WARNINGS

Ex-Clinton Staffers Challenge Anti-Terror Policies

APA Bush official takes advice ‘to heart’

Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher and former FBI and CIA chief William Webster challenged administration policies dealing with terrorism suspects last week. Christopher warned that secrecy threatens to lead America down a path to repression.

Christopher’s warnings about the post-Sept. 11 detentions of Middle Eastern, South and Central Asian men “is such great advice and one I take to heart,” commented Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh, the Bush administration’s spokesman at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court’s annual conference in Coronado, Calif., July 16.

In a panel discussion of national security and civil rights, Christopher raised the specter of repression once common in Argentina.

Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh.

Christopher’s comments came during a presentation in which Stanford Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan posed a hypothetical situation in which an Arab student is detained by authorities.

As the Bush administration’s spokesman, Dinh was challenged by Christopher after saying that detainees were being given extensive information on their rights including the right to have lawyers.

“I wonder if you would be willing to make the name (of the man detained) available to the press,” Christopher said.

Dinh replied, “We would not provide a list of persons of interest to us.”

But after Christopher’s loudly applauded warning about “the disappeared,” Dinh said, “That is such great advice and one I take to heart.”

Dinh then told a personal story of coming home from school as a 7-year-old in Vietnam. “My sister said, ‘He’s gone.’ ‘He’ was my father. It was June 1975, and my father was being held in a re-education camp. I cannot stress to you the feeling of pain and fear we went through.

“That is why each and every person taken into custody since 9-11 is given the full panoply of rights, including the right to go to the press,” Dinh continued. “These are not incognito detainees.”

Another panelist, American Civil Liberties Union Director Nadine Stossen, said, “I hope what Mr. Dinh says is true. But it’s not consistent with stories coming out from the detainees. A large number are not represented by lawyers.”

The judges had also received a lesson in the history of repression with graphic descriptions of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

A. Wallace Tashima, a 9th Circuit appellate judge, and Rose Matsui Ochi, vice president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, told of the displacement endured by their own families.

Tashima, who was in the second grade at the time, said his widowed mother lost her home, and after release there were efforts to deport her, which failed.

At the internment camp in Parker, Ariz., “We said the Pledge of Allegiance every day,” Tashima said, adding with a smile, “In those days it didn’t have the phrase, ‘under God.’”

The internment connections are important “because history has a way of repeating itself,” Tashima said. “I hope we tread with more caution.”

— Linda Deutsch, the Associated Press

GLASS CEILING

Minority Women Moving Up, But Obstacles Remain

Women of color in executive-level and managerial positions are receiving promotions and pay raises, but many remain pessimistic about advancement opportunities, according to a new study released last week.

The study — a follow-up to a 1999 report — showed 57 percent of the black, Asian Pacific American and Hispanic women surveyed three years ago were promoted at least once.

The participants’ salaries also increased an average of 40 percent in the three-year period between the surveys.

“There has been genuine progress along a number of parameters,” said Sheila Wellington, president of Catalyst, a New York-based research organization that released the report July 16.

Yet, despite the good news, the survey also found that women of color are now less optimistic about their prospects for advancement. Respondents said that barriers to career progress continue to exist, namely a lack of access to influential people, difficulty acquiring plum assignments and a “concrete” ceiling that prevents upward mobility.

A 1997 report from Catalyst indicated that minority women make up 10 percent of the U.S. workforce of 127 million, yet hold only 5 percent of the total 7.5 million management jobs.

White women make up 86 percent of female managers, while blacks make up just 7 percent, Hispanics 5 percent and APAs 2.5 percent.

In the fall, Catalyst will release a census on the number of women of color who are corporate officers. In 2000, Catalyst found that minority women held just 1.3 percent of these positions.

— Jennifer Friedlin, AP

POLITICS

Maryland Gets First APA Judge

Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening named an APA woman and an openly gay woman to serve as judges to the Baltimore City District Court as a way of “breaking down barriers.”

Jeannie Hong becomes the first APA judge in Maryland history, and Halee Weinstein becomes one of the state’s few openly gay judges.

The appointment of the two former assistant state’s attorneys on Wednesday fills the vacancies created on the city bench by the retirements of Teaette S. Price and John P. Miller.

“The strength of Maryland is its diversity, and with these two appointments we are celebrating that diversity and breaking down barriers,” Glendening said in a prepared statement. “I am confident Ms. Hong and Ms. Weinstein will make Maryland a more fair, just and inclusive [place] to live.”

Hong, 36, a Korean American, heads the Vehicle Analysis Network in the state’s attorney’s office and is the office expert on prosecuting carjacking cases.

Weinstein, 40, assistant division chief at the state’s attorney’s Charging Division, formerly specialized in domestic violence prosecutions.

Weinstein’s domestic partner is Shannon Avery, an assistant attorney general in the Maryland Office of the Attorney General. They have two young children.

Hong is married to Michael Shaw, an attorney, and they have two young children. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, and became a U.S. citizen in October 1977.

— AP

EDUCATION

Demand Rises for Vietnamese Courses

California educators are developing new textbooks in Vietnamese to meet the increase of Vietnamese-language classes in California high schools.

Statewide enrollment in Vietnamese courses has more than doubled in the last five years, school officials say. The demand comes from children of Vietnamese immigrants who may understand their parents’ native language but cannot speak it.

Two high schools in Orange County are starting Vietnamese courses this fall. Westminster High School’s three-year-old program has tripled to serve more than 100 students.

Schools teaching Vietnamese now use the four-book series Vietnamese for Vietnamese Speakers, which was commissioned in 1993 by Nguyet Dinh, a language programs administrator at San Jose’s East Side Union High School District.

As part of the state’s effort to adopt foreign-language textbooks, Dinh has hired Vietnamese scholars to update the texts. The new edition will reflect the more Americanized customs of many Vietnamese families and should be more accessible to students.

— AP