The program was a flop. No terror leads were obtained. Good riddance.

The United States has ended its requirement men from 25 mostly Muslim countries register with the authorities every year they are in the country. The program has yielded no terror leads, U.S. Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security Asa Hutchinson announced Monday.

A new program will take its place January 6. Officials say it will track individuals instead of groups of people.

Angela Kelley, deputy director for the National Immigration Forum, says the news is a bit of a "break in the clouds of the storm" but we're still "far from a sunny day."

Legal eagle Sam Heldman, still on hiatus from Ignatz, writes in about a new Patriot Act boardgame:

"The Patriot Act Game", a Monopoly-like board game based on education about, and opposition to, the "Patriot Act" -- is available here. I just finished playing it at a friend's house, and it's kind of fun as well as informative. It seems to be pretty soundly researched, based on actual analysis of the Act and, more generally, some history of civil liberties issues.

Here's a sense of how it goes: the currency is "freedom fries," the "homeland security threat level" rises during the course of the game, the players whose game tokens are black or brown or yellow get screwed in comparison to those who have the red, white, or blue tokens -- stuff like that. Even if it doesn't make it into the board game hall of fame, it could be a good gift for the civil libertarians on your holiday gift list.

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Transgenderites are organizing themselves into activists determined to protect their civil rights. They gathered yesterday in Washington for their annual "remembering our dead" ceremony, to commemorate transgender violence victims.

This emerging movement is a marked departure for a little-understood group that has long hovered in the shadows, largely ignored until a few years ago by even the gay rights campaigns.

For the first time, transgender people have a clear agenda: They are no longer going to deny who they are, they said. And they will not be denied their basic civil rights.

There is now a national organization, the National Center for Transgender Equality, headquartered in Washington to assist them.

"Transgender" is an umbrella term to describe people who do not conform to traditional notions of gender identity, appearance and expression. Within the group are heterosexual cross-dressers, men who identify as women, women who believe they really should have been born men. Some simply appear as the other gender; others may take hormones to obtain some of the desired characteristics; still others have surgery.

The organization will be lobbying for "health and social programs and legal protections against discrimination in employment and housing." If you'd like to learn more about transgender issues, visit here. For a list of transgender advocacy groups, go here.

Last April we wrote about the Feds Purchasing Commercial Data to Track Foreign Citizens. The company buying the information is an Atlanta company named ChoicePoint, Inc.

Last week, three Mexican officials were arrested and may be charged with treason for their part in providing the information to ChoicePoint without the approval of the Mexican Government.

Mexican authorities have placed three officials of a data base company under house arrest and are considering charging them with treason for allegedly providing information on 65 million Mexican voters to a U.S. company that resold the information to the U.S. government.

The U.S. sought the list, which reportedly contained addresses, passport numbers and even unlisted phone numbers, to conduct investigations involving Mexican citizens without having to contact Mexican law enforcement.

We haven't covered this until now, but these reports of abuses by Miami police at the recent anti-free trade talk rallies are very disturbing and warrant wider dissemination and discussion. Have at it.

Miami police reneged on their promise to give safe passage to 25 busloads of seniors who attempted to attend Thursday's AFL-CIO rally against the Free
trade Area of the Americas, the leader of a retired union workers group charged Tuesday.

More:

Civil rights groups complained Tuesday that police at last week's trade talks abused protesters - some senior citizens - by arresting them without cause and denying them restrooms, water and phones.

Meanwhile, the national steelworkers union called for a congressional investigation and the removal of Miami police Chief John Timoney over the treatment of its members during the protests, and several groups said they will ssue the city.

And this:

Small, peaceful demonstrations were attacked with extreme force; organisations were infiltrated by undercover officers who used stun guns; buses of union members were prevented from joining permitted marches; people were beaten with batons; activists had guns pointed at their heads at checkpoints.

Police violence outside trade summits is not new; what was striking about Miami was how divorced the security response was from anything resembling an
actual threat. From an activist perspective, the protests were small and obedient, an understandable response to weeks of police intimidation.

Amnesty International is also calling for an investigation .

Patriot Watch discusses the erosion of the Posse Comitatus Act and explains why it's a bad idea.

Back in April Senator John Warner (R-VA), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee indicated he would like to revisit Posse Comitatus....The White House has also weighed in, "The threat of catastrophic terrorism requires a thorough review of the laws permitting the military to act within the United States in order to determine whether domestic preparedness and response efforts would benefit from greater involvement of military personnel and, if so, how."

Military analyst William Arkin criticized the erosion of the Act in an op-ed this week in the LA Times:

It's not that we're heading toward martial law. We're not. But outside the view of most of the public, the government is daily expanding military operations into areas of local government and law enforcement that historically have been off-limits. And it doesn't seem far-fetched to imagine that those charged with assembling "actionable intelligence" will slowly start combining databases of known terrorists with seemingly innocuous lists of contributors to charities or causes, that membership lists for activist organizations will be folded in, that names and personal data of anti-globalization protesters will be run through the "data mine." After all, the mission of Northern Command and other Pentagon agencies is to identify groups and individuals who could potentially pose threats to Defense Department and civilian installations.

Ret. General Tommy Franks weighed in this week as well:

Meanwhile, another military expert, ret. Gen. Tommy Franks, who ran the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, told Cigar Aficionado magazine of his concern that another major terrorist attack on the order of 9/11 could cause citizens to "question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid another mass casualty-producing event."

More excerpts from Franks' interview can be found here.

Patriot Watch will keep us all posted. Our views and explanation of the Act with some good reference links are set out here.

The California Senate today voted to repeal the law allowing undocumented residents to obtain drivers' licenses. The Assembly is expected to vote the same tomorrow.

At least 17 senators who voted for the bill in September voted Monday to repeal it, while six others abstained from voting. The law's prospects collapsed in the face of a threatened initiative to repeal it, and the clout of Schwarzenegger, who called the Legislature into special session to overturn the law within hours of his taking office last week.

Schwarzenegger, who campaigned against the law signed by former Gov. Gray Davis, wants a compromise version that includes more safeguards and background checks on applicants.

We support drivers licenses for undocumented residents. This bill has always been our main point of contention with Gov. Arnold. Hopefully, the compromise version will not just give lip service to the program--but we're skeptical, since we are under the impression that the bill that passed required applicants to pass all driving tests, undergo criminal background checks, be in the process of applying for legal residency and have proof that they were employed and had lived in California for at least 15 months in the last three years. We think that's compromise a plenty and can't figure out what more could be needed.

The city of Chicago has an ordinance that requires contractors with the city to disclose whether they have ever profited from slavery. Among the affidavits filed is one by Lehman Brothers, stating that the founders of the company, three brothers, bought at least one slave and may have owned more individually. The company was founded in Montgomery, Alabama in 1850. Of the 2,000 slavery affidavits filed to date, Lehman Bros. is the first to acknowledge the ties. Such admissions don't jeopardize the contract with the city--only lying on the affidavit will do that.

"I don't think it means that we're the only firm that has that part in our history. It just means that we took it very seriously and we're quick to disclose what we know," said Carole Brown, a senior vice president of the company and chairwoman of the board of the Chicago Transit Authority...."The Lehman Brothers in the 1850s is not the company that it is today," said Brown, who is black.

So, will the disclosure lead to reparations lawsuits?

The disclosure could encourage people to seek reparations from Lehman Brothers, experts said. "All of the efforts of the reparations movement ... have now paid off," Roosevelt University history professor Christopher Reed said.

If there is one civil liberties expert you should be reading regularly, it's Georgetown Law Professor David Cole, who writes a column for the Nation.

In the Dec. 1 issue, check out Syria, U.S. Torture Center, where Cole examines the Maher Arar case.

In the Dec. 8 issue, read Korematsu II, in which Cole explains why the Supreme Court's decision to hear cases involving the Guantanamo detainees may not be the blessing we're expecting.

Then there's Cole's book, Enemy Aliens.

David Cole is the country's great voice for civil liberties today. In this important book he shows how 9/11 has been used to undermine the legal rights of immigrants—and that after them, it will be easy to target American citizens

Update: We didn't realize when we posted this that the Nation articles were by subscription. Here are some a small portion of the articles, we recommend you buy the magazine or pay $.75 a week for the full online version. We are only going to leave the quoted portion up for a day or two as we don't want the Nation to get mad at us. If they ask us to remove the content sooner, we will.

Instapundit weighs in on the same- sex marriage issue and says he's for it. He's getting a bunch of hate mail for his position--envy,perhaps? It began with an op-ed written by David Brooks, in which Brooks says,

Anybody who has several sexual partners in a year is committing spiritual suicide. He or she is ripping the veil from all that is private and delicate in oneself, and pulverizing it in an assembly line of selfish sensations.

Glenn responded,

Actually, I had quite a few years like that before I was married, and I consider it a good thing, though I'm quite happy to be married now and wouldn't have wanted to live that way forever. (But I think that one reason that I'm happily married now is that I did live that way for quite a while first). But I agree with David Brooks that gay marriage is a good thing, and actually strengthens traditional values rather than harming them.

Go read the weird emails Glenn got in response. And then Glenn's final retort.

Talk about non-compassionate conservatism, Bryan Baptiste, the Mayor of Kauai gets our vote today. Kauai is the only Hawaiian county without a homeless shelter. Nonetheless, the Mayor put into action last week a plan to get rid of the island's homeless, many whom are working poor, by evicting them from campsites and throwing them in jail. The Mayor said the homeless weren't motivated enough and he wanted them to have to make important life decisions.

Contact information for Mayor Baptiste ® is here.

The Chicago Tribune has a moving and sad series of reports this week under the heading Tossed Out of America. It investigates how America's post-9/11 treatment of Muslims has shattered lives. [link via Patriot Watch.]

On a related note, there is a push to revise how America is tracking foreign visitors.