The Marines and Afghan forces are continuing to patrol and have begun engaging with key leaders in the districts in order to better understand the concerns and needs of Afghans in the area. Once security is established, civil affairs personnel and other non-governmental organizations and agencies will begin establishing programs aimed at building long-term governance and development throughout the Helmand River valley.

One Marine has been killed in action, and several others have been injured or wounded since the operation began. Yesterday, south of Garmsir, one Afghan man began to approach a group of Marines and was warned to stop. He did not stop, despite a series of warning indicators being employed. The man continued to walk toward the Marines at a rapid pace without saying anything to them. A warning shot was fired, and when he still did not stop, a Marine fired a single shot, wounding the man. U.S. Navy corpsmen immediately treated the man, and he was evacuated by MEB forces to Bost hospital in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gah, where he is in stable condition.

Small Wars Journal has a strategic overview of the mission from its commander, Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson.

- Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas), also on Fox, had fulsome praise for Palin, saying that she showed “backbone” by quitting her job, and that the fact that she “drove the left crazy” emphasized what a strong candidate she was.

- Mike Huckabee, who might be/have been a 2012 contender against Palin, said that “what she’s showing is what a lot of us loved about her: Her spunk.” He said that her supporters wouldn’t punish her decision: “They’re going to feel like she was, in essence, hounded from the opportunity to serve.”

- Patrick Ruffini, a Republican media strategist, tweeted: “Is the media / political environment now so bad that it is driving our candidates insane?”

- Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review tweeted: “If she does want to reinvent herself a little, this could be a great sabbatical time.”

On Fox News, Bill Kristol said that “the more he thought about it,” Palin’s decision looked like a “shrewd gamble.” On MSNBC, Pat Buchanan compared Palin to Richard Nixon, who made a political comeback in 1966 by campaigning for Republican candidates.

I’m checking the reaction from pro-Palin sections of the blogosphere, and the general sense is one of bewilderment. From the thread at Conservatives for Palin:

WHAT THE EFF????? Why is she resigning??

we need to pray.

I can see not running for a 2nd term, but resigning? That’s insane. She’s not even a 1-term governor then. And SarahPAC just sent out the email for more donations on Monday.

if you want to, please pray now- for her family, for her, her staff. we need to be behind her.

I AM GONNA THROW UP. WHAT THE F***

But it still doesn’t explain why the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, after promising to crack down on employers who illegally hire immigrants and treat them as slave labor, is going after a company that starts its low-skilled workers at $10 – $12 an hour plus health benefits — far above the legal minimum wage. The government hasn’t even alleged that the company knowingly hired undocumented workers, only that an audit of its records shows that about a third of the workers might not be legal and may have shown fake documents when they were hired.

If the workers can’t now prove legal employment status, they’ll be fired and possibly deported.

Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) encouraged the DHS to be “tough” on employers who hire illegal immigrants. But he seems ill-informed about just who those employers are and what they’re doing.

“If this is a truly conscientious effort to get tough with employers to say the days are over of profiteering with illegal immigrants, that’s fine,” he told Julia Preston of the Times. “But if the fine will be so low that it’s just part of doing business, there’s no deterrent.”

But it turns out American Apparel is not profiteering off illegal immigrants — just the opposite. It seems to be paying a fair and living wage and benefits to whoever comes to work there and can show proof of legal work authorization.

Technically, DHS can go after any employer it wants who may have hired someone with false papers. But targeting a model company providing low-skilled and immigrant workers a chance to earn an honest living wage doesn’t really seem to be the best use of scarce resources.

Young protesters at the April 15 Tea Party in Washington, DC (Photo by: Aaron Wiener)

While South Carolina’s political establishment wrestles with the fate of Gov. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.), Ron Parks has already moved on. He’s one of the organizers of a July 4 Tea Party in Charleston, a rally that will celebrate America and protest the way that President Barack Obama is governing it.

“We had 6,000 people show up at the last Tea Party in Charleston, on April 15, when [Gov.] Sanford spoke,” said Parks, a contractor who lost his job earlier this year and quickly found work as a volunteer with the Tea Party movement. “We’re expecting fewer people this time, but I’d love to have to eat my words.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

With no great fanfare and little national media coverage, the people who organized the April 15 Tea Parties are gearing up for a new day of protests against government spending and higher taxes. Hundreds of rallies will take place, at least one in every state, in public places and in parks rented out for the occasions. Many of the same people are involved. Most of the conservative organizations that aided the last rounds of rallies are on board for the sequel, such as FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity. A proliferation of sites run by those groups and sites run by grassroots activists are pointing curious activists to rallies ranging in size from barbeques to a rally in Dallas that organizer Phillip Dennis promises will be “the biggest Tea Party in the history of Tea Parties.”

In the run-up to the first round of Tea Parties, conservative activists were aided enormously by coverage from Fox News and the endorsements of many Republican stars. Fox News ran dozens of segments about the events, dispatching five of its stars — Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, John Gibson, Glenn Beck, and Neil Cavuto — across the country to cover them live. Newt Gingrich endorsed the events, speaking at a Tea Party in Times Square and dispatching talking points to protesters through his American Solutions organization. Dozens of Republican members of Congress spoke at the events. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele passed up an opportunity to attend a Chicago Tea Party after being denied a speaking slot, but in May he told RNC members that the tide was turning against the Obama administration because “change is being delivered in a tea bag.”

But the collaboration between the official Republican establishment and the Tea Parties has not lasted into June. The RNC has no plans to get involved with any Tea Parties. A spokesman for Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who jaunted around northern California to attend several Tea Parties, said that his holiday plans were private but would probably not include Tea Parties. Gingrich will not attend any of the Tea Parties, although he recorded video messages for events in Birmingham and Nashville “at the request of the respective organizers,” according to spokesman Dan Kotman.

Media coverage has also gotten a little bit more scarce. Coverage on Fox News has largely been limited to interviews with Tea Party organizers on the network’s morning shows. While sources at Fox would not discuss their plans for covering the weekend events, they confirmed that no anchors would be attending and that the attendance and news value of the events looked to be lower than that of the April rallies. Tea Party organizers are counting, instead, on local news coverage and on distributed reporting such as the conservative news site PajamasTV, which hosts an “American Tea Party” show and has asked readers to submit their own videos from their rallies.

“There are legitimate journalistic reasons for why there’s less coverage this time around,” said Seton Motley, a spokesman for the conservative Media Research Center — a group that blasted CNN and MSNBC personalities for joking about the April 15 Tea Parties. “There aren’t as many rallies this time, and there was a novelty last time that isn’t there now. Also, if you’re talking about the networks that made light of the Tea Parties back in April, they might have realized that opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference.”

According to Jenny Beth Martin, a national organizer of Tea Party Patriots, there are advantages to media hype and to media indifference. In April, when Martin helped organize the Atlanta Tea Party, Sean Hannity asked for, and got, a starring role in the event — a decision that brought national coverage and 20,000 people. “But I couldn’t meet many of those people,” said Martin. “This past Saturday, we had an impromptu rally to protest the cap and trade vote. On the fly, organized with Twitter and Facebook. Only 70 people showed up but I got to speak to everyone and get to know them.” Martin did credit the media attention of April with letting the Tea Party organizers “reach an audience we simply wouldn’t have been able to reach on our own.”

The result of all of this: lower expected attendance, with some of the difference made up by a more celebratory atmosphere. On April 15, the largest Tea Party in Texas was the Fort Worth rally featuring Gov. Rick Perry, who drew days of controversy for apparently endorsing the idea of Texas seceding from the union. The July 4 Dallas Tea Party, by contrast, will combine political speeches from columnist Michelle Malkin, Bosnia war hero Scott O’Grady, and local conservative activists with entertainment from ersatz Monkees drummer and singer Mickey Dolenz, a bluegrass Beatles cover band, and a program that lets kids edit themselves into rock videos (”Be a star — no talent required!”).

“We’re using the fireworks and the Monkees and the rest of that to attract people who never though they’d be at a Tea Party,” explained Phillip Dennis. “This is going to be much more of a celebration than a protest. It’s a celebration of the Declaration of Independence, and it’s going to be our own declaration of independence from an irresponsible government.”

Dennis and the Dallas organizers are hoping for a turnout of 50,000 people, and hoping for it despite a ban on politicians speaking from the stage. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had asked to come and to sign copies of his new book, but reeled from the restriction; retired Lt. Col. Oliver North pulled out of the event for the same reason. (DeMint will appear at the event in Charleston, the only Republican senator making such an appearance this weekend.) Without Republican politicians getting involved, Tea Party organizers can speak openly about their plans to replace them. Asked what, if any, the political impact of the April 15 events was, Dennis suggested that it was “getting Sen. Arlen Specter out of the closet as a Democrat.”

“I think of the Tea Party Movement as a play in three acts,” said Michael Patrick Leahy, a Nashville activist who has clashed with other Tea Party organizers, but who is speaking at the Dallas event. “Act one was to protest the socialist statism that we don’t believe in. The second act is happening on Saturday when we celebrate the Constitution that we do believe in. The third act will be taking actions to restore limited government.”

Leahy pointed to the more independent, more attention-getting activists as the most likely way that the Tea Parties will evolve. One example: Phil Valentine, a radio host who has launched GivetheSenateSomeBalls.com, a campaign to supplant the tea bags that activists had been sending to Congress with brightly decorated sports balls, using some scatological humor to encourage the upper house to block Democratic plans.

“The idea for the balls campaign came to me as I was sitting around waiting to go on at a Tea Party event this past Monday,” said Valentine. “People are just beginning to send their balls to their senators.”

Update: Just got a hold of the court documents. Check them out after the jump.

The Justice Department argues that the volume of material it needs to go through in the CIA’s 2004 inspector general report is just too great to meet any pre-August 31 timetable. Not only is the IG report itself 200 pages, that’s just one of 319 documents under review as part of the case.

The ACLU replies that the CIA and the Justice Department have already missed three deadlines for the agreed-upon disclosure, and lawyer Amrit Singh writes that she’s “disturbed by the clear trend emerging in the government’s repeated delays in disclosure of documents critical to a complete understanding of the CIA’s interrogation program.” She says that instead of delaying, Judge Alvin Hellerstein should order the “expediting the reprocessing and release of all CIA documents at issue.”

Update 2: This is a statement from ACLU national security chief Jameel Jaffer:

The CIA has already had more than five months to review the inspector general’s report, and the report is only about two hundred pages long. We’re increasingly troubled that the Obama administration is suppressing documents that would provide more evidence that the CIA’s interrogation program was both ineffective and illegal. President Obama should not allow the CIA to determine whether evidence of its own unlawful conduct should be made available to the public. The public has a right to know what took place in the CIA’s secret prisons and on whose authority.

Here’s the Department of Justice letter:

And here’s the ACLU’s letter in response:

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As David Remes, executive director of Appeal for Justice who represents about a dozen Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo, explained to me earlier today, “If you look at the fine print of the Obama refined definition, you’ll see it’s limited to this litigation,” referring to the habeas cases. In the meantime, Obama has set up a team of people — a detainee policy task force — to study and consider and decide what U.S. detention policy should be going forward. “So it could be different than what DOJ has argued in the habeas cases,” says Remes.

But will it be?

National security and civil liberties experts like Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, and Ken Gude at the Center for American Progress are among the many lawyers urging a far narrower interpretation that would be limited to the right to detain fighters picked up on the battlefield.

Of course, there’s the question of how to define the battlefield.  But Martin and Gude, in the memo they sent to the detainee policy task force, point out one way that seems to make perfect sense: rely on the military’s definition of the scope of its combat operations.

“As two retired JAG officers have explained, when the military is operating with rules of engagement pursuant to the law of war, such circumstance defines the ‘battlefield’ and the extent of combatant detention authority,” they write, citing a paper by Geoffrey S. Corn and Eric Talbot Jensen.

“There’s a clear line,” says Martin. “When the military is authorized to shoot to kill, they have detention authority. But otherwise you have to try them.”

Remes points out that you still have the problem of defining who’s a fighter, an issue which comes up in all the habeas cases. To some extent that will have to rest with the military, and then with whatever proceedings it affords detainees to challenge their detention. (If they’re in the United States or at Guantanamo Bay, of course, detainees also have the right to challenge their detention in federal court.)

These limits still may not satisfy some civil and human rights experts, as Spencer points out. They make a strong argument that the laws of war apply to conflicts between states, not conflicts between a state and a terrorist organization. As Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First, put it to me recently, the Geneva Conventions “presumed that where it’s a non-state armed group you’re fighting against it will be domestic law that applies, because those people are all criminals. Unlike in an international armed conflict, the privilege of belligerency doesn’t apply.”

There may never be a meeting of the minds between the Rona and Martin, or what I’ll call the strict civil libertarians and the pragmatists. But given that the federal courts so far have accepted that the United States is engaged in a “war” of some sort with certain terrorist groups and seem willing to define at least some of those fighters as “enemy combatants” (or whatever the Obama administration is calling them now), it’s hard to imagine that Obama — not one to give up authority easily — will completely walk away from that paradigm in the future.

What seems the more pressing question now is whether the administration will continue to push for the extremely broad view of its war powers that it’s advocated in Guantanamo habeas cases — the same definition that allowed the Bush administration to snatch and indefinitely detain without charge anyone suspected of supporting al-Qaeda or the Taliban anywhere in the world — or if they’ll be willing to restrict their powers to a more logical and limited reading of international law.

Alternatively, will advocates for a whole new system of preventive detention — such as Neal Katyal, now Deputy Solicitor General; Robert Chesney, a law professor at Wake Forest University spending the summer on the Detainee Policy Task Force; Jack Goldsmith at Harvard; and Benjamin Wittes at Brookings — persuade the administration that it needs Congress to pass new legislation to move beyond the laws of war, so that it does have authority to indefinitely detain without charge terror suspects seized anywhere in the world?

I know that’s not what the strict civil libertarians are advocating. But I wonder if, by refusing to recognize the applicability of the laws of war at all, they’re actually (though unintentionally) encouraging a far more radical solution.

The two State Department and USAID officials now in Helmand have been there for two years, so they’re not starting from scratch in terms of understanding the area, which is a necessary trade-off of a so-called civilian surge into Afghanistan. This weekend, another USAID stabilization expert arrives in Helmand, with three more to follow in the coming weeks, and two other USAID employees will accompany Marine maneuver units this weekend. A USAID development adviser is scheduled to arrive on July 7.  By the end of the month there should be 20 new USAID employees in Helmand and Kandahar, though I don’t have a breakdown of who’s going where or doing what.

These U.S. development experts are supplemented by contract and international partners. Between the British, the Danes and the Estonians, there are about 50 diplomatic and development officials in Helmand. USAID programs also employ what I’m told, according to a fact sheet that was emailed to me, are “30 expatriate technical advisors and 500 Afghan technical staff.”

I have no idea if this is a sufficient civilian complement to the Marines’ efforts in Helmand, but I doubt it. The USAID complement still sounds rather spare — there are, what, 4,000 Marines involved in the operation? –  and the diplomatic component is even slimmer. Brig. Gen. Nicholson talks about Marines drinking tea and eating goat, and that’s a diplomatic burden they shouldn’t have to bear alone.

Well, OK, sure. But what good is that if the regime can withstand legitimacy-based challenges through the use of brute force? I asked Parsi if the opposition’s goal was still to overturn the election, given that its legal recourses are few, and if not, what a new goal might be. “The goal at this stage remains” a fair election result, he replied, since the “wiggle room is still extensive” for overturning the election. Contingencies could emerge, compelling an overturn of the results, such as “a large number of senior ayatollahs com[ing] out to criticize the legitimacy of the electoral results” or if the opposition could “get a majority of 86 people on the Assembly of Experts to come out, that can really threaten Khamenei and his institutions.”

Parsi further explained, in response to Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress, that the critical constituency would be conservative clerics who feel threatened by Ahmadinejad’s consolidation of power. In an irony from the perspective of the American debate about Iran — which conflates reformism with secularism — the clerics see Ahmadinejad “as a dangerous element, quite correctly, who tries to undermine the clergy as a whole.” That might compel some of them to resist Ahmadinejad, or to place pressure on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to find some compromise with the opposition.

But if a compromise can’t be found, then the opposition enters a new phase, having to face a choice between accepting Ahmadinejad and moving to a more radical position. “There are people loyal to the system, who don’t want to bring the system down but at the same time believe the system is quite imperfect [and wish to] ensure the system changes through peaceful means,” Parsi said. If they fail, “then we face a significantly more radical movement in Iran, with more bloodshed than we’ve seen.”

The important criterion for American policy right now has to be to reject Ahmadinejad’s attempts at portraying his victory as final. That means no negotiations, which is “creating some problems with the Obama administration, which is so very dedicated to the process of diplomacy,” Parsi said. While the administration has placed the onus for any diplomacy on Iran, if Iran calls the U.S.’s bluff and talks renew, it will send the message that the international community views the opposition’s efforts as futile.

This base of support for Palin — maybe not that large, but very passionate, and very powerful in places like the Iowa Republican Caucuses — isn’t going to abandon her just because the Serious People in the GOP laugh her off in favor of blow-dried flip-flopping pols like Mitt Romney or blandly “electable” figures like Tim Pawlenty. To her supporters, mockery is like nectar.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty and Hugh Hewitt provided some proof of this today:

My first thought was that it tied heavily to her appearance; in liberals’ minds, conservatives are supposed to look like the couple from the painting American Gothic: Dour and joyless, aged, spartan and frail. Political leaders aren’t supposed to be young, really good looking women, full of energy, smiles and winks.

Hugh suggested it tied to the contrast between her lifestyle and her critics: “She is the embodiment of the anti-choice, the opposite of every choice that lefty elites have ever made — as to going back home instead of moving to the west coast, having children, having a child with Downs, staying married to one man the whole time, choosing rural or suburban over urban and living a generally conservative lifestyle, working with her hands… That everything she is is the antithesis of everything that liberal urban elites are, so it’s not just enough to say, ‘I disagree with you,’; she has to be repudiated and crushed.”

The argument that liberals despise Palin because she had a child with Down syndrome probably makes less sense outside of the talk radio sphere than anything else said about her.

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