[Mb-civic] Two Trials - Jackson Diehl - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Two Trials

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, July 18, 2005; Page A15

On successive days this month, two democratic dissidents embraced by the 
Bush administration on opposite sides of the world were shoved into the 
same legal twilight zone, a virtual holding tank of menace and 
uncertainty that despots often find useful. Maria Corina Machado of 
Venezuela and Ayman Nour of Egypt were charged with crimes carrying 
heavy prison sentences; court proceedings were begun. But their final 
trial sessions then were left pending, in the case of Machado, or 
postponed for several months, in the case of Nour. That leaves them to 
twist in the wind this summer while their governments -- Hugo Chavez's 
Venezuela and Hosni Mubarak's Egypt -- measure the mettle of President Bush.

<>Bush may be the main reason each of these courageous dissidents faces 
prosecution. For Chavez and Mubarak, and for many Venezuelans and 
Egyptians, Machado and Nour are symbols of U.S. efforts to check the 
dismantling of democracy in Caracas and promote its introduction in 
Cairo. Machado, a 37-year-old single mother who met with Bush at the 
White House in May, is charged with treason because her nonpartisan 
election-monitoring organization accepted $31,000 from the National 
Endowment for Democracy. Nour, a 40-year-old lawyer who recently met 
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is Egypt's leading proponent of a 
secular, liberal democracy and the only serious challenger in a 
presidential election Mubarak called to deflect U.S. demands for reform. 
He's charged with forging the petitions that allowed him to legalize his 
political party.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/17/AR2005071701079.html?nav=hcmodule 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050718/c86802a2/attachment.htm