those deemed to be the culprits in Sun's death. They included a nurse alleged to have ordered other inmates to beat Sun, and the inmates accused of complying. But the major accomplice in Sun's death got off free. The bulk of the blame for Sun's death ought to fall on a little-known system of administrative detentionthat is, detention outside of the criminal justice systemwhereby Chinese citizens can be locked up merely for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Custody and repatriation," as the system is euphemistically called, exists to enforce laws that keep impoverished rural dwellers from overcrowding the country's more prosperous cities. Officially, custody-and- repatriation (C.-and-R.) centers are responsible for detaining vagrants, beggars and those who lack permits to live in cities, and returning them to their hometowns. In reality, say human-rights experts and those who have experienced the system firsthand, it's a terrifyingly arbitrary and routinely abused tool of state power that, at its worst, amounts to little more than a police-enforced kidnapping-and ransom scheme.....