This ‘packaged’ democracy

EVER since the military coup of October 1999, we have been hearing a steady drumbeat of “true democracy” which the new regime intended to usher in to replace “sham democracy” hitherto practised by our venal politicians. The main features of the proposed new dispensation have now been unveiled and the people have been asked to offer their comments and suggestions.

After a careful look at the new proposals, one cannot help feeling greatly perturbed because what is on offer is the very antithesis of all norms of democracy, parliamentary or presidential. The amendments proposed make a complete mockery of the country’s frequently ravaged Constitution and would, if implemented, amount to the murder of democracy and its replacement by naked dictatorship.

This pernicious package, though not entirely unexpected from a military government, still dos not fail to shock because it entails a wholesale assault on all democratic norms which would make every civilian institution, from parliament and the prime minister downwards, subservient to the military — a horrifying prospect. The prime minister would be reduced to a puppet.

The post of prime minister has been reduced to a meaningless farce by severely clipping its wings. The appointment and dismissal of the PM will be at the discretion of the president; consequently, he will need to obediently carry out every order and wish of the president. If he doesn’t, charges of corruption and/or maladministration can always be cooked up against him, as has happened so often in the past, at the behest of the president, to kick him out. The dismissed PM may also find himself entangled in several criminal cases on false charges of all kinds of imaginary misconduct in order to disgrace him and destroy his political image.

No self-respecting person of calibre, integrity and independence would want to become prime minister and expose himself to such humiliation.

The office of the president has been strengthened beyond belief. In a parliamentary form of government, the president is only a titular head like the British monarch who is bound by the advice of the council of ministers. His is neither an appellate nor a supervisory authority over the prime minister. However, under the new dispensation, the President will have more powers than even the US president. To list only a few of his vast new powers, these include the hiring and firing of the prime minister and the provincial governors and the dismissing the federal and provincial cabinets and legislatures. The concept of sovereignty of parliament has been demolished and buried. Appointments of service chiefs and chief justices and judges of superior courts will also be made by him. The list is almost endless.

It is most improper and unwise to concentrate so much power and authority in a single person or office, whether elected or unelected, and will inevitably create strong resentment and a fierce backlash. If better sense does not prevail, we may be confronted before long with violent nationwide protests as happened in 1968 leading to Ayub Khan’s downfall.

There really is no room for a military-dominated National Security Council (NSC) in a democratic set-up. However, the rather peculiar justification offered in support of this proposal is that the involvement of the army in political affairs for the past several years is a well-known fact and is even recognized by the politicians themselves. Hence, the NSC will not be a new addition to the political landscape but will merely formalize the role the military establishment has already been playing for a long time.

We all are aware that the army has been actively involved in political affairs of the country for long. However, this is a very unhealthy situation which must, instead of being perpetuated and formalized, be put an end to as early as possible. The disruptive political role played by the ISI in the making or unmaking of governments and political alliances is a very long and sordid story. It has been one of the most important causes of political instability in the country, which in turn creates chaotic conditions conducive to military intervention.

What we need to do, therefore, is to take steps to ensure that there is no military interference in political affairs in the future. There should be no role, formal or informal, for the armed forces in politics; otherwise, no civilian government will be allowed to survive for long, much to the detriment of the country’s political, economic and democratic future.

It is extremely important for the country’s security, and in the overall interest of all segments of our society, that every citizen should feel that he or she has a vital stake in Pakistan’s future and this is possible only under a continuum of democratically elected and fully empowered civilian governments.

There is much talk about ‘checks and balances’ supposedly provided under the proposed amendments. While the innumerable checks placed on the hapless prime minister are extremely severe and stick out like a sore thumb, the president, who has been made all powerful, has no checks to contend with. He will be answerable to no one except, perhaps, almighty Allah. So, where is the much talked about balance? How can such a grossly lop-sided set-up function effectively?

The endemic national problems of widespread corruption and gross abuse of power at various levels have grown to such monstrous proportions that drastic remedial action has become absolutely necessary. The accountability bureau set up by the military government is widely accused of selective justice and its credibility stands tainted. It is important therefore to set up on permanent basis a number of competent, impartial, and broadbased watchdog committees with adequate powers and resources to monitor closely the working of all government departments and agencies within their jurisdiction.

Their job would be to take prompt cognizance of all serious cases of corruption and misuse of official authority and take speedy corrective action if within their own powers or report the matter immediately to higher authorities for appropriate action. In this exercise, all must receive equal treatment, and no sacred cows whatsoever.

There is also need for an apex accountability commission at the federal level (and one each at the provincial level) to perform this difficult task in respect of top functionaries of the federal government — president, prime minister and his cabinet ministers, MNAs, Senators, federal secretaries and equivalent grade civilians, Army generals and equivalent rank officers of the navy and air force.

Each provincial accountability commission will similarly do the needful in respect of the governor, chief minister and his cabinet, chief secretary, provincial secretaries, and heads of various departments.

Since these apex commissions will be required to perform a very difficult and delicate task, they should be made fully autonomous, vested with all necessary powers and provided with adequate human, financial and physical resources to perform their assigned task satisfactorily. Only very distinguished persons of outstanding ability and proven integrity may be appointed to these bodies. Their term of office may be fixed at five years (and not to be extended) and their salary and conditions of service kept similar to those of Supreme Court judges.

The constitution of a country is the basic law of the land and is treated as a sacred document not to be tampered with. The purpose of having a democratic constitution is to run the country in accordance with the rule of law and with the consent of the people, both elements being notably absent in Pakistan. Of course, amendments in the constitution, whenever considered absolutely necessary in the national interest, can be made according to the prescribed procedure. Too many or too frequent amendments in the constitution tend to compromise its credibility and are, therefore, normally avoided.

Our constitution stipulates a federal parliamentary form of government. However, since we have had to endure authoritarian military rule for almost half the years since independence, the ruling dictators invariably put the constitution in abeyance and then, with the cooperation of a pliant judiciary, mangled the constitution cruelly, making several amendments therein, transferring most of the powers from the prime minister to the military dictator-turned president in order to further tighten the military’s strangle-hold on the country.

The Supreme court is supposedly the guardian and protector of the constitution but it has repeatedly failed to come up to the people’s expectations in this regard. This has caused great damage to our democratic ethos and hurt our image in the world community.

Today, we find ourselves once again at the cross roads of destiny but, instead of acting with great prudence, we continue to blunder on with our customary bluster and an irresponsible approach to many critically important issues. Contrary to the views expressed by some sycophantic observers, a wide gulf now exists between the armed forces and civil society and this needs to be bridged as soon as possible for the survival of our federation. The country has experienced four long spells of military rule showing that there is hardly any difference in the quality of governance provided by the civilian and military governments. Why then are civilians deprived of their inherent right of self-governance by frequent resort to military interventions and rule in the name of saving the country?

Our politicians have, of course, often messed up things badly and their constant strife has been a source of great pain and disgust to the nation. Interventions by the armed forces to help calm things down and restore sanity would be appropriate when things begin to get out of hand. However, this must be done without destroying the democratic political structure of the country and capturing power for themselves. The troops must return to the barracks as soon as normality is restored. Such a constructive role would restore people’s trust in the armed forces and ensure a more stable future for the country.

Drug laws: the thin end of the wedge

“It’s moving further towards decriminalization than any other country in the world,” warned Keith Hellawell, the ex-policeman who was the British ‘drugs tsar’ until the Labour government belatedly realized that his job was as ridiculous as his title.

He was responding to British home secretary David Blunkett’s announcement in July that being caught with cannabis will in future be treated no more seriously than illegally possessing other Class ‘C’ controlled drugs like sleeping pills and steroids. He was technically wrong, but in terms of its political impact he was right.

Hellawell was technically wrong because Britain is not leading the parade of European countries which have broken away from the prohibitionist US approach. Even after Blunkett’s changes, Britain will lag behind other European countries like Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal in its laws on recreational drug use. But he was right because Britain is (a) still more or less a great power, and (b) speaks English.

The main engine of the ‘war on drugs’ is the United States, which managed to enshrine its prohibitionist views in international law during the cold war by a series of treaties that make it impossible for national legislatures to legalize the commonly used recreational drugs. All that other countries can do without Washington’s agreement is to decriminalize the possession and use of at least some of the banned drugs.

A number of smaller European countries have already decriminalized various drugs, but what the Portuguese or the Dutch do will never have an impact on the United States. Britain is one of the very few countries whose example will ever be seen as relevant in the country that is the real home of the ‘drug war’. Britain’s decriminalization of cannabis, and even more importantly its partial return to the old policy of prescribing free heroin for addicts on the national health service, could finally open the door to a real debate in the United States.

The actual changes in British law are rather timid. In future British police will generally confiscate cannabis and issue warnings to users, rather than arresting them, but ‘disturb public order’ by blowing cannabis smoke in a policeman’s face and you’re in jail. Moreover, only a small fraction of Britain’s 200,000 heroin users will get free prescriptions. Nevertheless, this is by far the biggest crack that has yet appeared in the prohibitionist dam. Until the late 19th century, all kinds of recreational drugs were legal throughout the western world. Florence Nightingale used opium, Queen Victoria used cannabis, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle writes in a matter-of-fact way about Sherlock Holmes injecting drugs with a syringe.

Then came the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), most powerful in the deeply religious United States, which succeeded in banning one drug after another (mainly on the grounds that they were associated principally with Chinese, blacks and other racially ‘inferior’ groups) until by the early 20th century only the mainstream western drugs, alcohol and tobacco, were still legal in the US.

For almost two decades, in the 1920s and 30s, the WCTU even succeeded in prohibiting alcohol in the US. Organized crime expanded to meet the opportunity created by this newly illegal demand for alcohol — Al Capone was just as much the result of alcohol prohibition as Pablo Escobar in Colombia was of America’s ‘war on drugs’ — but eventually there was a retreat to sanity in the case of alcohol. There will eventually be a return to sanity on ‘drugs’, too, but Britain’s decriminalization of cannabis is only a very tentative first step.

The ‘war on drugs’ is one of the most spectacularly counter-productive activities human beings have ever engaged in. “We have turned the corner on drug addiction,” said President Richard Nixon in 1973, and predictions of imminent victory continue to be issued at frequent intervals, but the quality of the drugs gets better and the street price continues to drop. As any free marketeer should understand, making drugs illegal creates enormous profit margins and huge incentives to expand the market by pyramid selling. When cocaine was still legal, annual global production was ten tons. Now it is seven hundred tons.

Drug prohibition greatly increases the number of users, fills jails with harmless people, channels vast sums into the hands of the wicked people who work to expand the lucrative black market, and causes a huge wave of petty crimes. It is estimated that between half and two-thirds of the muggings and property crimes in both Britain and the US are committed by cocaine and heroin addicts desperate to find the inflated sums needed to satisfy their habit.

Decriminalizing cannabis only nibbles at the fringes of this problem, for cannabis users are overwhelmingly neither addicts nor criminals. The more significant part of Blunkett’s initiative is his willingness to revive the old policy of prescribing heroin to addicts (now around 200,000 in Britain, compared to around 500 when that policy was dropped at Washington’s behest in 1963). He’s only willing to let a small proportion of them have it on prescription for now, but since those will be the only heroin addicts who stay alive and for the most part stay clear of crime, the rest will also be back on prescription sooner or later.

It will be many years yet before mainstream American politicians gain the political courage to take on the prohibitionist lobby directly, but the external environment is changing.

The writer is a London-based journalist .

Uncertainty of economic reform

THE World Bank, under attack in recent times for its failure to adequately help developing countries, has come up with a Country Assistance Strategy (CAS) for Pakistan. And it has released the proposal for public comments after experts spent two years collecting data for it.

It is a road map for the Bank‘s financial assistance to Pakistan during the fiscal years 2003-2005 and on the basis of the official and public response to it, it will choose an assistance strategy from among its three lending scenarios.

The first scenario can provide four hundred million dollars per year as interest-free assistance. The second will be an allocation in the base-case scenario and the last can provide six hundred million dollars a year through the high-case scenario between 2003-2005. In case the high-case lending scenario is chosen, the lending period would start from 2004.

While Pakistan is likely to opt for the “high-case” lending scenario, the World Bank wants Pakistan to stay on track firmly in respect of its economic reforms and good governance to make them effective.

But the Bank has serious doubts about the ability of the government after the October general elections. It fears that the newly elected leaders might not want to follow the same reforms and harsh impact on the masses.

The World Bank believes that some pain for the people now will result in positive gains for them later. But after forty years of such assistance in weighing measures, a total foreign aid package exceeding sixty billion dollars and a heavy debt burden, the people of Pakistan have not experienced the gain they had been promised. And the pain goes on increasing as prices and taxes rise continuously.

On his part, General Musharraf has assured the World Bank and the IMF and other donors that the economic reforms are irreversible and will be sustained at any cost.

But the fact is that the newly elected members of the assemblies will want some real relief for the people from the ever-rising prices, particularly of utilities, and when they try to do that, the World Bank and the IMF may try to turn their back on Pakistan. The Bank says the CAS presents “a realistic assessment of the challenges and major risks the Pakistani economy faces. Most importantly the sustainability of the governments reform programme and the challenge of implementation”.

The Bank also says that in its engagement with Pakistan over the past two and a half years it has been impressed by the country‘s commitment to its reform agenda. Nonetheless the CAS underlies that substantial lending will continue as long as this commitment remains firm.

If economic reforms had been initiated in collaboration with the political parties or their approval secured earlier, the government might not have had to face this uncertainty. But it went ahead since the country had been under a series of sanctions after the 1998 nuclear explosion and after the imposition of military rule in 1999. Reforms became necessary especially since they would bring in much-needed money.

Now the three broader objectives of the CAS are truly acceptable to Pakistan. They include strengthening macroeconomic stability, including a sound debt reduction strategy to restore credit worthiness and reduce reliance on international financial institutions and the government‘s effectiveness. The strategy also seeks to improve the business environment for growth and accelerate human development and equity through support for pro- poor and pro-gender policies. But for the people, what matters more than the strategy, or the objectives, is what these objectives (or the strategy) can deliver to them. If it means higher prices, particularly for utilities, then people will not accept that. Nor can the politicians, who win the October elections, be ready to support such policies.

It was the failure of the World Bank to help the very poor and the unemployed of the developing countries which made Joseph Stiglitz resign as chief economist of the World Bank and become the hero of the anti-globalization movement. In his book Globalization and its discontents, which is making waves, he asked that if globalization was so good then why did it have so many people opposing it. He argues that even in America markets do not function in the perfect manner envisaged through competition. He says to benefit by the gains of the stock market one needs real information and that is available to a select few and they exploit it their own advantage.

Even in Pakistan, in many areas despite the movement towards free markets, there is price fixing in many areas. Oil prices are fixed every fortnight by the oil marketing companies committee.

And there is an official monopoly when it comes to power distribution and fixing of gas prices. Even the polyester staple fibre producers have got together and fixed sixty rupees per kilogramme as their price.

And when you have to pay higher prices for petroleum products as world prices rise we are not the beneficiaries. When raw sugar prices crash the excise duty is to be raised at home on imported sugar to keep prices high.

Clearly, when world prices rise we have to pay more for importing such commodities and when they crash, even then ordinary people get no benefit. This surely is not globalization. The CAS has been prepared in a far more elaborate manner than the CAS for Pakistan in 1995. In addition, there was also a client survey in 2000 as it had been prepared following consultation with the members of civil society in the country including those in the tribal areas and was discussed by the board of the World Bank in June. Officials of the bank visited rural areas in several parts of the country, including Balochistan and the NWFP, and saw the appalling state of the schools there. They came across schools with not only no furniture, but also one or two teachers.

In many of the areas there was an acute shortage of drinking water. The situation is not much better in the Rojhan tribal area of Dera Ghazi Khan in Punjab which is the area of former president Farooq Leghari.

The Bank says that Pakistan is a vibrant society and there is hunger for education especially basic education for girls, a yearning for justice and for maintenance of law and order to curb violence, corruption and abuse of political influence.

But the Bank fears that the elementary education system including the attempt to regulate the schools and the pro-gender equity policies could be upset by the outcome of the October elections.

It however commends the government‘s decision not to complete the Poverty Reduction Strategy paper until after the new government is in office to ensure the political parties endorsement of that paper. The Bank wants economic growth to pick up to the 1980s level of between five and six per cent and for the tax-GDP ratio to rise above thirteen per cent.

But tax collection cannot improve substantially unless economic growth increases significantly. Over-taxing people or having too many taxes in addition to the pervasive corruption in the administrative services will not lead to higher revenue and the corresponding reduced dependence on aid. If our own resources and the aid money are misused, as in the case of the schools visited by the World Bank experts, economic growth will be low with all its negative consequences.

And if the people with their low incomes are forced to pay higher prices for essential services like power, gas and water in addition to constantly rising petroleum product prices, their capacity to pay more tax will be even lower. The World Bank and the IMF should have no illusions, however imperative it is to slash the budget deficit if not eliminate it altogether.

Internet privacy

SUMMERTIME, and the living is anything but easy for many high school students. Instead of lounging in sun-soaked deck chairs, college-bound soon-to-be-seniors are hunching over computer screens, grinding out self-serving essays and padding resumes. Months later, they will be nervously staring at the screen again.

Over the last few years, the Internet has allowed many colleges to shave days off students’ agonizing wait to hear whether a college has accepted or rejected them. It’s a good system, but ham-fisted hacking by Princeton University recently revealed its vulnerability to two troubling trends: the erosion of privacy in the Internet age and increasingly cutthroat competition between universities.

It seems that Princeton University Admissions Director Stephen E. LeMenager used the birth dates and Social Security numbers of several students who had applied to that Ivy League school to break into a restricted Web page that archrival Yale University used to notify students whether it had accepted them to the class of 2006.

LeMenager maintains he was just testing the security of the site. Yeah, right. More likely is that Princeton was staking out the competition. LeMenager nosed around, for instance, to see what Yale had decided on relatively high-profile applicants, including President Bush’s niece, whose acceptance was viewed four times in one afternoon, and the grandson of a famous Notre Dame football coach. Princeton could use such information to determine whether to sic its high-pressure deal-closers on these coveted kids. —The Washington Post

Rewarding the inefficient

WAPDA and the KESC have become synonymous with the woes of citizens. Rising poverty coupled with an increasing electricity tariff has broken the backs of the people of Pakistan. Disregarding the independence of Nepra — in any case merely a myth — the government felt obliged to suspend the latest raise in tariff.

The KESC takes the cake with line losses of more than 40 per cent, an average tariff of 6.7 cents per unit, and frequent power breakdowns. And the irony is, as reported in the newspapers, that the Economic Committees of the Cabinet (ECC) has decided to reward both Wapda and the KESC with Rs. 15 billion each “as part of the subsidy to help remove their losses”. Perish the thought! Rs. 30 billion is little less than one month’s revenue collection by the CBR and amounts to Rs. 214 per capita. Rs. 15b is equal to half the KESC’s income in a year, with expenditure close to Rs. 44b. It is so heavily indebted under the garb of restructuring that interest alone amounts to Rs. 7b per annum.

Not only that, between June 1999 and now loans worth Rs. 59.7b in the case of Wapda and Rs. 94.29b in case of the KESC have been written off.

This recent decision to dole out Rs. 30b in the face of rising deficit does not portend well for our fiscal management. Spending money under pressure on a fundamentally unreformed unrepentant public sector amounts to a heist. The government decision to reward the failure of the two utilities is an act of faith and amounts to fiscal irresponsibility. If the ministry of finance assumes that ever-rising public spending is synonymous with progress and the welfare of the people of this country, then it should be prepared for a shock.

Fiscal irresponsibility hurts in a variety of ways. First, it denies far more important sectors of the economy essential funding requirements. Many schools, colleges, roads, canals or other infrastructure could be built for the amount. Second, it rewards failed or inefficient management. There is a certain risk that the heroic sums of money thrown at these utilities won’t make them better but only encourage them to continue in their errant ways.

As for the fiscal deficit, it too is increasing. In a recent report in this newspaper by Fauzia Mukarram, the budget deficit in fiscal year 2002 has gone up to 7 per cent of GDP, up from 5.3 per cent in 2001, against the initial budget target of 4.9 per cent. She has calculated a net budget deficit of Rs. 235.1 billion.

Another recent report regarding the World Bank’s decision to give a loan of 150 million dollars is disturbing if not outright ominous. The proposed loan is meant to ‘strengthen the accountability and reporting project which supports the government goals to improve public financial management and restore the integrity of state institutions’.

The report goes on to say that the loan is meant to increase the “accuracy, completeness, reliability, and timeliness of intra-year and year-end government financial reports in Pakistan at the national, provincial and district level”. The decision presupposes that there is something amiss. That in itself constitutes a severe indictment of the fiscal management. Besides the track record of World Bank funded projects in Pakistan or elsewhere in the world has not been very shimmering. These additional loans to be repaid by our future generations will only pile up more debt.

That Wapda and the KESC are two specimens of miserable management on a grand scale is to state the obvious. The quantum of these huge dollops corresponds to the period of the present unified management of the two entities and is directly proportionate to the extent of their failure. Whether it is a direct subsidy or a loan write-off or an increase in tariff, a citizen is saddled with the liability. Does it matter to him if he pays a higher tariff or an indirect tax? A taxpayer who is not a party to the flawed decision has to pay either way.

Imagine a citizen living below the poverty line at Rs. 20 per day having to bear the expense of the subsidy without even having any access to electricity. It is claimed that the KESC is being made viable for privatization in a month’s time with the conversion of these debts into government equities. Surely, that sounds like a joke.

Throwing away taxpayers money on these two public sector whit elephants without consulting them (the taxpayers) amounts to a rip-off. No amount of subsidy or conversion of losses into equity could transform these organizations into viable entities or prepare them for privatization. Eleven revisions of tariff for Wapda during the last three years have not caused a dent to the claimed losses of Rs. 55 billion.

In spite of hefty increases in the tariff the authority owes money to PPL, OGDC, two gas companies, and a number of contractors. PPL has served notice on Wapda to pay up or face up the consequences. A report in this newspaper of the chairman’s news conference headlined “Tariff hike not to meet Wapda deficit” only confirms this. Nor will the latest largesse do anything to arrest the trend.

Although Dawn in its editorial welcomed the decision of the ECC saying that payment of a subsidy “saves the domestic consumers from an unbearable increase in the power tariffs and the industries from uneconomic increases in the cost of inputs” and conversion of losses into equity, “attempts to prepare the two losing entities for privatization”, one disagrees with this optimistic assessment. Both these outcomes are highly unlikely. Pouring money into the bottomless pits of the two utilities will only increase the financial misery of the taxpayer and of consumers of electricity.

The Wapda chairman does not tire of claiming accolades for his outstanding performance, but when confronted with failure blames it on somebody else. In an Urdu newspaper of July 20, he blamed the finance minister for the ever-rising tariff of electricity. In another report, he accused the ministry of petroleum for Wapda’s woes for not providing enough gas to its powerhouses. Another time he held Pakistan Petroleum Limited responsible for raising fuel prices, which in turn forced him to raise the electricity tariff.

He has also bemoaned that all his proposals to bring down electricity prices have fallen on deaf ears. One of them was to supply natural gas to Wapda at the rate given to the fertilizer industry because Wapda consumes more than 37 per cent of the total gas of the country. To overcome these self-created problems, Wapda has decided to directly import fuel. Where will it find the money to pay for this? It will eventually fall back to PSO for supplies. Next time it may start manufacturing its own meters. And soon it might become a doddering empire.

The good performance of Wapda in the past four years, as claimed by its top management, and of the KESC in three years, under a unified management is based on repeated unverified assertions. The facts critical to these self-serving claims highlighted in the press have either been ignored or not noticed. Commenting on the latest largesse, the editorial mentioned above notes that the army is managing both the organizations at the moment. “But contrary to the expectations, this experiment too has not yielded the desired results. It is time to put an end to this experiment”.

Wapda has served as a huge laboratory for experimentation of military principles of command and control for over two-and-a-half decades.

One of its former chairmen, while addressing a class at the National Defence College during the 1988-89 session admitted, without remorse or regret at his abject failure, that Rs. 600 million worth of electricity was being stolen in Lahore alone. One hopes he was talking of a year and not a month.

He seemed to imply that by admitting to the NDC intellectuals this daylight robbery, he was absolved of all responsibility. In a civilized country, with checks and balances in place, his admission would have cost him his job.

A good decision

A FEDERAL judge in Washington had no hesitation last week in ordering the Justice Department to reveal the names of almost 1,200 people it jailed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. “Secret arrests are ‘a concept odious to a democratic society,’ and profoundly antithetical to the bedrock values that characterize a free and open one such as ours,” said U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler, quoting an earlier ruling in her own decision.

Lawyers with two dozen human rights and civil liberties groups filed the Freedom of Information Act challenge late last year after the Justice Department rebuffed request after request to say whom it had rounded up and why, and where it had jailed these men and women.

The department insisted — and continues to insist — that secrecy was necessary to keep information from Osama bin Laden and other terrorists still at large. If terrorists don’t know who’s in jail, such logic goes, they can’t know what the government knows about their plans for attacks.

But even if the United States had nabbed Bin Laden himself, the ends don’t justify the means. Americans depend on the transparency of their legal and political institutions to protect what Kessler called America’s “core values of openness, government accountability and the rule of law”. For that reason, “the public’s interest in learning the identity of those arrested and detained is essential to verifying whether the government is operating within the bounds of law.”

Kessler has given the Justice Department 15 days to turn over a list of the people jailed since 9/11. —The Washington Post