The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

The administration is planning to try detainees before specially constituted military commissions. In a related development, five uni- formed military lawyers assigned to defend Guantanamo prisoners have also filed a brief with the Supreme Court ( www.nytimes.com ). I n their 30-page brief, the lawyers argue that President Bush has created “a legal black hole.” The military brief does not take a position on the issue of denial of habeas corpus to people detained at Guantanamo, but con- tends that if they are put before a tri- bunal as now envisioned, the president will have overstepped his constitution- al authority as commander-in-chief. On Jan. 14 the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights ( www.human rightsfirst.org ), re presenting Amnes- ty International, Human Rights Watch and a broad array of nongovernmental legal and human rights organizations, also filed an amicus brief arguing, among other things, that the Consti- tution does indeed entitle the Guan- tanamo detainees to due process ( http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/ us_law/14077_freiman_proofs. pdf ). A brief on behalf of 175 members of the British Parliament has also been filed with the Supreme Court. Internet Voting Pilot Abruptly Canceled On Feb. 5 the Defense Depart- ment abruptly cancelled plans that would have enabled 100,000 of the estimated six million American voters living abroad to cast their votes online in the 2004 presidential election. The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, or SERVE, is a congressionally-mandated program developed by the DOD’s Federal Voting Assistance Program ( www. fvap.gov ). E xpanded from a success- ful pilot project that involved less than 100 voters in 2000, SERVE was ready to roll with seven states and 50 coun- ties on board and a dedicated Web site ( www.serveusa.gov/public/aca. aspx ). Still under development, SERVE functions in much the same way as e- commerce systems, with layers of security including secure military servers, digital certificates and dual- key encryption schemes. “The department has decided not to use SERVE in the November 2004 elections,” said a DOD spokeswoman ( www.nytimes.com ). “W e made this decision in view of the inability to ensure legitimacy of votes, thereby bringing into doubt the integrity of the elections results.” Two weeks earlier, several mem- bers of an expert panel set up by the Pentagon to review the project had issued a report concluding it should be halted. “There really is no good way to build such a voting system without a radical change in overall architecture of the Internet and the PC, or some unforeseen security breakthrough,” the report’s authors argue. Written by four of the 10 panelists, the report was at first dismissed by the Pentagon as a “minority report.” Five of the six other panel members, polled informally, did not recommend clos- ing. Another outside reviewer termed the report the “professional paranoia of security researchers.” The decision memorandum from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz stated that efforts would continue to find ways to cast ballots electronically for overseas Americans, and that testing and development would continue with SERVE. The Strategic Stakes in Africa Africa’s strategic significance for U.S. foreign policy was highlighted in late January, on the eve of renewed six- party talks in Beijing over North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, by the news that Pyongyang has offered ballistic missile technology to Nigeria ( www.allafrica.com ). Nigeria’s spokesman Onukaba Ojo M A R C H 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 11 C YBERNOTES 50 Years Ago... If Foreign Service officers themselves are inert or indifferent to the practical needs of an effective Foreign Service and especially to their standing with the American community, even the most sympathetic Secretary of State and the most kindly departmental staff will not be able to develop conditions most of us would want to see prevail. — Amb. Robert Murphy (Remarks at the January 1954 AFSA Luncheon), FSJ , March 1954.