"This was the voice of moderation until 13 Sept, 2025"
by liberal japonicus The Guardian has a piece today about revelations about CIA extraordinary rendition network as revealed by recent court filings in upstate New York. This article (which confusingly has the same picture at the top and so could be confused with the previous one) gives more details while this companion opinion notes how the … Read more
by fiddler
Despite eastern Virginia’s steamy summers, the temperature can drop close to or below freezing at night in late fall, winter and spring. Concrete is not a good insulator against the chill in the ground, or in the air. And in a concrete cell in the brig at the Marine base in Quantico, VA, US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is being forced to go without clothing for hours at a time, including sleeping at night and for inspections.
by Gary Farber
There are many expert reporters on Egypt, obviously, and tons of scholars. But let's start with the excellent generalist on international policy that everyone has, I hope, been reading for many years — and if you haven't you should start last year or whenever — Laura Rozen. Some good news and bad news:
Earlier today, I was on a panel discussing coverage of the Egypt unrest, and someone mentioned that no one had seen it coming.
But that is not the case. Several foreign policy scholars and former officials have been urging the U.S. administration for months to prepare for the end of the Hosni Mubarak era and the instability that would accompany it.
Now that the administration has found itself scrambling the past few days to, first, try to avert a bloodbath in Egypt and more broadly, figure out what to do amid a hugely complicated power transition there with much at stake for the U.S., it's worth noting the people who have been pleading for policy attention on this issue long in advance. Chief among them, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Michele Dunne, a former NSC and State Department Policy Planning official, and the Brookings Institution's Robert Kagan, who co-chair a bipartisan working group on Egypt.
I (and others) wrote about their efforts to get the U.S. policy community to pay attention. See "W.H. pressed on Egypt democracy," from September:
by Gary Farber
ONE WAY TO CONNECT can be this:
This is something we can do:
To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:
The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world
Everything connects:
by Gary Farber
We must talk about the the War Logs of Wikileaks.
The amount of data is staggering. Key stories abound.
Let us start with death.
The Guardian's breakdowns include a breakdown of lethal casualties of the Iraq war. (The New York Times approach is here; we'll get to that.)
America caused this. It's a map of every Iraqi war-related death documented by the Coalition.
Hooray for freedom.
by guest poster Gary Farber.
To bereave a man of life, or by violence to confiscate his estate,
without accusation or trial, would be so gross and notorious an act of
despotism, as must at once convey the alarm of tyranny throughout the
whole kingdom. But confinement of the person, by secretly hurrying him
to gaol, where his sufferings are unknown or forgotten; is a less
public, a less striking, and therefore a more dangerous engine of
arbitrary government. …
— 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 132-133 (1765)
I am not a lawyer; I'm just a guy who has cared passionately about civil liberties and our Constitution all his life, and who has read a lot of court decisions.
I'm quoting Blackstone, above, from a specific court decision, in fact: Hamdi et al. v. Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, et al.
I'm quoting Justice Scalia quoting Blackstone, with whom Justice Stevens joined in dissenting.
Which brings to yesterday's decision, Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
By guest poster Gary Farber.
Prison rape jokes abound every time a heinous trial or crime is in the news.
I don't need to repeat any: you've heard them. Heh, heh, I'm not going to feel sorry for that mass murderer/rapist/con artist/thief, and what's coming to him.
Of course, few of us think we'll ever wind up in jail, let alone prison, and most of us won't.
Prison rape is what happens to The Other.
Which is where the laughing and the righteous vengeance arise: it's not so funny if you imagine yourself, or one of your loved ones, trapped in an injustice system, unjustly thrust into captivity, and subject to brutal sexual and violent abuse.
Last week, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report: Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008-09.
As you imagine, it's not enjoyable reading.
Guest post by Gary Farber. Gary's home blog is Amygdala, and he invites you to read him there.
[Eric Martin: My friend Gary is going to be pitching in for a couple of days as I adjust to the enhanced parenting techniques that my son is submitting me too. And yes, sleep deprivation is torture.]
On December 31, 2009, three provisions of "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001," aka the "PATRIOT Act," sunset and expire.
Bills to reauthorize or amend these three provisions have been moving through the Congressional Judiciary Committees in the past two months.
The three sections are:
This is also known as "the John Doe" provision.
Also known as the section dealing with "national security letters," by which:
The third is:
What are these about, and why should we care?, you ask. As the ACLU explains:
by publius My views of Dick Cheney are hopefully clear by now. So I'm not getting into the immorality of his torture stance. But I don't think that "winning" the torture debate is his actual goal. To me, the goal of his recent charm offensive is simply to kick up enough dirt to force a … Read more
By Lindsay Beyerstein Washington Post reporters Peter Finn, Joby Warrick, and Julie Tate lend credence Dick Cheney's fallacious argument that because Khalid Sheik Mohammed began cooperating with U.S. authorities after he was tortured, torture made him cooperate. The story is based the reminiscences of unnamed intelligence officers who observed Mohammed in 2005 and 2006. They … Read more