Pruning Shears

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

Scott Horton on the depressingly cynical logic behind the Guantánamo show trials: “You can count on it that the convening authority will not get around to announcing the actual sentence until sometime after the midterm elections in November.”

WikiLeaks has been harshly criticized in some surprising quarters. Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News, Amnesty International and Reporters with Borders have all weighed in. I’ve read their opinions and respect them, I admire their work and I’m almost always in their corner. I disagree with them on this one, though. WikiLeaks is acting as a check on the government in the way newspapers were originally intended to.

Looks like the site has some more documents almost ready too. I look forward to their release.

We need distributed whistleblower sites like WikiLeaks because of nonsense like this (via).

In southern Alabama back in late May, my PhD student’s ant samples were taken away by a US Fish and Wildlife officer at a publicly accessible state Wildlife Management Area because our project hadn’t been approved by Incident Command (also called the Deepwater Horizon Response Unified Command — which is a joint program of BP and federal agencies, such as the Coast Guard, the Department of the Interior, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, assembled to respond to problems related to the April 20 blowout).

We’ve had similar experiences in south Louisiana, where our research trip was halted after driving more than 150 miles to a study site. On the way to our sampling sites in Grand Isle, LA, were turned away by a sheriff’s deputy blocking the road who said that he was told to allow no one who wasn’t associated with BP or NRDA to pass that point. We’ve also been blocked by the Wisner Trust, one of the largest private land owners of marsh habitat in Louisiana, who in the past allowed LSU researchers access to their property. The lawyer representing the trust indicated that they are coordinating over 700 different people associated with BP and NRDA and that they simply cannot approve access for anyone else.

It is just so wearying to have to point out - in America, in 2010 - that equating Islam with al Qaida makes as much sense as equating Christianity with the KKK. Adam Serwer, responding to Andy McCarthy’s claim that “Islamists (not just terrorists but the whole Islamist movement) mean to change us in very fundamental ways,” writes:

Of course terrorism has changed “us” in very fundamental ways. Between the gutting of due process for terrorism suspects, the endorsement of torture and a massive expansion of the surveillance state, we’ve seen one “defeat for freedom” after another, cheerfully abetted by people like McCarthy who possess a conditional commitment to the rule of law whenever Muslims are involved.

I didn’t expect building a mosque on the former site of a coat factory would end up requiring the president to weigh in; obviously my radar for which wingnut lunacy will take hold is a little off. So maybe International Burn A Qu’ran Day is going to be a big hit; Commenter Cammie Novara pointed to some great reasons to participate!

So Louie Gohmert, where did the previous generation of terror babies go? Wouldn’t our implacable foes in the Mideast have launched this sinister plot back in the days of Ayatollah Khomeini when America was the Great Satan?

In all the crazy there was a really nice moment where Anderson Cooper showed the kind of skepticism towards anonymity that almost never seems to happen in Washington:

COOPER: No, I will take a legitimate former FBI agent who actually offers evidence. If you can present that person, let us know off-camera, we’d be happy to talk to them off-camera. But so far, you have presented nothing.

GOHMERT: I talked to that FBI agent, I promised him I would not reveal his name.

COOPER: Well, that’s convenient…

Google and Verizon demonstrated why net neutrality has been such a hard fight. The funny thing is, there are legitimate issues related to traffic prioritization. For instance, a VOIP phone call like one made over Skype is a lot more sensitive to interruption than, say, a page load. If your call drops enough packets it either becomes frustratingly, unusably latent or just goes away all together. I could see the argument for prioritizing VOIP as a way to give the ordinary user a better experience. (The devil is in the details though - prioritize VOIP and you give others incentive to spoof their traffic to look like VOIP, and how do you sort that out?) That’s not what is happening here though. It’s just a couple of enormous companies telling the rest of us to trust them.

Raw Story: “A federal grand jury has added an additional indictment to a former Blackwater employee involved in the murders of two Afghan civilians in May of 2009”. As the story notes, Blackwater mercenaries were charged with manslaughter in a 2007 Baghdad killing, but a judge dismissed the case. Don’t get your hopes up, in other words. Stories like this may be having an impact in other areas, though.

Glenn Greenwald:

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of our mammoth Surveillance State is that the bulk of its actions are carried out not by shadowy government agencies, but by large private corporations which are beyond the reach of democratic accountability. At this point, perhaps it’s more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity — with a public division and a private one. In every way that matters, the separation between government and corporations is nonexistent, especially (though not only) when it comes to the Surveillance State. Indeed, so extreme is this overlap that when Michael McConnell was nominated to be Bush’s Director of National Intelligence after serving for a decade as Vice President of Booz Allen (prior to which he was head of the NSA under Bush 41 and Clinton), he told The New York Times that his ten years of working “outside the government,” for Booz Allen, would not impede his ability to run the nation’s intelligence functions. That’s because his Booz Allen work was indistinguishable from working for the government, and therefore — as he put it — being at Booz Allen “has allowed me to stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left.”

As the NSA scandal revealed, private telecom giants and other corporations now occupy the central role in carrying out the government’s domestic surveillance and intelligence activities — almost always in the dark, beyond the reach of oversight or the law. As Tim Shorrock explained in his definitive 2007 Salon piece on the relationship between McConnell, Booz Allen, and the intelligence community, in which (to no avail) he urged Senate Democrats to examine these relationships before confirming McConnell as Bush’s DNI: “[Booz Allen’s] website states that the Booz Allen team ‘employs more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel.’ TS/SCI stands for top secret-sensitive compartmentalized intelligence, the highest possible security ratings. This would make Booz Allen one of the largest employers of cleared personnel in the United States.”

Prairie Weather emailed me “Obama, Bush, and the Geneva Conventions” by John B. Bellinger III. A good read.

It’s possible - possible - that Tuesday will provide one of the most important domestic policy achievements of the Obama presidency. James Pethokoukis: “The key date to watch is August 17 when the Treasury Department holds a much-hyped meeting on the future of Fannie and Freddie.” Via.

I admire the way Republicans can channel their outrage very precisely for political gain when a less sophisticated approach might hurt traditional GOP allies. Darrell Issa has the latest work of craftsmanship: “‘Lost in the debate over how best to legislate the aftermath of the financial crisis has been the necessity to conduct an inward examination of the too-cozy relationship between government enterprises and private industry,’ Mr. Issa said.”

Ezra Klein, performing his function: “it seems to me that the importance of Warren’s nomination is being dramatically overblown.” Compare to his repeated claims that the public option was a relatively minor part of the overall health care debate. His function is to characterize Obama policies that rouse the left as wholly acceptable liberal goals, while characterizing progressive aims as unworthy of all the fuss. And he argues it the same way too - it’s not a big deal, so liberals should drop it. As opposed to - it’s not a big deal, so the administration should placate the silly old liberals.

Ted Frier on the late sociologist Eric Hoffer:

He theorized that the fanaticism and self-righteousness at the heart of all mass movements are rooted in self-hatred, self-doubt, and insecurity. His most important insight may have been that all mass movements are essentially the same in terms of the kind of personalities attracted to them and the benefits they confer on committed members.

Therefore, said Hoffer, it is much easier for a fanatical Nazi to become a fanatical Communist even though those two belief systems are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, than for either to become a mainstream liberal. Hitler’s propaganda chief said the same thing.

Geeks are dinosaurs. Ah, my bones are creaking.

I WISH I COULD WRITE LIKE Mary Elizabeth Williams:

On Thursday I spent several hours at Sloan-Kettering, answering questions and filling out forms. I sat in a waiting room full of quietly frantic-looking people watching “Deal or No Deal” and availing themselves of the free coffee. A young woman in lace knee socks, plaid miniskirt, and Led Zeppelin T-shirt typed lazily on her phone. I don’t think her peach fuzz hairstyle was a fashion statement.

Next week, I am going back to have a portion of my scalp removed, and flesh from either my neck or my thigh grafted onto it — we don’t yet know which. Apparently the surgeon likes to wing it, skin graft-wise. I will wake up with a ping pong ball-size permanent bald spot, and a badass scar that I intend to go around telling people I got in Desert Storm. I am going to have lymph nodes removed and biopsied. And then, my new cancer doctor tells me, once we get the results from all that, we can begin my “treatment.”