The Dish

By Patrick
The 3 am bit worked better in relation to foreign affairs:

Economic troubles don’t usually strike in the middle of the night.
Update: David Weigel has a good play by play.

By Patrick
The AP studies the footnotes of the Yoo memo and finds evidence of another secret memo that justifies warrantless surveillance and perhaps more:

For at least 16 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001, the Bush administration believed that the Constitution’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures on U.S. soil didn’t apply to its efforts to protect against terrorism.[…]

"Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations," the footnote states, referring to a document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States."

Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, or TSP.

That program intercepted phone calls and e-mails on U.S. soil, bypassing the normal legal requirement that such eavesdropping be authorized by a secret federal court. The program began after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and continued until Jan. 17, 2007, when the White House resumed seeking surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

These documents are fragments; they provide a partial view of the administration’s assault on civil liberties over the last eight years. We are only now seeing documents from 2003 and learning of documents from 2001. Much is yet to be disclosed. 

By Patrick

George Packer:

The American invasion of Iraq was, above all else, a revolution in the lives of Iraqis. Their institutions, their everyday routines, their futures, their sense of order were all turned upside down. This revolution, which is still ongoing and will play out for years to come, was the opening of a prison. When they staggered out into the light, most Iraqis didn’t know where they were, what they wanted, even who they were, and the Americans who had so quickly and casually broken down the gate were standing around as if they had never even considered what to do next. The Americans were nominally in charge—the Iraqis expected them to be, and after the first few weeks of paralysis, the Americans flung themselves into a flurry of activities befitting an occupying power—but it was all illusion. No one was in charge. By the summer of 2003, when I first went to Iraq, it was clear that a void had opened up and the best-armed and most ruthless groups had moved in. Although it went through many phases and assumed a variety of forms, the process of mutual disenchantment between Iraqis and Americans began early. It was this process that interested me most about Iraq, because it went to the human heart of the matter: the experience of suffering, hope, illusion, need, violence, and disappointment that transformed both sides and made the war so painful for each.

These may be clichés for anyone who has spent much time in Iraq, or in any country at war. And yet here at home they have been almost impossible to convey. In the United States, the war is an abstraction that routinely shades into caricature. For all the television news coverage, Americans have the slimmest sense of what the war actually feels and looks like—crumbling deserts, blasted buildings, angry crowds, random firefights. The image of Iraq is flickering and formless. Each year of the war seems like the last, and the patrols and meetings with Iraqis that soldiers conduct every day don’t make for good television ratings. With the exception of Falluja, there have been no memorable battles. The mundane character of counterinsurgency, the fact that journalists have become targets, and the media’s sheer lack of imagination have combined to make this most covered of modern wars one of the least vivid. Iraq is more remote in our consciousness than Vietnam ever was. It has been strangely difficult for Americans even to picture the place. I’ve been asked more times than I can remember, "What does it look like over there?" If you think of World War II or Vietnam, a dozen photographs immediately come to mind. But Iraq has not been a photographer’s war. What are its iconic images? Digital snapshots by military policemen in Abu Ghraib, footage of beheadings posted by jihadis on the Web. There was no shortage of superb photographers taking extraordinary risks in Iraq, and perhaps time will sort from their work a handful of images that will define this war in the same way that, for example, Robert Capa’s photographs of Omaha Beach and Nick Ut’s of children fleeing napalm defined earlier ones. But almost five years into this war, there is only blank space where America’s picture of Iraq should be.

By Patrick
German website Pundo3000.com compares foodstuffs packaging with the contents. As the image above demonstrates, there is often a slight discrepancy.

(Hat tip: David Schmader)

By Patrick

Some more analysis from around the web. Emily Bazelon:

On page 47 of the Yoo memo, if I’m not mistaken, there’s the amazing assertion that the Convention Against Torture doesn’t apply whenever the president says it doesn’t. "Any presidential decision to order interrogations methods that are inconsistent with CAT would amount to a suspension or termination of those treaty provisions." Doesn’t this mean that whether or not a treaty has been ratified, with or without express reservations, Yoo is saying that the president can implicitly and on his own authority withdraw the United States from the treaty simply by not abiding by it? Is there precedent for such a claim? In my quick scan so far of the tortured (sorry) reasoning here, I can’t find anything other than ipso facto, because I say so, the president says so.

Marty Lederman:

When will Congress insist upon hearings at which Geoffrey Miller, Jim Haynes, Donald Rumsfeld, and other DOD officials, explain why they kept the Yoo memo and the Working Group Report secret — undisclosed even to the Working Group itself — and why they briefed Miller on Yoo’s multiple theories of legal absolution on his way out to Iraq? It’s no longer very hard to figure out just why, all of a sudden, as soon as Miller arrived in Iraq, everyone there just suddenly and magically came to think the Geneva Conventions, UCMJ, federal assault and torture statutes, etc., simply no longer applied — that Iraq was a law-free zone and that the gloves had come off. If you were Miller and you had been briefed on the Yoo theories, wouldn’t you feel awfully confident that you could get away with, well, murder and everything short of it, in interrogation operations in Iraq? This memo is the source of the Nile for the abuse that occurred in Iraq in 2003.

By Patrick
Jeff Foust reports:

As the schedule for SpaceShipTwo slips, it provides an opportunity for other companies to gain a better footing in the market, and possibly even try to enter service before Virgin. Last week XCOR Aerospace made its latest move into the suborbital spaceflight market, announcing a vehicle, dubbed Lynx, that could enter service within two years. The efforts of XCOR and others are resulting in a wide diversity of vehicles, leaving it up to the market to determine which one—or ones—work best."

(Hat tip: Reynolds)

By Patrick
A reader writes:

While I entirely agree with your post on HIV and immigration, one small correction. Leprosy is not very contagious. A person with normal nutrition and a healthy immune system stands no chance of getting infected. Infections are actually very difficult to acquire and mostly come in people who are severely malnourished over a long period (not something that really happens in the US except in cases of abuse). How do I know this? My dad ran a leper colony (not the politcally correct term but you know what I mean) when I was kid and I’ve had my hair ruffled by a great many fingerless and noseless old man and woman. No sign of leprosy yet. Indeed, I was recently tested for it as part of a Green Card application and was negative.

Just as pointless and discriminatory as the HIV policy is the one demanding tests for leprosy. Lou Dobbs jumped on this, claiming that immigrants had brought in thousands of cases of leprosy. Complete nonsense and anyway, it is easily treatable with antibiotics. Only the truly ignorant attach moral stigma to illness.

Another adds:

Leprosy (a.k.a. Hansen’s Disease) is a slowly developing, chronic bacterial infection. 95% of the population is naturally resistant. Leprosy affects peripheral nerves and can lead to disability and deformity if untreated. However, leprosy is easily treatable with a combination of very effective antibiotics. Patients with leprosy bear the burden of incredible stigmatization from centuries of misinformation. The additional burden of being worse than HIV infection is grossly unwarranted.

By Patrick

Scott Horton’s reaction to Philippe Sands’s article:

They have dragged the Department of Justice, as an institution, straight into the gutter. And amazingly, five years later, it continues to sit there in the muck, unable to stand up and step out of it.

Of course they missed some things along the way. The legal analyses were so poorly crafted–making the sorts of sophomoric arguments that would land a law student a failing grade on an examination, that Justice was forced to rescind them. It immediately crafted new opinions, which it continues to keep under lock and key, with the certain knowledge that when they are disclosed the resulting public uproar will force their withdrawal as well. This is the quality of legal work that emanates from the Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales, and now, Michael Mukasey.

They also missed the established precedent I have cited repeatedly here, namely United States v. Altstoetter, under the rule of which the conduct of the torture lawyers is a criminal act not shielded by any notions of government immunity.

By Patrick

A Cuban blogger’s criticism of the recent changes in Cuba:

If you look at the "reforms" that have made the latest splash in the media, they all have one thing in common. Cell phones, computers, appliances (except for the lowly toaster, they’ll have to wait ’til 2010 for them), they are the appurtenances of modern life, the must haves of the global consumer society. Your average American hears, "Cubans will be allowed to buy microwaves," and immediately pictures them in addition to the Kraftmaid kitchen with the Kitchen Aid appliances, not as a replacement for the lone hot plate with the grease of twenty years and the fraying cord, the cost of which must be paid out for years. So to the uninformed, the impression made is that Cuba is joining the 21st century.

Now Cubans may be isolated, but they have a sense of how the other half lives. All they have to do is look at the tourists, the party apparatchiks, and the State stores, or look to their exiled kin. And in part, they realize how little likelihood there is that they will be able to afford these luxuries the rest of the world takes for granted. As usual with the regime, appearance is all.

That’s the true genius of these "reforms," they are designed to appeal to the Cuban sense of self. Raul is dismantling the assemblage of fiats that make Cubans feel like second-class citizens in their own country. While no substantial reforms have been forthcoming that will allow Cubans to avail themselves of these "changes," those decreed are designed to make them feel they could. One wonders if the removal of the two-tier currency will be next.

Still among the banned, however, are the rights of free assembly, free speech, free elections. Call me a skeptic, but I’m looking for one tell, and that is the release of the political prisoners. The day that Dr. Oscar Biscet walks out of whatever hell hole they’ve transferred him to a free man; then I will believe change is truly on the way. Until then, I fear I have misjudged Raul, who may very well have been the brains behind keeping the throne all these many years.

(Hat tip: Global Voices)