Syria's emergency law, in place since the Baath Party took power in 1963, has long been a focus of critics, who say it grants the government license to jail anyone with little pretext.
They need little pretext to invade communities with their gripes, another of which has to do with a deadly church shooting in September in Antioch, also near Nashville, carried out by a black man.
Over the last 10 years Mr. Hogan and Ms. Higgins have become powerful enough to add more incentive to reunions, by booking bands for several festivals within a five-month span, and a little more pretext, by asking those bands to play a single album in proper sequence.
An encounter with the police, who stop pedestrians and motorists on little or no pretext, is most often resolved with an unofficial "fine".
These polished performances keep the laughs coming even when the creaky plot provides little more than pretext for the characters' self-created histrionics.
The rebels intended to dethrone George in favor of the king's fraternal nephew, Demna, who was considered by many to be a legitimate royal heir of his murdered father, David V. Demna's cause was little but a pretext for the nobles, led by the pretender's father-in-law, the amirspasalar ("constable") Ivane Orbeli, to weaken the crown.
In Egypt too, Arab socialism soon became little more than a pretext for dictatorship and reckless policies at home and abroad.
Several Riverkeeper employees and board members said they believed the Wegner issue was little more than a pretext for a power struggle.
Some questioned whether the arrest, just two days before Ms. Brooks was scheduled to appear before a parliamentary committee with Mr. Murdoch and his son James, was little more than a pretext to avoid being eviscerated in public.
"Perhaps it reflects inexperience," he said, "but for Howard Dean to permit a veto over when America can or cannot act becomes only a little more than a pretext for doing nothing.
But when the Russian Army not only ejected the Georgians from South Ossetia but moved further into Georgia, occupied major cities and destroyed infrastructure, the safety of the Ossetians began to look like little more than a pretext.
