Three gunmen driving a motorbike shot dead a pro-government tribal leader near his home in Kandahar province of southern Afghanistan Friday morning, officials said.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party nominated him as its candidate for upcoming presidential elections, a senior Fatah official said on Saturday.

A well-known Turkish newspaper announced the recent Constitutional Court decision with the headline “The tŸrban has been cancelled.“ The case reviewed by the Constitutional Court was relevant to two constitutional amendments that have expanded the sphere of liberties. In the end, the amendments were sufficient to lift the headscarf ban at the universities. However the Constitutional Court has cancelled the Constitution itself--and not the tŸrban alone--with its recent decision. To cancel constitutional amendments, it violated the established constitutional rules and standards. The gravity of violation is so visible that the Constitution can no longer be regarded as the main set of rules keeping the political system and order operational and effective.

Founding Authority
The Sovereignty Theory was developed to fortify and justify the right to govern. This theory was subsequently turned into a theory of popular sovereignty. Sovereignty theory was developed to oppose the church’s stance of a divine source of ruling authority. In later times, it was consulted to justify democracy in discussions over whom the core of rule and power belonged to. Under this thesis, there are two types of power and rule: founding authority and established authority. No democratic power or administration is allowed to take any action contrary to these rules.
Second, the principle of separation of powers is highly regarded in Turkey. This principle regulates judicial independence vis-ˆ-vis the legislative and executive branches in parliamentary systems. The founding authority uses its powers in reliance on the principle of separation of powers. Automatically, the judiciary reviews the actions of the executive and legislative branches with reference to laws and constitutional rules; it also enjoys such extensive authorities as checking the popularly-elected administrations and parliaments acting as the representative of the people and holder of the founding authority.

Unlawful Decision
The Constitutional Court is a judicial institution that reviews the laws adopted at Parliament in terms of conformity with the Constitution. The rules of the review held by the court are visibly outlined in the Constitution. The question is whether the court’s authority to review remains in effect when Parliament amends the Constitution. Under the Constitution, Parliament is vested with the power to amend the Constitution, which is a flexible one, based on the classification of the constitutional rules. It can be amended at Parliament by a qualified majority vote. In the event that the required majority is not attained at Parliament, the amendment proposal may be referred to popular referendum by a three-fifths vote.
Within the framework of these rules, Parliament amended article 42 of the Constitution. Article 42 said bans introduced at universities should be based on a law. Article 148 of the Constitution states pretty clearly that the Constitutional Court reviews the constitutional amendments with regard to their form alone. The court’s recent cancellation decision constitutes a clear violation of the Constitution and creation of a new one. As might be recalled, the amendments in the two articles in question were made in relation to the expansion of fundamental rights and freedoms--and not the headscarf. The court cancels these amendments in the absence of the authority to do so. There is only one conclusion we can draw from this: Turkey is being dragged away from the principle of rule of law by the judiciary.

Political Actor
Contrary to the principle of separation of powers, the politicization of the judiciary implies growing influence by the executive branch over the judiciary. There is a bureaucratic issue in Turkey that makes the judiciary a political actor. The bureaucracy--apart from its connotation with red tape--is a notion that refers to the domination of the bureaucrats over the state. Bureaucratization of the judiciary is transformation of the judicial organs into tools to maintain domination over the political administration.
The painful process of change of elites is the primary source of Turkey’s current problem. Turkey is changing its elites. The problem is the change of the ruling elite, not domination of conservatism or distancing from laicism. The ongoing competition between the capitalist elites led by Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen’s Association (T†SúAD) and the new elites was deciphered by the former Swedish ambassador. The class interest of big capital circles favors liberal democracy and maintenance of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) rule. But individually, each member is uneasy with the new capital class represented by the AK Party.
From now on, no development will come as a surprise in Turkey. It is now possible that the AK Party may be closed and the president forced to step down from office. Everything expectable in a state of emergency should be expected and taken as normal now. The judiciary supposed to serve as a mediator and remove tension becomes the source of instability and uncertainty.
The result compatible with Turkey’s political experiences is the striking opposite of this prediction. Things become smooth in Turkey when everything gets messy. The Constitutional Court decision is a grave violation of law; for this reason the AK Party may not be closed down. The court may correct this mistake by acting this way.
Today’s Zaman

A long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al-Qaeda.
According to the “New York Times“, the report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it represented the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Bush and other officials, was the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policy makers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by the available intelligence.

Selective View?
The 170-page report accuses Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.
In a statement accompanying the report, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the intelligence panel, said “the president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al-Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.“
Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, on Thursday called the report a “selective view“ and said that the Bush administration’s public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by foreign intelligence services. Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, called the report a “waste of committee time and resources.“
The presidential campaigns of Senators John McCain and Barack Obama had not responded by Thursday night to requests for comment on the Senate report.

Uncertainties
The report on the prewar statements found that on some important issues, most notably on what was believed to be Iraq’s nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs, the public statements from Bush, Cheney and other senior officials were generally “substantiated“ by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. But it found that the administration officials’ statements usually did not reflect the intelligence agencies’ uncertainties about the evidence or the disputes among them.

Rogue Operation
In a separate report released Wednesday, the intelligence committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings in Rome and Paris between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about rivalries in Iran and what was thought to be an Iranian “hit“ team intending to attack American troops in Afghanistan, the report said.
The report concluded that Stephen J. Hadley, now the national security adviser, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, who was then the deputy defense secretary, “acted within their authorities“ to send the Pentagon officials to Rome. But the report criticized the meetings as ill-advised, and accused Hadley and Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings, which the report portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation.
The report on Iraq on Thursday was especially critical of statements by the president and vice president linking Iraq to Al-Qaeda and raising the possibility that Saddam might supply the terrorist group with unconventional weapons.

Discredited Policymakers
Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report’s findings and suggested that the investigation was a partisan smoke screen to obscure the real story: that the CIA failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policy makers that have since been discredited.
In a detailed minority report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and of cherry picking, namely by refusing to include misleading public statements by top Democrats like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Rockefeller.
The report about the Bush administration’s public statements offers some new details about the intelligence information that was available to policy makers as they built a case for war. For instance, in September 2002 Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the Iraq problem cannot be solved by air strikes alone,“ because Iraqi chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not be penetrated by American bombs.
Two months later, however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities identified by the intelligence agencies “are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried.“