Pruning Shears

No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Last week I wrote about Jay Rockefeller reminding us of his disdain for civil liberties after he made some good noises on health care. This week Dianne Feinstein shook off recent good publicity and reminded us of her own abysmal record on the subject. Presumably Steny Hoyer is getting ready for his turn.

In the same post last week I mentioned the Pentagon’s use of the Rendon Group, and the next day the issue was put to rest. It’s one of those “glad you fixed it, wish you hadn’t needed to” situations.

CIA says “Lawlessness: It’s not just for use on detainees anymore!”

Scott Horton posted on how the Bush administration wanted to enshrine the Nuremberg Defense in international law as well as domestic:

Two newly-obtained documents show how American diplomats during the Bush administration worked tenaciously to incorporate what is commonly known as the Nuremberg Defense into a new international convention addressing enforced disappearances.“What the OLC memos did on a domestic basis, these documents show American diplomats attempting to do on the international stage,” said Joanne Mariner, an analyst at Human Rights Watch with expertise on the U.S. extraordinary renditions program.

In honor of Steve Benen’s line last week that “Any sentence that starts, ‘Officials must of course live within the law but…’ isn’t going to end well” from here on I’m going to write that any sentence beginning in a sufficiently crazy way as to guarantee a bad ending can be said to have crossed the Benen Threshold. This week’s example:

It’s one thing for a national cable network to feature a Nazi sympathizer as a political analyst,

James Inhofe is evil.

Zachary Roth asks “Did the Abramoff scandal extend into the highest reaches of the Justice Department?” It certainly looks possible. John Ashcroft has other headaches to worry about at the moment though. His former underlings shouldn’t hold their breath waiting for him to come out swinging in their defense. UPDATE: Dday has an inspiring take on what we are seeing play out.

Financial reporting has become nearly fictional. But it’s Google News, Huffington Post, bloggers and Craigslist that are killing newspapers.

Some good news (via). Any break from the Bush administration should be celebrated.

Tristero recommended a boycott of the Kindle, writing “No delivery system that permits a corporation or government to alter - never mind delete! - a purchased text can ever be anything than a civil libertarian’s worse nightmare.” I agree it’s unacceptable for something you’ve purchased to be deleted by the company, but in this case it’s more about the odious nature of digital rights management (DRM) than censorship. Kindle’s books are locked down by DRM - internal security that prevents the files from being copied, shared or otherwise used in any way Amazon deems inappropriate. While it’s ostensibly about protecting intellectual property, in practice it tends more to be about companies putting their customers in walled gardens that prevent them from getting the most out of their content. The music industry has already been through this and decided the battle isn’t worth fighting. Not only does it tend to annoy consumers to have what they bought be so locked down, it causes an uproar when it actually gets enforced. Furthermore, it imposes what turn out to be legacy headaches for the companies themselves, as Microsoft and Yahoo unhappily discovered earlier this year. It’s why I refuse to by DRM’d music on principle. Sure, I could share Dent May’s fabulous album on a P2P network or torrent site now that I’ve downloaded it from Amazon’s very cool DRM-free download store. But do you know what I really want to do with it? I want to burn it to a CD to play on the ancient CD player in my living room, and burn another copy to play in my car, and copy it to my portable MP3 player to listen to at the fitness center, and copy it to my son’s Zune because he loves it as well, and take the CD I’ve burned for my car into work and rip it onto my computer there to listen to with headphones on if I’m in the mood, and….anything else I can think of. That’s why DRM is so objectionable to me - you can’t use what you buy the way you want. When you buy a Kindle, you buy a DRM model, and you take your chances. Sony has launched its own product that allows for both open and DRM’d file formats. If you don’t want to have to trust the maker of your reader, get the Sony and only buy books that don’t have it. DRM sucks, and consumers need to take what (if any) implementation of it is in any product they are considering - and set their expectations accordingly.

Now, if you want to say that the reason companies are doing this is because of the crazy Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and that we need to repeal it, I’ve got your back baby. I think companies use it as a convenient excuse to implement controls on their products that they might not otherwise. The DMCA is bad law, and that is sufficient to justify its repeal, but it also has been used to cover some pretty thoroughly consumer-unfriendly behavior. I’d like to see companies try to get away with some of this stuff without that crutch.

UNPACKING JANE: For the next three weeks I plan to do excerpts from Mayer’s description of the treatment and interrogation of John Walker Lindh. On page 94 she writes how he was held incommunicado - not allowed to meet with lawyers, family, anyone - in the immediate aftermath of his capture.

During this time, Lindh was kept blindfolded, naked, and bound on a stretcher with duct tape, according to a declassified account from a Navy physician. One document quotes the physician saying that the lead military interrogator believed that “sleep deprivation, cold, and hunger” could be applied to make Lindh talk. For days, Lindh was fed only a thousand calories a day and was left cold and sleep-deprived in a pitch-dark shipping container. The physician described Lindh as “disoriented” and “suffering lack of nourishment,” adding that “suicide is a concern.”

Nonetheless, Lindh was interrogated repeatedly. Early on, an unidentified Army interrogator had qualms and evidently asked through his superiors in the chain of command what the rules were regarding extracting a confession from Lindh. His understanding was that he could not collect incriminating information from Lindh that could be used against him in a criminal trial unless Lindh had a lawyer or had waived his rights. But after checking with the admiral in charge, he was told otherwise. The order came straight from the top of the Pentagon. A government document obtained by Lindh’s lawyers shows clearly that the admiral told the interrogator that William Haynes, the General Counsel to the Secretary of Defense, had authorized him to “take the gloves off” and ask anything he wanted.