I spent all afternoon on this, and finally had to use this page. It required Method 3, resetting the registry and the file permissions, but then it finally worked. Glad to be shut of that.

Except, of course, on the show 24, where they are common. But it’s a bad idea to make public policy and pass laws based on fictional TV shows. ThinkProgress:

One of the right wing’s favorite talking points to defend torture is that it could be useful in a so-called “ticking time bomb” scenario. In 2005, for example, a “senior administration official” said President Bush’s signing statement waiving a torture ban was justified because a ”ticking time bomb” could necessitate the need for torture. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently endorsed “smacking someone in the face” if he were hiding “the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles.”

But in a House Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) asked three jurists who have extensively studied interrogations if they have ever heard of such a scenario. As Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) put it, they responded with “radio silence“:

Marjorie Cohn, President, National Lawyer’s Guild: I know of one. It’s on the show 24. And that’s the only one I know of.

Phillippe Sands, University College, London: I know none other, and I’ve never seen the show 24, so I don’t even know of that one.

David Luban, Georgetown University: I have been trying to chase down true ticking time bomb cases for a couple of years. There have been a couple that have been alleged to be ticking time bomb cases. They turned out not to be true.

Watch it:

Luban said that even a “poster child” ticking bomb scenario was bogus. He described a situation where an al Qaeda member was tortured in the Phillippines, eventually confessing about a plot on U.S. airliners and the pope. But Luban said the detainee “broke” under the threat of being turned over to another country — not after torture. “When you have torture as your A option, you don’t look at your B option,” he noted.

Even torture proponents can’t think of a scenario. One of the lawyers in the hearing, David Rivkin, a former Reagan Justice Department official, defended the administration throughout the hearing. But even he couldn’t think of a scenario, saying, “I personally do not have complete proof” of a particular instance.

Queenie Wong of McClatchy Washington Bureau reports:

Americans rank last in a new National Geographic-sponsored survey released Wednesday that compares environmental consumption habits in 14 countries.

Americans were least likely to choose the greener option in three out of four categories — housing, transportation and consumer goods_ according to the assessment. In the fourth category, food, Americans ranked ahead of Japanese consumers, who eat more meat and seafood.

The rankings, called “Greendex,” are the first to compare the lifestyles and behaviors of consumers in multiple countries, according to the National Geographic Society.

It plans to conduct the 100-plus question survey annually and considers trends more important than yearly scores, said Terry Garcia, executive vice president of National Geographic’s mission programs.

“This is not just a one-time snapshot,” Garcia said. “Some of the most important information may yet be revealed.”

India and Brazil tied for the highest score — 60 points out of a hundred. U.S. consumers scored 44.9.

In between, China scored 56.1, Mexico 54.2, Hungary 53.2, Russia 52.4, Great Britain 50.2, Germany 50.2, Australia 50.2, Spain 50, Japan 49.1, France 48.7 and Canada 48.5.

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Last july I had a post on how the UK was going to classify drugs by their harm potential. The current classifications, there as here, were not based on any sensible rationale but simply reflected various legislative attitudes at different times.

Apparently that initiative succeeded, but now it’s being rolled back despite the recommendations of a panel of experts appointed by Gordon Brown. Here’s the story. A couple of extracts:

The home secretary said she wanted to reverse Tony Blair’s 2004 downgrading of the drug because of “uncertainty” over its impact on mental health.

The move from class C means the maximum prison sentence for possessing cannabis rises from two years to five years.

Her statement to MPs came despite the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs’ review - commissioned by Gordon Brown - saying it should stay class C. …

Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Chris Huhne said that, as its advice had been disregarded, ministers should disband the advisory council of experts and replace it with an advisory council of “tabloid newspaper editors”.

Labour MP Chris Mullin, who was chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee when it recommended that cannabis was downgraded to class C, said: “The government should follow the advice of the experts rather than that of the tabloids.”

Amazing article by Radley Balko in Reason Magazine:

About a month ago I got a call from a reporter for the Arkansas Times inquiring about my research into paramilitary drug raids. He’d been reporting on a raid in North Little Rock involving a 40-year-old man named Tracy Ingle. When he told me the story over the phone, I was floored, even given all the abuses and mistakes I’ve reported and read about over the last few years. What makes the case especially egregious is not that the police may have gotten the wrong home, that they shot a man, or that they were covering it up or going silent. We’ve seen all that before. What’s mind-blowing about this one is that they’ve continued abusing the poor guy, even after it should have been clear for some time now that they made a mistake.

From the outset, it should be noted that Tracy Ingle has had some trouble with the law in the past, though nothing violent, and nothing drug-related. He has had a couple of DWI’s, and a citation for failing to appear in court. He apparently also agreed to do some repair work on a friend’s car that later turned out to be stolen.

That said, what’s happened to him over the last few months is pretty outrageous.

Here’s the Arkansas Times piece, which I’d encourage you to read in full. And here’s a follow-up interview with North Little Rock Police Chief Danny Bradley about SWAT tactics.

I’ve since spoken again to the reporter and to Tracy Ingle’s sister, Tiffney Forrester, who herself is a former sheriff’s deputy. I’ve also had a chance to review the warrants and return sheets (pdf).

The North Little Rock Police Department wouldn’t discuss the case with me.

Here’s a quick rundown:

• On January 7, 2008 a paramilitary police unit in North Little Rock, Arkansas conducted a drug raid on Tracy Ingle’s home. Ingle says he had fallen asleep for several hours, and was asleep when the raid happened. He awoke when the police took a battering ram to his door. Another team of officers approached form the outside of the house, and shattered the window to his bedroom.

• When he awoke, Ingle says he thought his home was being invaded by armed robbers. He reached for a broken gun, a pretty clear indication that he had no intention of killing anyone, but rather was trying to scare away the intruders. When he grabbed the gun, an officer inside the house fired his weapon. The bullet hit Ingle just above the knee, shattered his thigh bone, and nearly severed his lower leg. When the outside officers heard the shot, they opened up on Ingle, hitting him four more times. According to Ingle’s sister, one bullet still rests just above Ingle’s heart, and can’t be removed.

• Ingle was taken to the hospital, and spent a week-and-a-half in intensive care. He was then removed from intensive care—still in his hospital pajamas—and taken to the North Little Rock police department, where he was questioned for five hours. He was not told he was suspected of a crime, and his family wasn’t allowed to speak with him. After the interrogation, he was arrested and transferred to the county jail.

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It’s clear that under Bush the Executive Branch went out of control—and the lack of control was designed and engineered by the GOP, which likes an authoritarian government, by all signs. Ryan Singel has an interesting article in Wired about how one of those extensions of power is playing out. It begins:

The Internet Archive, a project to create a digital library of the web for posterity, successfully fought a secret government Patriot Act order for records about one of its patrons and won the right to make the order public, civil liberties groups announced Wednesday morning.

On November 26, 2007, the FBI served a controversial National Security Letter (.pdf) on the Internet Archive’s founder Brewster Kahle, asking for records about one of the library’s registered users, asking for the user’s name, address and activity on the site.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive’s lawyers, fought the NSL, challenging its constitutionality in a December 14 complaint (.pdf) to a federal court in San Francisco. The FBI agreed on April 21 to withdraw the letter and unseal the court case, making some of the documents available to the public.

The Patriot Act greatly expanded the reach of NSLs, which are subpoenas for documents such as billing records and telephone records that the FBI can issue in terrorism investigations without a judge’s approval. Nearly all NSLs come with gag orders forbidding the recipient from ever speaking of the subpoena, except to a lawyer.

Brewster Kahle called the gag order “horrendous,” saying he couldn’t talk about the case with his board members, wife or staff, but said that his stand was part of a time-honored tradition of librarians protecting the rights of their patrons.

“This is an unqualified success that will help other recipients understand that you can push back on these,” Kahle said in a conference call with reporters Wednesday morning.

Though FBI guidelines on using NSLs warned of overusing them, two Congressionally ordered audits revealed that the FBI had issued hundreds of illegal requests for student health records, telephone records and credit reports. The reports also found that the FBI had issued hundreds of thousands of NSLs since 2001, but failed to track their use. In a letter to Congress last week, the FBI admitted it can only estimate how many NSLs it has issued.

Continue reading.

This post recounts some odd and intriguing happenings in Houston, beginning with the murder of a CIA agent. The post begins:

“…the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil…therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds they more easily fall a victim to a big lie than to a little one…” - Adolph Hitler

Don Clark’s Big Lie About Roland Carnaby

I’ll try to make this brief. Being modern Americans, both you and I have short attention spans. That’s how stories like the following get memory holed. We don’t pay attention.

On April 29, 2008, Roland Carnaby was shot down in the street by the Houston Police Department. The capital crime he committed was running from the cops after a traffic stop.

When stopped the first time, it’s claimed that Carnaby produced ID identifying him as a CIA agent. The offficer was told by his superiors that the ID was fake. The officer was also told to find a reason to arrest Carnaby. This brings up question number one: if the ID was fake, why did the cops need to find a reason to arrest him? Impersonating a federal official is already a crime.

At this point Carnaby, a man with a stellar reputation (he was president of the Houston chapter of the Association of Intelligence Officers), drove away from the traffic stop and attempted to call his contacts in the Houston Police Department and the FBI. Having no luck with that, he kept driving while the cops chased him through Houston.

Apparently Carnaby’s vehicle was disabled by the police in some manner or another or he just stopped. This point’s a little unclear. What is clear is that the police were enraged and attempted to smash the front passenger window after the vehicle stopped. Carnaby was shot in the back while exiting the vehicle and then shot again in the chest by another officer. He was put in handcuffs and left on the road to die.

Do I still have your attention? Good. This is where you need it. …

Continue reading.

Get ready.

ThinkProgress has this post:

On April 9, ABC News reported that in 2002, President Bush’s most senior advisers approved the use of harsh interrogation tactics. Days later, Bush confirmed to ABC he “approved” of the tactics. Since the ABC report, the media have largely ignored the story. Morever, it took 14 days for a reporter to raise the issue in a White House press briefing.

During an interview this morning on NPR, former Vice President Al Gore criticized Bush for approving the techniques, calling it “obscene,” adding that his use of signing statements is “a raw assertion of authority outside the boundaries of the law”:

GORE: Ultimately the guarantor of our freedoms are the people. And these kinds of outrages, a president saying that he has the right turn George Washington’s 200-plus year prohibition against torture and torture anyone he wants with his assistants gathering in the basement of the White House — according to recent revelations — personally reviewing the kinds of torture techniques being used prisoner by prisoner, its obscene.

Listen here.

Highlighting Bush’s “arrogation of authority,” Gore also noted that the Bush administration has “refused to comply with the Supreme Court decision” requiring it to regulate “global warming pollution” under the Clean Air Act.

While Gore called Bush’s abuses of power “outrages,” the media does not seem to be as concerned. However, the House Judiciary Committee provided a bright spot today, voting to subpoena David Addington, Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, to compel him to testify about the administration’s interrogation programs.

Transcript:

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Is there a smoking gun on how the US tortures its prisoners if people refuse to look at the smoking gun? Errol Morris writes in the Huffington Post:

Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! A soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account?

– William Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.i.45

It is now four years since the Abu Ghraib photographs were placed before the world by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and by Dan Rather in 60 Minutes II. The military and the administration did everything to prevent their release. Calls from the White House, calls from the Pentagon, the whole nine yards. Mary Mapes who produced the story for 60 Minutes II, talked about the endless pressure that came from the government not to run the story. At one point Dan told me, “Just walk away. Walk away. God damn them.” He was enraged. The photographs were eventually published - despite the hesitancy of bigwigs at CBS.

The photographs inaugurated a storm of international protest. In America hand wringing and regret quickly devolved into buck-passing and finger pointing. The President commented, “This is the worst day of my Presidency.” But quickly, the story changed. We were told that the photographs depicted the actions of “a few bad apples.” Both the left and the right agreed, the bad apples were bad, really bad, and although the reasons for this were disputed, everyone could agree the pictures were beyond the pale.

Ironically, the abuse photographs helped George W. Bush win the 2004 election. When the photographs came out, Bush said that it was the worst day of his presidency. That was doubtlessly true, but on the other hand, the photographs opened up an opportunity. He had an excuse. To the questions: why is the war going badly? Why is the insurgency growing? Why does the Arab world hate us? He had an answer. Because of these soldiers, because of the bad apples. They betrayed us. They stabbed America in the back. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. The insurgency had been growing by leaps and bounds before the first photographs at Abu Ghraib were taken. The war had gone south from the very beginning.

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Like “eat less, exercise more,” many “secrets” are common knowledge, but just hard to do—not hard to do for a day or two, or even a week, but hard to do year after year, which involves a change in oneself: a realignment of desire and habit and expectation that many people fail to address successfully.

The same with corporations, as James Surowiecki reports in the New Yorker:

In the current atmosphere of economic tumult, the announcement that Toyota sold a hundred and sixty thousand more cars than General Motors in the first three months of this year might seem like a minor news item. But it may very well signal the end of one of the most remarkable runs in business history. For seventy-seven years, in good times and bad, G.M. has sold more cars annually than any other company in the world. But Toyota has long been the auto industry’s most profitable and innovative firm. And this year it appears likely to become, finally, the industry’s sales leader, too.

Calling Toyota an innovative company may, at first glance, seem a bit odd. Its vehicles are more liked than loved, and it is often attacked for being better at imitation than at invention. Fortune, which typically praises the company effusively, has labelled it “stodgy and bureaucratic.” But if Toyota doesn’t look like an innovative company it’s only because our definition of innovation—cool new products and technological breakthroughs, by Steve Jobs-like visionaries—is far too narrow. Toyota’s innovations, by contrast, have focussed on process rather than on product, on the factory floor rather than on the showroom. That has made those innovations hard to see. But it hasn’t made them any less powerful.

At the core of the company’s success is

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Like the “Do Not Call” list, which seems to have drastically reduced the telemarketing calls—and provided us the magic phrase to interrupt the introductory spiel: “Please remove me from your call list”—the “Do Not Mail” list will free us from unwanted junk mail. Those who send junk mail are, of course, fighting this initiative tooth and nail, challenging Congress with the question: “Who do you work for? The people, or the lobbyists who give you tons of money?”

But the implementation of a “Do Not Mail” list is tricky: your phone number is one thing—you either keep it or it goes inactive for a period. But your mailing address, if you move, is immediately used by someone else.

Read the full story.

At one time, it was thought that no news is good news, but now not so. We have entered a Zen of news, where those who gather their news from large corporate TV news programs must determine what is not being reported, which is the real news. For example:

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon’s illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated US law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers — most of them with financial ties to war contractors — into the TV networks as “message surrogates” for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences.

News of the Pentagon’s online posting of the documents came from Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, who notes that NSNS provided the New York Times “limited information about a military office early in the reporting process.”

Here is the official Pentagon website with the 8,000 pages of documents, the most interesting and revealing of them previously secret and only available to the Pentagon and the New York Times:

http://www.dod.mil/pubs/foi/milanalysts/

More than two weeks after the New York Times reported on the Penatgon’s military analyst program to sell controversial policies such as the invasion of Iraq, the broadcast television news outlets implicated in the program are hoping to tough out the scandal by refusing to report it. Recently Media Matters of America (MMA) reported that, according to a search of the Nexis database, “the three major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — have still not mentioned the report at all.”

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Bruce Scheier has an interesting post on how the pendulum of NSA swings between improving commercial security and breaking commercial security. The post begins:

On April 27, 2007, Estonia was attacked in cyberspace. Following a diplomatic incident with Russia about the relocation of a Soviet World War II memorial, the networks of many Estonian organizations, including the Estonian parliament, banks, ministries, newspapers and broadcasters, were attacked and — in many cases — shut down. Estonia was quick to blame Russia, which was equally quick to deny any involvement.

It was hyped as the first cyberwar: Russia attacking Estonia in cyberspace. But nearly a year later, evidence that the Russian government was involved in the denial-of-service attacks still hasn’t emerged. Though Russian hackers were indisputably the major instigators of the attack, the only individuals positively identified have been young ethnic Russians living inside Estonia, who were pissed off over the statue incident.

You know you’ve got a problem when you can’t tell a hostile attack by another nation from bored kids with an axe to grind.

Separating cyberwar, cyberterrorism and cybercrime isn’t easy; these days you need a scorecard to tell the difference. It’s not just that it’s hard to trace people in cyberspace, it’s that military and civilian attacks — and defenses — look the same.

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This recipe sounds extremely tasty and I’m going to try it. Note the comment about squeezing some of the water out of the tofu. I usually put the tofu on paper towels if I’m pressing it, otherwise the water runs over the counter. Here’s just the marinade part:

In a blender jar add 1/4 cup soy sauce, 1/4 cup rice vinegar, 1 teaspoon chili oil, 1 teaspoon sesame oil, 1/2 a shallot, 3 cloves garlic, 2″ x 2″ knob of fresh ginger (cut into pieces). Let this rip on medium speed until the ginger, shallot, and garlic are emulsified. Pour 1/3 of it into a dish. Slice a firm-style block of tofu into 12 pieces and arrange the tofu on top of it, pour the remaining marinade over the tops of the tofu.

A useful comment from Sparkadelic on a post about bacon-jalapeño vodka:

As a veteran of bacon-vodka infusion, a few tips: Use more bacon - 1/2 pound of maple smoked-black pepper works great. Cook crispy, then crumble it into bits before adding to vodka. The additional surface area helps speed flavor infusion. After a couple of weeks, strain the vodka through cheesecloth, and put it in the freezer overnight in wide-mouthed jars. In the morning, use a spoon to remove the fat that will have congealed on the surface. Pour the liquid bacony booze back into a vodka bottle and store in the freezer until ready to use. Your inclination to try a martini is right on - a toothpick with two pearl onions sandwiching a twirled wedge of freshly cooked bacon, and a glass rimmed with hickory salt will send you straight to bacon heaven. Cheers!

I’m a big fan of Rancho Gordo beans, and that delicious looking dish of Giant White Lima Beans was cooked by The Wednesday Chef, who (it turns out) is another fan. Their Christmas Lima beans are also extremely good, and the Black Valentines have replaced Black Turtle beans in my own cooking. Of this dish, she says:

The beans are creamy, yet still pleasingly firm. The ones at the top have a chewy little crust that is browned in spots. The peppers and onions are stewy and sweet, and the vinegar gives the dish just the right amount of acidity. You could swap out the bay leaf for oregano, scattered throughout, or sage could also be a nice choice. We ate our beans with fresh slices of country bread and murmured delightedly through bites that we should eat nothing but beans and vegetables (steamed asparagus with a mustard vinaigrette) forever and evermore.

Go check it out. Sounds easy to make.

Well, perhaps not the very worst, but take a look at this story by Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

Congress has found a novel way to address the food crisis facing the developing world: Slash the budget for a bipartisan program providing school lunches to poor kids abroad to encourage them to remain in school.

According to The Washington Post this morning:

Under a deal worked out in the last few days, required spending on the Dole-McGovern International Food for Education program was set at $60 million. That is $780 million less than proposed by the House, and $40 million less than was allocated in the expiring farm bill.

That’s Dole, as in former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.), and McGovern, as in former Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.). Neither is pleased with the development, and said so in a biting op-ed this morning, also in the Post:

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I’m not surprised: this gang will do anything to keep its machinations secret. Of course, not keeping copies of official emails is illegal, but breaking the law never slowed down the Bush White House. Matthew Blake reports:

The intricate legal battle over missing White House emails could be going somewhere. Theresa Payne, the White House’s chief information officer,has admitted that there are no backup tapes of Executive Office of the President emails between March 1, 2003 and May 22, 2003. This timeframe roughly coincides with the invasion of Iraq (which was March 19, 2003) and “Mission Accomplished” victory declaration (May 1, 2003).

A court order in a civil suit- filed by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive- instructed Payne and the president’s office to release all email backup tapes from March 2003 to October 2003.

In her declaration to the court, Payne said that the earliest back-up tape was May 23, 2003. It has already been established that these emails are not on a White House hard drive, as the White House erased the hard drives when they switched their archiving program in October 2003. In other words, it is likely that there is no archive of White House emails during these two critical months of White House activity. Some experts say this would constitute a violation of the Presidential Records Act, which is why the White House is being sued in the first place.

As to the 438 backup tapes the White House did produce between May 23, 2003 and September 29, 2003, Payne said it would be “extraordinarily burdensome” and “extremely costly” to prove the White House’s claim that these backup tapes actually contain executive office of president correspondence. “They’re hoping that they can avoid giving information as long as possible,” said Meredith Fuchs, of the National Security Archives, a plaintiff in the case, “Time is ticking away for the administration and they know it.”

No extra walking yesterday, so the 8500 is probably the “regular” walk along with the daily movement about the apartment. Today will be no walk, though next week I may go for five.