Later On

Glenn Greenwald:

A task force appointed by President Obama to issue recommendations on how to close Guantanamo announced yesterday it will miss its deadline and instead needs a six-month extension, potentially jeopardizing Obama’s promise to close Guantanamo within a year.  The announcement was made in a briefing given by four leading Obama officials, where the condition of the briefing was that none of the officials could be named (why not?) and all media outlets agreed to this condition (why?). 

Though the Task Force’s final recommendations were delayed, it did release an interim report (.pdf) which — true to Obama’s prior pledges — recommends an optional, three-tiered "system of justice" for imprisoning accused Terrorists, to be determined by the Obama administration in each case:  (1) real trials in real courts for some; (2) military commissions for others; and (3) indefinite detention with no charges for the rest.  This memo is the first step towards institutionalizing both a new scheme of preventive detention and Obama’s version of military commissions.

From this interim report, it’s more apparent than ever that the central excuse made by Obama defenders to justify preventive detention and military commissions — there are dangerous Terrorists who cannot be released but also cannot be tried because Bush obtained the evidence against them via torture — is an absolute myth.  That’s clear for multiple reasons:

First, the Task Force is formulating detention policy not only for detainees already at Guantanamo, but also for future, not-yet-abducted detainees as well.  From the first paragraph of the memo (click image to enlarge): …

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Jeff Sharlet, who wrote The Family, writes about the C-Street house:

I can’t say I was impressed when I met Sen. John Ensign at the C Street House, the secretive religious enclave on Capitol Hill thrust into the news by its links to three political sex scandals, those of Gov. Mark Sanford; former Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., who allegedly rendezvoused at the C Street House with his mistress, an executive in the industry for which he then became a lobbyist; and Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev. Although Sanford declared today that his scandal will actually turn out to be good for the people of South Carolina because he’s now more firmly in God’s control, the once-favored GOP presidential prospect will finish out his term and fade away. And Ensign’s residence at the C Street House during his own extramarital affair now threatens to end a career that he and other Republicans hoped would lead him to the White House.

When I met Ensign, he was just back from a run, sweaty and bouncing in place, boasting about the time he’d clocked and teasing a young woman from his office. She seemed annoyed that the senator wouldn’t get himself into a shower and back on the job. When I wrote about Sen. Ensign in my book about the evangelical political organization that runs the C Street House, "The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power," I described him as a "conservative casino heir elected to the Senate from Nevada, a brightly tanned, hapless figure who uses his Family connections to graft holiness to his gambling-fortune name."

Now, of course, I know I was wrong: John Ensign is a brightly tanned, hapless figure who used his Family connections to cover up the fruits of his flirtations, to make moral decisions for him, and to do his dirty work when his secret romance sputtered. Doug Hampton, the friend and former aide whom Ensign cuckolded, tells us that it was Family leader David Coe, along with Coe’s brother Tim and Family "brother" Sen. Tom Coburn, who delivered the pink slip when it was time to put Cynthia Hampton out of Ensign’s reach.

If sexual license was all the Family offered the C Street men, however, that would merely be seedy and self-serving. But Family men are more than hypocritical. They’re followers of a political religion that embraces elitism, disdains democracy, and pursues power for its members the better to "advance the Kingdom." They say they’re working for Jesus, but their Christ is a power-hungry, inside-the-Beltway savior not many churchgoers would recognize. Sexual peccadilloes aside, the Family acts today like the most powerful lobby in America that isn’t registered as a lobby — and is thus immune from the scrutiny attending the other powerful organizations like Big Pharma and Big Insurance that exert pressure on public policy.

The Family likes to call itself a "Christian Mafia," but it began 74 years ago as an anti-New Deal coalition of businessmen convinced that organized labor was under the sway of Satan. The Great Depression, they believed, was a punishment from God for what they viewed as FDR’s socialism. The Family’s goal was the "consecration" of America to God, first through the repeal of New Deal reforms, then through the aggressive expansion of American power during the Cold War. They called this a "Worldwide Spiritual Offensive," but in Washington, it amounted to the nation’s first fundamentalist lobby. Early participants included Southern Sens. Strom Thurmond, Herman Talmadge and Absalom Willis Robertson — Pat Robertson’s father. Membership lists stored in the Family’s archive at the Billy Graham Center at evangelical Wheaton College in Illinois show active participation at any given time over the years by dozens of congressmen.

Today’s roll call is just as impressive: …

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Dean Baker, the economist, in Truthout:

As a card-carrying economist, I don’t like the unlimited tax deduction for health insurance premiums. It is regressive and just plain bad policy.

    Low- and moderate-income people are both less likely to have employer-provided health insurance, and benefit much less from the tax deduction if they do. Most of these families will have no income tax liability. So, if they get a $12,000 employer provided plan, their tax savings will only be on the 15.4 percent payroll tax liability, which would come to $1,850 in this case.

    By contrast, if a family earns $250,000, it is in the 33 percent tax bracket. If this family gets a $25,000 policy from an employer, the government is effectively paying almost half the tab, or $12,100. In this case, the government ends up paying almost seven times as much to subsidize the health care of a high-income family as it does for a moderate-income family. That policy is hard to justify.

    Of course the vast majority of the people who benefit from the tax deductibility of employer-provided health insurance do not earn more than $250,000. Most are solidly middle-class, many of them are union members.

    The unions have taken a strong position against efforts to place a cap on the size of the tax deduction as a way to help finance health care reform. Many union contracts provide for plans that would likely fall over the cap. As a result many middle-class union members could be looking at tax hikes in the neighborhood of a $1,000 a year if caps were imposed.

    Abstractly, imposing a cap on premiums would be reasonable policy. After all, why should the government pay more to subsidize the insurance of a relatively well-paid schoolteacher than the custodian who cleans the classroom?

    But this is not an abstract issue. It is a concrete question of who will pay more. For some reason, when it comes to sacrifice, union workers always seem to be at the top of the economists’ agenda.

    That was certainly the case with trade policy, where …

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Who knows, it could become a habit. From the Drug Policy Alliance in an email:

Congress let politics trump public health when it banned funding for syringe exchange programs, despite volumes of scientific evidence that these programs save lives and money.

Now, for the first time since the 1980s, you and I finally have the chance to end this backwards ban.

Repealing the ban could come up for a vote in the House THIS WEEK. We can’t afford to wait another twenty years, so let’s tell Congress to save lives by ending the syringe exchange funding ban now.

Syringe exchange programs reduce the spread of HIV/AIDS by making sterile syringes widely available, but states are banned from using their share of federal HIV/AIDS prevention money on these programs.

Repealing the ban costs no taxpayer money but will save lives.

Tens of thousands of people have contracted HIV unnecessarily since this ban was put in place in the 1980s, and many of them are dead now — all because politicians wanted to "send a message" about drug use.

You can help save lives AND dismantle a hysterical drug war policy. Join me in telling Congress to repeal the syringe exchange funding ban today!

Helped along, it must be admitted, by a strong veto threat. Halimah Abdullah in McClatchy:

The Senate voted Tuesday to strip $1.75 billion in increased spending for the F-22 jet fighter from the defense authorization bill after a protracted fight between the Obama administration, top Pentagon officials and a bipartisan group of lawmakers on one side and a faction of military leaders and members of Congress whose districts benefit from the aircraft’s construction on the other.

Support for the amendment, which was approved 58-40, was seen as a test of the administration’s ability to shift spending priorities in the massive Pentagon budget. President Barack Obama has vowed to veto any defense spending measure that included additional money for the F-22. Last month, the House of Representatives approved a version of the bill that includes $369 million as a down payment on 12 additional F-22s. The two chambers will have to reconcile those differences.

In the Senate, Arizona Sen. John McCain, in an unusual alliance with the Obama administration, faced off against fellow Republican and Senate Armed Services Committee colleague Saxby Chambliss of Georgia in the fight to remove a provision in the $679.8 billion defense authorization bill that called for spending $1.75 billion to build seven more F-22s.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates also opposed the measure and wanted instead to cap production of the F-22 at 187 and to replace the planes, parts of which are manufactured in Georgia, with the F-35, which has parts produced in Texas. Lockheed Martin builds both planes.

Tuesday’s vote was seen as a big victory for Gates, who made trimming the F-22 program the cornerstone of reshaping the nation’s defense priorities.

"The fact that the F-22 program is no longer needed beyond where it stands today, that it is no longer wanted by the most senior civilian and uniformed officials in the Pentagon — exercising their best professional judgment — and that it is simply no longer affordable cannot be disputed," McCain said Tuesday on the Senate floor. "However, in the face of those facts, the full weight of all those interests that have — for a period of over 20 years — become invested in the survival of the program has been brought to bear on the decision-making process on this body today. That is the military-industrial-congressional complex at work." …

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Our system is pretty bad insofar as it allows industry and the wealthy to give large sums of money to Senators and Representatives—who, it must be admitted, are mostly eager to take the money. Dan Eggen discusses the payoffs to kill healthcare reform:

As liberal protesters marched outside, Sen. Max Baucus sat down inside a San Francisco mansion for a dinner of chicken cordon bleu and a discussion of landmark health-care legislation under consideration by his Senate Finance Committee.

At the table on May 26 were about 20 donors willing to fork over $10,000 or more to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, including executives of major insurance companies, hospitals and other health-care firms.

"Most people there had an agenda; they wanted the ear of a senator, and they got it," said Aaron Roland, a San Francisco health-care activist who paid half price to attend the gathering. "Money gets you in the door. The only thing the other side can do is march around and protest outside."

As his committee has taken center stage in the battle over health-care reform, Chairman Baucus (D-Mont.) has emerged as a leading recipient of Senate campaign contributions from the hospitals, insurers and other medical interest groups hoping to shape the legislation to their advantage. Health-related companies and their employees gave Baucus’s political committees nearly $1.5 million in 2007 and 2008, when he began holding hearings and making preparations for this year’s reform debate.

Top health executives and lobbyists have continued to flock to the senator’s often extravagant fundraising events in recent months. During a Senate break in late June, for example, Baucus held his 10th annual fly-fishing and golfing weekend in Big Sky, Mont., for a minimum donation of $2,500. Later this month comes "Camp Baucus," a "trip for the whole family" that adds horseback riding and hiking to the list of activities.

To avoid any appearance of favoritism, his aides say, Baucus quietly began refusing contributions from health-care political action committees after June 1. But the policy does not apply to lobbyists or corporate executives, who continued to make donations, disclosure records show.

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David Weigel in the Washington Independent:

The lengthy speech on health care that Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele delivered on Monday was short on details. Republicans, said Steele, wanted to address “runaway costs,” and had a few ideas on how to do that, such as posting the cost of treatments “openly on the Internet,” supporting “bold new incentives” for medical breakthroughs, and “no life-time health care benefits and insurance for Congressmen who leave their jobs.”

Most of Steele’s event at the National Press club consisted of scorching attacks on President Obama’s agenda for health care reform, and on the early drafts of health care legislation that have been scored by the Congressional Budget Office at around $1 trillion. Much of the speech had been telegraphed two weeks earlier in a poll conducted for the RNC and a corresponding memo from Alex Castellanos, a Republican media consultant who worked for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, which argued that Republicans could kill Democratic plans for health care reform by dragging out the debate. “If we slow this sausage-making process down,” Castellanos wrote, “we can defeat it.” The “key message” for Republicans would be “We’ve got to ‘SLOW DOWN the OBAMA EXPERIMENT WITH OUR HEALTH’.” In his Monday speech, Steele used the word “experiment” or some version of it no fewer than 30 times. In a new television ad airing in North Dakota, Nevada, and Arkansas — all states with at least one Democratic senator on the ballot in 2010–the RNC casts health care reform, again, as a “risky experiment.”

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Interesting article by Matt Richtel in the NY Times:

In 2003, researchers at a federal agency proposed a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cellphone use behind the wheel.

They sought the study based on evidence that such multitasking was a serious and growing threat on America’s roadways.

But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings about the use of phones by drivers — in part, officials say, because of concerns about angering Congress.

On Tuesday, the full body of research is being made public for the first time by two consumer advocacy groups, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit for the documents. The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen provided a copy to The New York Times, which is publishing the documents on its Web site.

In interviews, the officials who withheld the research offered their fullest explanation to date.

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Fighting desperately to keep the status quo, the GOP is saying "No" as loud as it can. The Center for American Progress:

Throughout his campaign for the White House, after his election victory, and as soon as he assumed office, President Obama made it clear that reforming the health care system would be at the top of his agenda. Reiterating that sentiment, Obama said recently that health care is his "highest legislative priority over the next month." And the American public agrees. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly 60 percent of Americans said they favor Congress passing major health care reform this year. And while the relevant committees in the House and Senate are hard at work on legislation, Republicans and conservatives, in and out of power, are doing everything they can to stand in the way of major reform. The right is taking its lead from GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who authored a memo laying out a rhetorical strategy for conservatives to demonize Obama’s proposal. Luntz recently admitted that he is urging Republicans to attack reform as a "government takeover" regardless of what the actual legislation says. But Republicans (and some Democrats) have added another obstructionist tactic: delay. As White House budget director Peter Orszag said last Sunday, "The typical Washington bureaucratic game of — ‘if you don’t have a better alternative, just delay in the hope that that kills something’ is partly what’s playing out here." "There are those who are advocating delay just as a desperation move to try to kill this," he said. Orszag is right: Opponents of reform in Congress are proposing amendments that would maintain the status quo and have resorted to a delay-and-kill strategy.

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Interesting sounding book:

Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North
by Thomas J. Sugrue

A review by Scott Saul

The year 1943 seemed, to contemporary observers, “1776 for the Negro” — a revolutionary time in which the promises of full citizenship for African-Americans were finally to be redeemed. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had desegregated the war industries two years before, and blacks were migrating en masse from the Jim Crow South to Northern cities, streaming into decent-paying jobs as welders, shipbuilders and machinists. The war was stirring a passionate commitment from black Americans, who came to understand it as a fight against fascism abroad and racism at home — and to understand themselves, in turn, as democracy’s cutting edge.

Yet in retrospect 1943 was also a time of quiet counterrevolution, in which longstanding inequities were being consolidated under the pretense of business as usual. The National Association of Real Estate Boards, for instance, issued a seemingly innocuous brochure titled “Fundamentals of Real Estate Practice,” which warned realtors that, no matter the size of the down payment on the table, they needed to guard against selling to undesirable elements. “The prospective buyer might be a bootlegger who would cause considerable annoyance to his neighbors, a madam who had a number of call girls on her string, a gangster who wants a screen for his activities by living in a better neighborhood” or — the grace note here — “a colored man of means who was giving his children a college education and thought they were entitled to live among whites.” Just as more blacks were earning enough to consider moving to better neighborhoods, that is, realtors were being instructed that they needed, in defense of American property values, to stave off this “form of blight” and nix any such deal.

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Here’s yet another example by Mark Benjamin in Salon.com:

Salon has uncovered further evidence of grave offenses at Arlington National Cemetery. It is now clear that the cemetery, which is managed by the U.S. Army and calls itself "our nation’s most sacred shrine," lost track of the identity of remains buried in a grave, and covered up the disturbing discovery for six years. New information also casts doubt on Army statements about when the Army learned of criminal misconduct by a top cemetery official.

Last week Salon reported allegations by former and current employees that headstones and graves do not match in some cases. The article noted internal cemetery documents over the past several years that revealed "information listed on grave cards and burial records were not consistent with the information on the actual headstone." It documented an expensive, 10-year-old effort to computerize operations at Arlington — a feat cemeteries of similar size and age have achieved relatively quickly and cheaply.

Arlington admitted to the paperwork problems but insisted the confusion stopped at the grave’s edge. When asked — "Has the cemetery ever dug a grave only to find there is already someone there, though the grave is unmarked?" — cemetery spokeswoman Kaitlin Horst responded, "We are not aware of any situation like that."

But Salon has discovered evidence to the contrary. In 2003, Arlington workers dug into the ground at Grave 449 in Section 68 — the cemetery had paperwork that said the grave was empty — to bury somebody who had recently died. They came across remains already interred in that grave. There was no headstone. Soon after the discovery, workers filled out a grave card (obtained by Salon), generally used to note information about each burial site, with an urgent note to colleagues: "do not DO NOT USE!!! CASKET IN GRAVE REMAINS UNKNOWN."

Since Arlington does not know the identity of the remains in Grave 449, there is no way of knowing when the burial occurred. Arlington tends to bury service members who pass away at around the same time in the each section. The graves in Section 68 are generally from the late 1980s through 2008, suggesting the original burial occurred in that era.

In response to a query about Grave 449, Arlington admitted the error. "The identity of the remains in Grave 449 in Section 68 is unknown at this time," Horst admitted. "Arlington National Cemetery officials have known about this situation since 2003, when in the process of preparing for a burial, a casket was discovered in Grave 449 in Section 68," she added. "At that time, a review of records took place to locate the corresponding documents. The files could not be matched and as a result, the card you have described was filed. Following your inquiry this morning, a search for corresponding records in the paper files was conducted and again, proved inconclusive."

This discovery, Horst suggested, had an upside: …

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Self-confidence is important: people rate highly others who are confident (even though the confidence that the others feel is often misplaced: confidence does not correlate with being right and may even have a negative correlations, since those most confident are least likely to verify and try to disconfirm their perceptions). Still, if you have a choice, appearing confident is a definite asset. Trent Hamm has some excellent (and unusual) tactics to improve how your level of confidence is perceived. Take a look.

I recommend Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family for more information.

Spencer Ackerman in the Washington Independent:

To build on one aspect of Daphne’s post, there was an interesting debate during the July 7 Senate hearing on military commissions about the degree to which it was feasible to expect soldiers on the battlefields of Afghanistan to consider the courtroom admissibility of statements they extract from detainees they take. The general consensus was that such an expectation is a category error. When a soldier raids a house, points a rifle at a suspected insurgent and asks where the IEDs are, that’s “inherently coercive,” said Vice Adm. Bruce MacDonald, the Navy’s judge advocate general, and therefore inadmissible.

But a new study wonders whether military intelligence operations in a counterinsurgency context is really so different from law enforcement. Admittedly, this isn’t about point-of-capture concerns, which the July 7 panel grappled with, but Gretchen Peters’ piece for the new edition of The CTC Sentinel, the publication of West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, is still a case study in how applied counterinsurgency is eroding an old distinction. (Unfortunately it’s not online yet, but check out the Sentinel’s website in the coming days.)

Peters, a former Associated Press reporter with extensive experience in Afghanistan, writes that soldiers are increasingly considering the actions of the Taliban-led insurgency to “more closely resemble the mafia than a traditional military force.” And if the point of counterinsurgency is to cleave a population from a rebel faction through protecting its security, then there’s some reason to propose, as Peters does, that soldiers take cues from police work in patrolling a beat and acquiring intelligence leading to the takedown of certain insurgent targets. She suggests that soldiers study the Army Field Manual on Interrogations’ approaches to building rapport with interrogation subjects and learning through close contact with a given area about who represents reliable sources of information. Peters ends with this pungent quote: …

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Excellent post from Kevin Drum at Mother Jones:

The communists at the Wall Street Journal present us with the latest executive pay data today:

Executives and other highly compensated employees now receive more than one-third of all pay in the U.S…..In the five years ending in 2007, earnings for American workers rose 24%, half the 48% gain for the top-paid. The result: The top-paid represent 33% of the total, up from 28% in 2002.

….The data suggest that the payroll tax ceiling hasn’t kept up with the growth in executive pay. As executive pay has increased, the percentage of wages subject to payroll taxes has shrunk, to 83% from 90% in 1982. Compensation that isn’t subject to the portion of payroll tax that funds old-age benefits now represents foregone revenue of $115 billion a year.

You probably thought that the big problem with skyrocketing executive pay was the fact that it left nothing for the rest of us.  And you’re right: that 24% increase for "American workers" includes the 48% increase for the top earners.  In other words, the executives got a 48% increase, the rest of us got approximately nothing, and it all averaged out to 24%.

But that’s not all!  It also means that the average joes with stagnant wages couldn’t keep up, so they went deeper and deeper in debt.  And who loaned them the money to do that?  Well, the rich can’t really spend that ocean of extra dough they’re getting — the technical reason is that they have a lower marginal propensity to consumer than average joes; the nontechnical interpretation is that you can only buy just so many yachts — so they ended up loaning most of it back to the middle class.  We all know how that turned out — but the rich got bailed out by the taxpayers so they ended up OK.  The rest of us, not so much.

And now the Journal is pointing out yet another problem with running our economy solely for the benefit of the wealthy: you only owe payroll taxes on income up to $106,000.  This number rises every year, but it doesn’t rise nearly as fast as the earnings of the rich.  Which means that more and more income every year is above the cutoff and doesn’t get taxed.  And that in turn means that Social Security is in considerably worse shape than it would be if increases in national income weren’t being hoovered up almost exclusively by the executive class.

So there you have it.  If we don’t pass healthcare reform it will be because the rich don’t want to help pay for it.  Average wages are stagnant because that leaves a bigger pool of money for the rich to slosh around in.  We’re letting the planet fry because policies to stop it would inconvenience the rich.  Regulatory reform of the financial system increasingly appears to be a dead letter because Congress is owned by the rich and they don’t want it.  Against all that, I suppose that crippling Social Security hardly even shows up in the ledger.  But we might as well tot it up anyway.

I learned my lesson on the lather-holding capacity of a new boar brush: small. So rather than use a shave stick (and I’m eager to use the Speick stick again), I went with a tub soap: the Vintage Blades own soap, which lathers quite well with a badger brush.

And it lathers well with a boar brush as well, this one my new Vulfix 374: lots of lather for the first pass, but the second pass was rather stretched for lather. For the third pass, I had to return to the puck and lather up anew. But it’s a brand new brush, and I’m told will require breaking in.

The Gillette NEW with a previously used Wilkinson blade did a good shave, though it seemed to struggle a bit. I’ve replaced the blade for next time. And New York is a great aftershave—a definite favorite, although no longer in production.

The wine was Blackstone Pinot Noir.

1/2 duck breast, sautéed on the skin side until it was well browned, then on the other side until done.

While that was doing, I prepare:

1 qt (more or less) Brussels sprouts, trimmed and cut in half vertically
1 med onion, chopped
1 slice cooked bacon (I happened to have on hand)

When the duck came out, the above went in along with some salt and pepper. I stirred well to coat veg with duck fat, covered the pan, and let it sauté over low heat for 15 minutes. I then took the lid off, stirred, added about 1 1/2 tsp habanero oil, 2 Tbs water, and a sprinkle of soy sauce. Lid goes back on for another 15 minutes.

Put it into a bowl, squeeze a lemon over it, and enjoy. It had a mouth-filling taste—very rich and full—but no noticeable spiciness. But after I finished I noticed that my mouth had a nice, slight burn—really just a noticeable warmth—that lasted for several minutes. Quite nice, actually.

Chris McGreal in the Guardian:

Teenage pregnancies and syphilis have risen sharply among a generation of American school girls who were urged to avoid sex before marriage under George Bush‘s evangelically-driven education policy, according to a new report by the US’s major public health body.

In a report that will surprise few of Bush’s critics on the issue, the Centres for Disease Control says years of falling rates of teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease infections under previous administrations were reversed or stalled in the Bush years. According to the CDC, birth rates among teenagers aged 15 or older had been in decline since 1991 but are up sharply in more than half of American states since 2005. The study also revealed that the number of teenage females with syphilis has risen by nearly half after a significant decrease while a two-decade fall in the gonorrhea infection rate is being reversed. The number of Aids cases in adolescent boys has nearly doubled.

The CDC says that southern states, where there is often the greatest emphasis on abstinence and religion, tend to have the highest rates of teenage pregnancy and STDs.

In addition, about 16,000 pregnancies were reported among 10- to 14-year-old girls in 2004 and a similar number of young people in the age group reported having a sexually transmitted disease.

"It is disheartening that after years of improvement with respect to teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, we now see signs that progress is stalling and many of these trends are going in the wrong direction," said Janet Collins, a CDC director.

Although the CDC does not attribute a cause, …

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This is worrisome. Adam Liptak in the NY Times:

The most consequential decision of the Supreme Court’s last term got only a little attention when it landed in May. And what attention it got was for the wrong reason.

But the lower courts have certainly understood the significance of the decision, Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which makes it much easier for judges to dismiss civil lawsuits right after they are filed. They have cited it more than 500 times in just the last two months.

“Iqbal is the most significant Supreme Court decision in a decade for day-to-day litigation in the federal courts,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, an appellate lawyer with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington.

On its face, the Iqbal decision concerned the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The court ruled that a Muslim man swept up on immigration charges could not sue two Bush administration officials for what he said was the terrible abuse he suffered in detention.

But something much deeper and broader was going on in the decision, something that may unsettle how civil litigation is conducted in the United States. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who dissented from the decision, told a group of federal judges last month that the ruling was both important and dangerous. “In my view,” she said, “the court’s majority messed up the federal rules” governing civil litigation.

For more than half a century, it has been clear that all a plaintiff had to do to start a lawsuit was to file what the rules call “a short and plain statement of the claim” in a document called a complaint. Having filed such a bare-bones complaint, plaintiffs were entitled to force defendants to open their files and submit to questioning under oath.

This approach, particularly when coupled with the American requirement that each side pay its own lawyers no matter who wins, gave plaintiffs settlement leverage. Just by filing a lawsuit, a plaintiff could subject a defendant to great cost and inconvenience during the pre-trial fact-finding process called discovery.

Mark Herrmann, a corporate defense lawyer with Jones Day in Chicago, said the Iqbal decision will allow for the dismissal of cases that would otherwise have subjected defendants to millions of dollars in discovery costs. On the other hand, information about wrongdoing is often secret. Plaintiffs claiming they were the victims of employment discrimination, a defective product, an antitrust conspiracy or a policy of harsh treatment in detention may not know exactly who harmed them and how before filing suit. But plaintiffs can learn valuable information during discovery.

The Iqbal decision now requires plaintiffs to come forward with concrete facts at the outset, and it instructs lower court judges to dismiss lawsuits that strike them as implausible.

“Determining whether a complaint states a plausible claim for relief,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the five-justice majority, “requires the reviewing court to draw on its judicial experience and common sense.”

Note those words: Plausible. Common sense.

The old world was mechanical…

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