Gitmo Chief Prosecutor and Defense Dept General Counsel Resign

In case you missed this -- Maj. Col. Davis resigned as chief prosecutor of the Gitmo tribunals. He recently had this to say to THE NATION about his Department of Defense General Counsel William Haynes.

Think Progress » Top Gitmo lawyer: ‘We can’t have acquittals.’:

DAVIS: "I said to him that if we come up short and there are some acquittals in our cases, it will at least validate the process,” Davis continued. “At which point, [Haynes’s] eyes got wide and he said, ‘Wait a minute, we can’t have acquittals. If we’ve been holding these guys for so long, how can we explain letting them get off? We can’t have acquittals, we’ve got to have convictions."

Today, Haynes announced that he would be returning to the private sector.

GITMO lawyers on Zubaydah's Treatment and Mental State

Washington Post

Yet Zubaydah's mind may be beyond our reach. Regardless of whether he was "insane" to begin with, he has gone through quite an ordeal since his arrest in Pakistan in March 2002. Shuttled through CIA "black sites" around the world, he was subjected to a sustained course of interrogation designed to instill what a CIA training manual euphemistically calls "debility, dependence and dread." Zubaydah's world became freezing rooms alternating with sweltering cells. Screaming noise replaced by endless silence. Blinding light followed by dark, underground chambers. Hours confined in contorted positions. And, as we recently learned, Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding. We do not know what remains of his mind, and we will probably never know what he experienced.

Anti-war veterans' group: War crimes are 'encouraged'

The Raw Story | Anti-war veterans' group: War crimes are 'encouraged':

"The killing of innocent civilians is policy,' said veteran Mike Blake. 'It's unit policy and it's Army policy. It's not official policy, but it's what's happens on the ground everyday. It's what unit commanders individually encourage.'

Veteran Matt Howard concurred: 'These decisions are coming from the top down,' Howard said. 'The tactics that we use, the policies that the military engages, will create situations, create dynamics, create -- ultimately -- atrocity."

Banco del Sur vs IMF showdown sunday, sunday, sunday

* South American Countries Agree to Found Banco Del Sur
By Jeb Blount

Bloomberg - October 8, 2007

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aTCCDSFNqrzY

Seven South American countries agreed to establish
Banco del Sur, a regional development bank championed
by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in an effort to
expand regional trade and growth with their own
resources.

Chavez, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva
and the presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador,
Paraguay and Uruguay will inaugurate the bank on Nov.
3, in Caracas according the "Declaration of Rio de
Janeiro" signed by finance ministry officials of the
seven countries today.

"Banco del Sur is the beginning of a new financial
architecture for the South," said Rodrigo Cabezas,
Venezuela's finance minister, in comments to reporters
in Rio de Janeiro. "Our development won't be put at
the service of other countries." Today's meeting
included officials from Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay,
Uruguay, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela.

Torture and mass killings in Burma

Monk reveals how Burmese security forces tortured protesters

Matthew Weaver
Thursday October 11, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

New evidence emerged today of the torture of monks and other protesters in Burma, as the security forces arrested more prominent anti-government activists.

A recently released monk revealed today that he and hundreds of others were interrogated to provide the names of the ringleaders of the protests.

When they failed to answer they were kicked and beaten, he told Reuters news agency.

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, he said they were packed in so tightly at a makeshift prison at the Technical Institute campus in Rangoon that they could not lie down.

Radiohead Update email

THANK YOU FOR ORDERING IN RAINBOWS. THIS IS AN UPDATE.

YOUR UNIQUE ACTIVATION CODE(S) WILL BE SENT OUT TOMORROW MORNING (UK TIME). THIS WILL TAKE YOU STRAIGHT TO THE DOWNLOAD AREA.

HERE IS SOME INFORMATION ABOUT THE DOWNLOAD:

THE ALBUM WILL COME AS A 48.4MB ZIP FILE CONTAINING 10 X 160KBPS DRM FREE MP3s.

MOST COMPUTERS NOW HAVE ZIP SOFTWARE AS PART OF THE OPERATING SYSTEM; IF YOUR COMPUTER DOES NOT, YOU NEED TO GET WINZIP OR ZIPIT INSTALLED PRIOR.

Protect America Act and Domestic Surveillance

As I speculated on 08/05/2007, the Protect America Act does in fact allow spying on purely domestic calls without a warrant. So from now on, I will be calling it the Spy on Americans Act. Some details from the draft of "Risking Communications Security: Potential Hazards of the “Protect America Act”," authored by Steven M. Bellovin, Columbia University, Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems Susan Landau, Sun Microsystems, Peter G. Neumann, SRI International, Jennifer Rexford, Princeton University:

While most traffic on international links travels to or from a foreign host, a small amount of domestic traffic traverses these links as well. For example, some domestic traffic travels through Canada and then back to the U.S., due to the vagaries of Internet routing11. As such, monitoring the links at the U.S. borders, with the goal of warrantless tapping of international traffic, could lead to unintentional tapping of domestic traffic. Because these links operate at very high speed, it is difficult to analyze the measurement data as they are collected. Furthermore, Internet traffic does not necessarily follow symmetric paths — the traffic from host A to host B does not necessarily traverse the same links as the traffic from B to A —monitoring both ends of a conversation sometimes requires combining data collected from multiple locations, making this type of monitoring
difficult in practice.

And this is with the assumption that NSA is making a good faith effort to not intercept domestic calls. There are other complications as well, I suggest checking out the whole piece linked to above.

Radiohead to Release New Album, "In Rainbows," on the Web

And you can pay whatever you like for it. You just add the download to your basket, go to your basket and then enter whatever price you want. I entered 0.0 just to see what would happen. I then "stood in queue" for a couple of minutes (I assume this is because the site was overloaded when the release date and method of release was first announced). I was then asked to sign in or register. The registration process asks for name, email, address and mobile phone number. I gave a fake everything except email address as that's where the details for download are to be sent. Here is an LA Times article on it. If you want the deluxe box set you have to pay, of course, but it looks like if you just want a download, you can pay 0.00. I received this email:

Order Number WAS4303056
Order Date Sat 6th Oct 2007

Your Name Jimbo Monkeyface
Your Address
Lansing
48912
USA


Description Qty Each Total



Download


1


£ 0.00


£ 0.00

Total Goods Price £ 0.00
Order Total £ 0.00
This transaction will appear on your credit card bill as WASTE PRODUCTS LTD. or a shortened version of this.


Discbox customers.

You goods will be shipped on or before 3rd December 2007 by post.
Information regarding the download (included with the Discbox) as per below.

Download customers.

You will receive a further e-mail on or before the 10th October detailing your username and activation code. The e-mail will also provide the link to the download area.

We value your custom.

Burma's latest

Not sure if you all are following this, but I was floored to see this as a possibility...

BBC
Burma's military leader, Gen Than Shwe, has agreed in principle to meet the detained pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, state media has reported.

In return she must drop her support for international sanctions and abandon her confrontational attitude, it said.

I'm Back

Gone a long time while I tried to get new blogging software, new laptop, and new operating system to work together. Even when I couldn’t post I would still check in all the time, so thanks for your great posts.

Here’s NYTIMES review of Justice Thomas’ new book - in which he reveals who the real bigots in the country are:

He writes that he had grown up fearing the Ku Klux Klan’s lynch mobs but “my worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia, but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.”

Disaster capitalism vs. Capitalist fear

Two pieces worth noting not for the ironic contrast and the thinking together of militarized states and capitalist development - one which claims that 9/11 made possible a union between security needs and new VC enterprises while the other claims China's surveillance technology companies getting cozy w/ Wall St. should be cause for deep concern.

The age of disaster capitalism

An Opportunity for Wall St. in China’s Surveillance Boom

Huntin' armadillos and living to tell

"I can just envision getting in the car, getting bored, going down to the ranch," he says. He also has big plans for making money. "I'll give some speeches, to replenish the ol' coffers," says Mr Bush, who is already estimated to be worth $20m. "I don't know what my dad gets - it's more than 50-75 [thousand dollars a speech], and "Clinton's making a lot of money".

Ed Pilkington in New York
Monday September 3, 2007
The Guardian

Leahy Threat Update

Fred Fielding, the White House Counsel, responded on August 20th with the same old Bush tripe: National Security, Executive Privilege, 9/11, 9/11, 9/11. Will Leahy follow through? Not likely. As of now, he has only committed to suggesting contempt charges before the Senate Judiciary Committee when Congress goes back in session. The best coverage I've seen is from The Jurist, a publication of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

Ignorance is Strength: German Sociologist Arrested for Membership in Terrorist Organization

I'm not clear on all the details yet, but Andrej Holm was arrested on July 31st under § 129a StGB” (German Penal Code, section 7 on ‘Crimes against Public Order’). He is a sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin and does work on cities, which is apparently part of the trouble. That he uses the word 'gentrification' in his work is among the evidence given for his membership in a terrorist organization. Here is a mainstream media piece on it:

Deutsche Welle (in English).

The Latest NYT Apologia for the Sell-Out Dems

From the New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

More later.

Leahy Sets Another Meaningless Deadline

As TPM reports, Patrick Leahy, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has set another deadline for the administration to ignore without consequences. Leahy originally subpoenaed the documents regarding the legal basis of the--now completely legal by act of Congress--warrantless wiretapping programs on June 27th, 2007. August 20th is the new date on which nothing will happen.

09/11/2007 Attempt to Organize a General Strike

It is too bad that the 9.11 truth people are the ones who are starting to organize this. There are, of course, multiple other reasons to go on strike on 09.11.07, some of which are listed on their flyers. But, the site is worth a look anyway.

And there you have it...

This is what happened:

The 227 to 183 House vote capped a high-pressure campaign by the White House to change the nation's wiretap law, in which the administration capitalized on Democrats' fears of being branded weak on terrorism and on a general congressional desire to act on the measure before an August recess.

Here are the details:

The bill would give the National Security Agency the right to collect such communications in the future without a warrant. But it goes further than that: It also would allow the interception and recording of electronic communications involving, at least in part, people "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" without a court's order or oversight.

[snip]

In a sole substantial concession to Democrats, the administration agreed to a provision allowing the legislation to be reconsidered in six months.

[snip]

Under the administration's version of the bill, the director of national intelligence and the attorney general can authorize the surveillance of all communications involving foreign targets. Oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, composed of federal judges whose deliberations are secret, would be limited to examining whether the government's guidelines for targeting overseas suspects are appropriate. The court would not authorize the surveillance.

But, wait, if a significant number of calls from somewhere else are routed through the US, isn't it at least possible that some domestic calls are routed through other countries? If true, can't basically all calls, emails, web-postings, etc. be monitored without a warrant?

Even if this isn't true, we are now entirely dependent on assurances from the executive--and if history shows anything, it shows them to be trustworthy--that the "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" clause will not be abused. But, we don't just have to trust the executive, but two guys in particular: Alberto Gonzales, who can't tell the truth even when he's trying and the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, who, if Democrats are to be believe--a big if, I admit, given their (triumphant?) return to their pre-Iraq blind adherence to "OUR COMMANDER IN CHIEF"--just pulled the rug out from under the Senate Democrats who thought they had a deal, which would have at least given the secret FISA court a role more significant than listening to stories from AG and MM.

When the original warrantless surveillance program was revealed, one FISA judge resigned in protest. Hopefully, there will at least be some symbolic protest here.

Just in case it still matters, here's the 4th Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Reichstag, Oh, I mean Senate passes FISA reform

I wonder if Chertoff's gut feeling and the stepped up Capitol police presence has scared the Senate into capitulation. Ridiculous.

The bill which just passed the Senate requires the administration to "describe" the procedures to the (secret) FISA court:

From Reuters:

Offered by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, no relation to the national intelligence director, the bill would allow the administration to continue the warrantless surveillance but require it to describe to a secret federal court the procedures it uses in targeting foreign suspects.

The Senate defeated, on a 45-43 vote, a Democratic alternative, which would have placed tighter controls on the spying and provided for independent assessments of the attorney general's implementation of the measure.

FISA Court already said this was illegal

Two things to note from today's Washington Post.

1.

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers.

2. Apparently FOX news viewers are allowed to hear classified info so long as it comes from a republican:

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) disclosed elements of the court's decision in remarks Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation. Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.