Saturday, November 03, 2007

The Pakistani leader, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, declared a state of emergency tonight, suspending the country’s constitution, blacking out all independent television news reports and filling the streets of the capital with hundreds of police and soldiers.

[...]

The emergency declaration was in direct defiance of repeated calls this week from senior American officials — including Secretary of State Condolezza Rice — to not declare an emergency. American officials in Islamabad said they were in the process of preparing a statement but waiting for approval from Ms. Rice, who was on a plane.

A federal judge yesterday issued a rare ruling that ordered Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and more than 10 other prominent current and former government officials to testify on behalf of two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of violating the Espionage Act at their upcoming criminal trial.

[...]

Their testimony has been sought by attorneys for Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, who are accused of conspiring to obtain classified information and pass it to members of the media and the Israeli government.

Attorneys for Rosen and Weissman say Rice and the other officials could help clear them because they provided the former lobbyists with sensitive information similar to what they were charged for, according to Ellis's ruling and lawyers familiar with the case. Prosecutors have been trying to quash the subpoenas during secret hearings and in classified legal briefs, but Ellis wrote that the testimony could help "exculpate the defendants by negating the criminal states of mind the government must prove.''

The Bush administration took a hard line yesterday on US diplomats resisting postings to Iraq, when secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and the US ambassador in Baghdad issued blunt reminders of their duty to serve anywhere in the world.

In an escalating dispute over the first forced deployment of diplomats since the Vietnam war, the ambassador, Ryan Crocker, made the thinly veiled threat that officials who put their own personal safety before the interests of their country were "in the wrong line of business".

Any qualms individuals might have about the war in Iraq were irrelevant, he said, adding: "It is good for all our colleagues to remember that we took an oath to serve our nation worldwide when we joined the foreign service, just as the military swore an oath."

As she boarded a plane for Turkey for a weekend conference, Ms Rice added her weight to the top-down pressure on rank-and-file US diplomats, saying: "We are one foreign service and people need to serve where they are needed."

The row flared up on Wednesday at a meeting between state department officials and their managers at which individual employees likened a tour of Iraq to a "potential death sentence". The department's hierarchy countered that only three foreign service personnel had been killed since the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The confrontation is the culmination of a tense period in the state department since Ms Rice took over at the start of the second Bush administration in January 2005. She vowed to shake up the antiquated bureaucracy and introduce "transformational diplomacy".