While WitnessLA didn’t go dark on Wednesday for the SOPA blackout (too much jails stuff going
on to even consider it), the protest seems to be helping.

If you’re unfamiliar with the fuss about SOPA—the Stop Online Piracy Act—and its little sister PIPA …. the Protect IP Act, let writer and NYU professor Clay Shirky explain it all to you.

Shirky, who is one of the smartest people breathing on all things web, was asked to do an “emergency TED talk,” to address the issue of SOPA (and PIPA) in plain terms.

You can find it here.

And then if you want to take action, go here.

In 2006, a Hannibal MO high school student, unhappy about being rejected by a girlfriend, sent an instant message to another friend about his desire to bring a gun to school and shoot several of his classmates. His threats were specific and the IMing student, who is referred to as D.J.M. in all court papers, made sure to tell the friend that he could easily get a gun. The friend got spooked and reported the IMs a school principal, who called in district officials and the cops. D.J.M. was suspended from school.

The student and his parents sued.

A three-judge panel for the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the school’s right to discipline D.J.M., and ruled that his threatening IMs were not protected speech.

No kidding!

There is admittedly a fine line in some of these kinds of cases, but not on this one. Mark Walsh of Ed Week has the details.

Here’s a clip:

[The court wrote,]“The First Amendment did not require the [school] district to wait and see whether D.J.M.’s [the student] talk about taking a gun to school and shooting certain students would be carried out,” said the court’s Aug. 1 opinion in D.J.M. v. Hannibal Public School District.

Court papers say D.J.M. was instant messaging with a friend in October 2006 when he discussed being romantically spurned by a female classmate. D.J.M. said he had access to a gun, and that while he would probably let the female friend live because “I still like her,” he named several specific students who he “would have to get rid of,” and he used anti-gay and racist epithets.

The student on the other end of the IM conversation, C.M., became concerned, and she passed along some of the comments to an adult friend, who contacted the principal of Hannibal High School. C.M. also passed along comments from D.J.M. that he “wanted Hannibal to be known for something,” that he had access to a gun, and that he might commit suicide after shooting his classmates.

School officials immediately contacted police, who took D.J.M. into juvenile detention. Meanwhile, D.J.M. was suspended for 10 days, and later for the rest of his sophomore year. The student and his parents sued the Hannibal district, alleging that the suspension violated his free-speech rights because the instant messages were conducted outside of school and were not meant as serious expressions of intent to harm anyone.

Despite the pressing need to revisit our nation’s schools’ problematic zero tolerance polices, which often do more harm than good, these IMs, as the court pointed out, were “true threats.” Any adult who ignored them would have been frighteningly irresponsible.

All that said, I hope the school administrators—and whatever other powers-that be who were involved—also made it their business to find out what was going on with “D.J.M” and thus offer him help as well as discipline.

The fact that, as the Hannibal Courier-Post reports, D.J.M. eventually returned to school and graduated ahead of his class is a heartening sign.

AND THE FUN FAMILY AWARD OF THE MONTH GOES TO….THIS GROUP WITH THE SHANKS IN THE BIRTHDAY CAKE

LA Now reports this cheery tale of a couple of brothers—Chong and Gary Vue— awaiting trial, one of whom attempted to pass a shank to the other one by embedding it in some birthday cake that he had in his cell, and talking a deputy into passing a piece to his brother, who was elsewhere in the Sacramento jail. Fortunately the deputy thought, Hey, wait a minute, maybe this isn’t such a swell idea..” and checked the cake out at which time the added….um…ingredients were discovered.

(So tell me again why brother number one got to have a birthday cake in his cell in the first place..?)

And what are the Vue brothers on trial for you might wonder? LA Now elaborates:

Chong Vue, 32, and Gary Vue, 31, are accused of shooting and killing Steve Lo, 39, at his Sacramento home in October 2008, just as Lo was leaving for his job as a state correction officer at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville.

Prosecutors said the two were carrying out a hit taken out by their older brother, Chue Vue, 46, a former Sacramento sheriff’s deputy. Chue Vue had discovered his wife was having an affair with Lo and retained his brothers to kill him, prosecutors say.

Chue Vue has already been convicted for arranging the murder of Lo. He is currently serving a sentence of life without parole.

The younger Vues, Chong and Gary, have previously been convicted of a gang murder in Minnesota.

Like I said, a fun family.

NOTE: Evidently the Sac Bee reporter Andy Furillo had the same question that I did about how the damned cake got into the cell in the first place. To wit:

It was unclear how the cake got in the cell or whether it was baked in the jail’s kitchen. Sheriff’s spokesman Jason Ramos said Tuesday that he has never heard of inmates at the downtown jail having cake in their cells.

“I would be very curious to look into it,” Ramos said. “Wow.”

In next week’s issue of the New Yorker (April 11), the magazine’s legal writer, Jeffery Toobin, has a MUST READ story about SCOTUS’ view of campaign reform.

It is an interesting and important read, but not exactly a cheery one:
Below I have posted a few salient clips but the whole thing is worth your time:

Eight of the current Supreme Court Justices are known for their zeal in questioning lawyers. That tendency was on display last week during the oral argument over the constitutionality of an Arizona law known as the Citizens Clean Elections Act, a law that attempts to do a little something about campaigns in which one candidate has a great deal more money than the others. Roughly, the law says that the ones who are outspent should receive a modest subsidy from state funds. By the end of the questioning, however, it had become clear that a majority of the Justices will probably declare the Arizona law unconstitutional. In apparent frustration, Justice Stephen G. Breyer departed from custom and allowed himself a despairing comment about the Court’s treatment of campaign-finance laws, which he has long, and mostly futilely, defended. “It is better to say it’s all illegal than to subject these things to death by a thousand cuts, because we don’t know what will happen when we start tinkering with one provision rather than another,” he said.

[SNIP]

In many other respects, this Court’s commitment to free speech is admirable. Earlier this year, Chief Justice John Roberts gave voice to the best American tradition of tolerance when he (along with seven colleagues) overturned a damage award against a fringe religious group. The Westboro Baptist Church, which, as it happens, is more of an extended family than an actual church, had launched one of its odious anti-gay publicity stunts near a funeral at which a mother and father were grieving the loss of a son in Iraq. Understandably, perhaps, a judge had awarded five million dollars in a civil suit brought by the father, but the Court recognized that such a judgment threatened the free-speech rights of all unpopular groups. “Speech is powerful,” Roberts wrote, but it was the Court’s duty “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

The problem is that there is more than one way to stifle public debate. The idea behind limiting campaign contributions and expenditures is to insure that the voices of the wealthy don’t drown out the voices of those who are less well off. A surreal moment during the Arizona argument summed up how peculiar the Court’s campaign-finance jurisprudence has become. Springing a well-planned trap, Roberts told the lawyer defending the Arizona law, “I checked the Citizens Clean Elections Commission Web site this morning, and it says that this act was passed to, quote, ‘level the playing field’ when it comes to running for office. Why isn’t that clear evidence that it’s unconstitutional?” To many ears, levelling the playing field hardly sounds like a sinister activity, worthy of the Supreme Court’s ultimate sanction. Indeed, as recently as 1990 the Court upheld a campaign-finance law because of “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” But the Court explicitly overruled that decision last year in the Citizens United case. For better or for worse, Roberts is right: leveling the playing field is now verboten.

JERRY BROWN SIGNS BILL SENDING THOUSANDS OF NONVIOLENT PRISONERS BACK TO JAIL TO SERVE OUT THEIR TIME

Yeah, I’m sure this sounded great on paper. And I’m all for doing whatever is necessary to reduce the California state prison population. But all this new plan seems to be is simply moving prisoners around in some kind of shell game strategy in which the county jails take the hit instead of the state prisons—a hit that LA’s county Jail system, for one, really cannot take right now.

Here’s a clip from Jack Dolan’s story for the LA times.

Tens of thousands of felons convicted of nonviolent crimes would serve their time in county jails instead of state prisons under a law signed by Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday evening.

The measure is designed to reduce the number of inmates in California’s chronically overcrowded state lockups and keep relatively low-level offenders closer to their homes, where drug treatment and mental health services are believed to be more effective.

Supporters hope to save taxpayers money by lowering the number of offenders who return to prison and by housing many parole violators in less expensive county jails.

“For too long, the state’s prison system has been a revolving doorr for lower-level offenders and parole violators who are released within months,” Brown said in a news release. “Cycling these offenders through state prisons wastes money, aggravates crowded conditions, thwarts rehabilitation and impedes local law enforcement supervision.

Sounds dandy. Unfortunately, however, the county jails have even less in the way of rehabilitation and other programs than the California prisons, so this bill is going to help our recidivism rate how exactly?

We need sentencing reform if we want to reduce CA’s prison population.

….AND SPEAKING OF SENTENCING REFORM, THERE IS THIS FROM FORBES MAGAZINE

Here’s a relevant clip from the Forbes report:

…Republican governors and lawmakers pushed for many of the policies that put low-level drug offenders and nonviolent felons behind bars and extended sentences for many convicted criminals. But with the GOP in control of more financially strapped state governments, a growing number of Republican elected officials favor a review of the sentencing laws that contributed to a fourfold increase in prison costs over two decades.

The total cost of incarcerating state inmates swelled from $12 billion in 1988 to more than $50 billion by 2008.

Newly elected Republican governors in Florida and Georgia are among those pushing sentencing reforms. Brent Steele, a Republican state senator in Indiana, concedes that lawmakers share the blame for driving up state prison costs in recent years. High-profile crimes prompt lawmakers and governors to adopt ever-tougher criminal sentencing, such as three-strikes laws that impose minimum mandatory sentences for those convicted of a third felony, no matter the offense.

“But with that eventually comes the time when we run out of prison space,” said Steele, who is sponsoring a criminal justice overhaul in his state, prompted by budget concerns. “So what do you do? You concentrate on incarcerating those we’re afraid of and not those we’re just mad at.”

I want that last sentence on refrigerator magnets so we can give ‘em out in Sac’to.

Once again, in California, we not only cannot persuade our Republican lawmakers to go along with sentencing reform—we can’t get the Dems show a little spine on the topic either.

(Dear Georgia and Florida Repubs, can’t you talk sense to these people? Seriously. It would mean a lot to us.)

SHOULD STATE BE ABLE TO DEMAND A JUROR’S FACEBOOK POSTS? CALIFORNIA SUPREMES WANT THE QUESTION CAREFULLY CONSIDERED

This one’s a doozey and is shaping up to be a Constitutional battle. On one side you have the right to privacy and freedom of expression, on the other hand you have the constitutional rights of the accused.

Here’s what the case is about as the Sac Bee reports it:

[A Sacramento juror named Arturo Ramirez] posted his online remarks in a gang-beating trial last year in which five men were convicted. Before the defendants were sentenced, defense lawyers found out about his Facebook postings.

Mostly, the writings chronicled the juror’s attendance at the trial in which he later served as foreman of the panel. At one point in his writings, Ramirez said he found the evidence “boring.”

Defense attorneys asked Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael P. Kenny to retrieve all of the juror’s postings to see if he was biased or if he was influenced by any of his Facebook friends.

Kenny on Feb. 4 ordered Ramirez to allow Facebook to make the postings available for a private review. Facebook had opposed releasing the postings on its own, citing federal computer privacy law….

Mike Wise, the lawyer for one of the defendants in the gang case, said it is critical for his side to see what Ramirez wrote to make sure the defense clients received a fair trial. Wise on Wednesday also welcomed the state Supreme Court decision.

“I think it’s a great opportunity to resolve the issue,” he said. “I think in the end, the constitutional rights of the accused will prevail over the privacy rights of the juror.

A new hearing on the matter is expected soon.

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN WRITES LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF THE ASBURY PARK PRESS PRAISING STORY ABOUT HOW BUDGET CUTS ARE AFFECTING MANY OF THE POOR

To wit:

Thank you for your March 27 front-page story by Michael Symons, “As poverty rises, cuts target aid.” The article is one of the few that highlights the contradictions between a policy of large tax cuts, on the one hand, and cuts in services to those in the most dire conditions, on the other…..

And so on.

Nice to know that The Boss is paying attention to such things, as the US Congress doesn’t seem to be concerned.

BRONX ZOO EGYPTIAN COBRA FOUND AND RECAPTURED…. (NO WORD ON WHETHER THE SNAKE WILL HOST SNL)

Entertainment Weekly reports.

You may now breathe a ssssigh of relief. After escaping from a cage at the Bronx Zoo last week and going MIA, a venomous 24-inch Egyptian Cobra was found on Thursday by zoo staffers. Was it captured while slithering its way through Central Park? Catching a Knicks game at Madison Square Garden? Enjoying a quiet dinner at an Italian bistro in the Village? Nope. She was just coiled up in a dark corner of the reptile house, a mere 200 feet from her cage, and is now “resting comfortably and secure,” according to zoo officials. (Cue the singer from Survivor: The search is over/you were with me all the while…)

The snake, who insists she is a female (at least in her very popular Twitter incarnation), has launched a Facebook campaign to host Saturday Night Live.

THE QUESTION OF HUFF POST NOT PAYING ITS WRITERS ISN’T GOING AWAY

Author Michael Walker is the latest voice to question the Huffington Post’s no-pay policy for its freelance writers. The clip below is from his LA Times Op Ed.

Should stage owners who profit from the talent appearing on those stages be obliged to pay the talent in something other than exposure?

<strongTwo labor disputes over talent and compensation, three decades apart yet eerily similar, suggest the issue remains as vexing as ever.

The more recent concerns whether the Huffington Post should pay its non-staff writers and bloggers, who supply most of the popular website’s content for free. Arianna Huffington, who sold the site she cofounded to AOL in February for $315 million, has increasingly come under fire for not paying for most of the content she runs.

Last week the Newspaper Guild called on its 26,000 members to boycott the Huffington Post in support of a “virtual picket line” until a pay schedule for writers was established.

The core of Huffington’s justification for not paying is that the Huffington Post is a showcase for writers, and that exposure there leads to paying gigs and greater visibility. Huffington merely — and generously, by her estimation — provides the stage. Mario Ruiz, the Huffington Post’s spokesman, claims that contributors are happy to write for free because they “want to be heard by the largest possible audience and understand the value that that kind of visibility can bring.”

This was precisely the argument put forth 32 years ago by Mitzi Shore, the owner of L.A.’s Comedy Store, for not paying the comedians whose performances filled her club night after night…..

TUESDAY ILLINOIS POISED TO ABOLISH STATE’S DEATH PENALTY

Go Illinois!

Reuters has the story. Here’s a clip:

Illinois was poised to become the first state since 2009 to abolish the death penalty after the state Senate approved the ban on Tuesday and sent it to Democratic Governor Pat Quinn for his signature.

The Senate vote came after House approval late last week. The Senate vote was 32-25.

Illinois has not executed anyone for more than a decade after former Republican Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in January 2000 following a series of revelations that people had been sent to Death Row who were later found to be innocent.

“We’ve had 20 innocent people on Death Row,” said Jeremy Schroeder, executive director of the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. “It’s time to be done with the moratorium and do the right thing.”

State Sen. Kwame Raoul, the measure’s sponsor, said that too many mistakes had been made in Illinois that sent innocent people to death row.

“We have an historic opportunity … to join the civilized world and end this practice of risking putting to death innocent people,” Raoul said before the vote.

FYI: The bill just passed would take the money saved from the Capital Litigation Trust Fund (which will no longer be needed), and re-allocate the $$$ to a fund for murder victims’ services and law enforcement.

OKAY, THIS IS UNBELIEVABLY CREEPY

This cheery ad is on the web page of the Palmetto State Armory.

Palmetto State Armory would like to honor our esteemed congressman Joe Wilson with the release of our new “You Lie” AR-15 lower receiver.

(For those unfamiliar with armaments, an AR-15 is the automatic rifle that is akin to an M-16, and the “lower receiver’ is the “gun” part of this particular gun.)

UPDATE: The above link to the ad no longer works. Obviously, it has been taken down.

Evidently Congressman Wilson was tickled by the matter since he is shown cradling the AR-15 named in his honor.

ASSANGE LAWYERS WORRIED ABOUT “ILLEGAL RENDITION” AND THE DEATH PENALTY

The NY Times has the story:

Lawyers for Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks antisecrecy group, said on Tuesday that they would oppose his extradition to Sweden because he might subsequently face “illegal rendition” to the United States, risking imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, or even the death penalty.

They made the assertion in defense documents released after Mr. Assange made a brief appearance in a British high-security court for a largely procedural hearing concerning his resistance to demands for his extradition to Sweden, where he has been accused of sexual misconduct….

LATE TUESDAY UPDATES

LA COUNTY DEPUTY SHOT BY SUSPECT

The LA Times has the story:

A Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy was shot in the face Tuesday night in East Los Angeles after he and his training officer were attacked by a reputed gang member on parole, authorities said.

The suspected gunman was fatally shot by the training officer after a struggle ensued, authorities said.

Deputy Mohamed Ahmed, 27, was taken to a local hospital and may lose sight in one eye, said a source familiar with the incident. The Sheriff’s Department initially reported that the deputy had been shot in the cheek.

Ahmed did not appear to have suffered any brain damage and was listed in critical condition. He joined the department in April 2007.

As we hope for the health of Gabrielle Giffords, we also hope for LA County Sheriff’s Deputy Mohamed Ahmed.

In his column in Wednesday’s LA Times, Steve Lopez reports that the Los Angeles Sheriff’s department—presumably with the okay of Sheriff Lee Baca—has instructed its deputies not to talk to reporters from LA County’s main news outlet, namely the Los Angeles Times.

Or something like that.

Here’s the relevant section on Lopez’s column:

The latest [LASD/Lee Baca] head-smacker involves an e-mail from one of Baca’s captains ordering deputies not to speak to the L.A. Times. As my colleague Robert Faturechi reported Tuesday, the captain’s directive came just a few days after the paper ran Faturechi’s story on the fact that Baca had launched a criminal investigation in Beverly Hills — which has its own presumably competent Police Department — on behalf of a political donor.

It was outrageous enough that Baca took the unusual step of sticking his nose into a case Beverly Hills police had already decided was a civil matter. But then his department puts out the word to punish The Times for doing its job?

Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore claimed the e-mail had nothing to do with The Times’ Beverly Hills story.

Yeah, OK.

Whitmore also claimed The Times wasn’t being singled out.

Hmmmm. Then why did the e-mail instruct deputies to forward media requests to headquarters, “Specifically any LA Times requests.”

“It’s vernacular,” Whitmore told me. “It’s shorthand. I know it sounds silly.”

Um, yeah. Really, really silly. And really disingenuous.

But, hey, we’re living through a month in which the US Air Force just announced on Tuesday that it is barring its personnel from using work computers to view the Web sites of The New York Times and more than 25 other news organizations and blogs.

Why? Take a wild guess.

Yep. You got it. Wikileaks.

I’d say all this madness was due to some new contaminant in the water, but the east coast/west coast nature of these dismayingly wrong-headed occurrences pretty much leaves that out.

Dunno. Bad moon rising.

The hysterical reactions by seemingly sane people on the topic of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange grow ever more deeply disheartening.

But there are, fortunately, a few people talking sense, among them Ron Paul and Tom Hayden, two men who would find themselves at opposite ends of many questions. But on this crucial issue they agree. Similarly, Salon’s lawyer/columnist Glenn Greenwald finds a kindred spirit on the matter on former Bush administration lawyer, Jack Goldsmith:

LYING IS NOT PATRIOTIC

Texas Congressman Ron Paul spoke on the floor of the House of Representatives on Friday where he passionately defended Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Here’s a clip from reporting by the Atlantic Wire:

“Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?” asked Paul. He went on to compare WikiLeaks to the Pentagon Papers, explaining how both exposed American wars that were based on “lies.” He also asked his colleagues which events caused more deaths, “Lying us into war, or the release of the WikiLeaks papers?”

At the end of his speech, Paul asked his listeners 9 questions, which are as follows:

Number 1: Do the America People deserve know the truth regarding the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen?

Number 2: Could a larger question be how can an army private access so much secret information?

Number 3: Why is the hostility directed at Assange, the publisher, and not at our governments failure to protect classified information?

Number 4: Are we getting our moneys worth of the 80 Billion dollars per year spent on intelligence gathering?

Number 5: Which has resulted in the greatest number of deaths: lying us into war or Wikileaks revelations or the release of the Pentagon Papers?

Number 6: If Assange can be convicted of a crime for publishing information that he did not steal, what does this say about the future of the first amendment and the independence of the internet?

Number 7: Could it be that the real reason for the near universal attacks on Wikileaks is more about secretly maintaining a seriously flawed foreign policy of empire than it is about national security?

Number 8: Is there not a huge difference between releasing secret information to help the enemy in a time of declared war, which is treason, and the releasing of information to expose our government lies that promote secret wars, death and corruption?

Number 9: Was it not once considered patriotic to stand up to our government when it is wrong?

Thomas Jefferson had it right when he advised ‘Let the eyes of vigilance never be closed’

THE LYNCH MOB MOMENT

Tom Hayden is just as impassioned as Paul, although his approach is calmer. Here is a clip from the analytical essay that he sent out to friends on Wednesday about what he calls The Lynch Mob Moment.

We know that conservatives are extremists for order, but why have so many liberals lost their minds and joined the frenzy over Julian Assange and WikiLeaks? As the secrets of power are unmasked, there is a growing bipartisan demand that Julian Assange must die.

Once-liberal Democrat Bob Beckel said on FOX, “there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son-of-a-bitch.” Center-liberal legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said on CNN that Assange is “absurd”, “ridiculous”, “delusional”, and “well beyond sympathy of anyone”. The Washington Times called for treating him as an “enemy combatant”; Rep. Peter King of the Homeland Security Committee who wants him prosecuted as a terrorist; and of course, Sarah Palin wants Assange “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders”, or a wolf in Alaska.

This is a lynch-mob moment, when the bloodlust runs over. We have this mad overreaction many times since the witch-burnings and Jim Crow, including the Palmer Raids of the 1920s, the McCarthy purges of the 1950s, the Nixon-era conspiracy trials, the Watergate break-ins, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11.

Most Americans now know that those frenzied periods of scapegoating did nothing for our security, which instead damaged our democracy and left in their wake a secretive National Security State.

There is wisdom in expecting calmer heads to prevail in the WikiLeaks matter, but what can be done when the calmer heads are going nuts or hiding in silence?

Do the frothing pundits remember that we have a legal system in which the accused is entitled to due process, legal representation and the right to a defense? The first obligation of our threatened elected officials, bureaucrats and pundits is to calm down.

Hayden acknowledges that wholesale release of the WikiLeaks documents could do damage:

I can understand the reasonable questions that reasonable people have about this case. It is clearly illegal to release and distribute the 15,652 documents stamped as “secret.” Why should underground whistleblowers have the unlimited right to release those documents? There is a risk that some individuals might be harmed by the release. There is a concern that ordinary diplomatic business might be interrupted.

But he also reminds us what we have thus far gotten from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks:

1. WikiLeaks disclosed 390,136 classified documents about the Iraq War and 76,607 about Afghanistan so far. No one died as a result of these disclosures, one of which revealed another 15,000 civilian casualties in Iraq which had not been acknowledged or reported before;

2. Fragmentary orders [FRAGO] 242 and 039 instructed American troops not to investigate torture in Iraq conducted by America’s allies;

3. The CIA operates a secret army of 3,000 in Afghanistan;

4. A secret US Task Force 373 is assigned to nighttime hunter-killer raids in Afghanistan;

5. The US ambassador in Kabul says it is impossible to fix corruption when our ally is the corrupt entity;

6. One Afghan minister alone carried $52 million out of the country;

7. US Special Forces operate in Pakistan without public acknowledgment, apparently in violation of that country’s sovereignty;

8. America’s ally, Pakistan, is the chief protector of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

9. Following secret U.S air strikes against suspected al-Qaeda militants, Yeme’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh told General David Petraeus, “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”

10. U.S. government contractor DynCorp threw a party for Afghan security recruits featuring trafficked boys as the entertainment. Bacha bazi is the Afghan tradition of “boy play” where young boys are dressed up in women’s clothing, forced to dance for leering men, and then sold for sex to the highest bidder. DynCorp has been previously linked to child sex trafficking charges.

CORRECTING THE MEDIA FALSEHOODS

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald (who also happens to be an attorney trained in Constitutional law) has been stalking the absurd inaccuracies put out by major media outlets—like, for example, Time magazine— when they report on the ongoing WikiLeaks story.

Read and grow angry.

IF ASSANGE IS GUILTY WHAT ABOUT THE NY TIMES? WHAT ABOUT BOB WOODWARD?

On Friday, former Bush administration lawyer, Jack Goldsmith, posted 7 “thoughts” on the matter of WikiLeaks. They are all worth reading, but here are the first three:

* I find myself agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified. I certainly do not support or like his disclosure of secrets that harm U.S. national security or foreign policy interests. But as all the hand-wringing over the 1917 Espionage Act shows, it is not obvious what law he has violated. It is also important to remember, to paraphrase Justice Stewart in the Pentagon Papers, that the responsibility for these disclosures lies firmly with the institution empowered to keep them secret: the Executive branch. The Executive was unconscionably lax in allowing Bradley Manning to have access to all these secrets and to exfiltrate them so easily.

* I do not understand why so much ire is directed at Assange and so little at the New York Times. What if there were no wikileaks and Manning had simply given the Lady Gaga CD to the Times? Presumably the Times would eventually have published most of the same information, with a few redactions, for all the world to see. Would our reaction to that have been more subdued than our reaction now to Assange? If so, why? If not, why is our reaction so subdued when the Times receives and publishes the information from Bradley through Assange the intermediary? Finally, in 2005-2006, the Times disclosed information about important but fragile government surveillance programs. There is no way to know, but I would bet that these disclosures were more harmful to national security than the wikileaks disclosures. There was outcry over the Times’ surveillance disclosures, but nothing compared to the outcry over wikileaks. Why the difference? Because of quantity? Because Assange is not a U.S. citizen? Because he has a philosophy more menacing than “freedom of the press”? Because he is not a journalist? Because he has a bad motive?

* In Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward, with the obvious assistance of many top Obama administration officials, disclosed many details about top secret programs, code names, documents, meetings, and the like. I have a hard time squaring the anger the government is directing toward wikileaks with its top officials openly violating classification rules and opportunistically revealing without authorization top secret information….

Forget what you think about Julian Assange. It doesn’t matter whether you like him or loath him. Nor does it matter if you think Assange and company were wrong to have distributed the leaks, or alternately if you think he’s the champion of transparency and democracy…..

None of this is the point. Not anymore.

The issue now is the dangerous nature of the campaign launched against Assange and WikiLeaks and what it points beyond itself to portend. This is about freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And it is a scary business.

My friend Marc Cooper has it right when he points to the column by Dan Gilmore at Salon as mandatory reading on the matter. Here’s the opening:

Journalists cover wars by not taking sides. But when the war is on free speech itself, neutrality is no longer an option.

The WikiLeaks releases are a pivotal moment in the future of journalism. They raise any number of ethical and legal issues for journalists, but one is becoming paramount.

As I said last week, and feel obliged to say again today, our government – and its allies, willing or coerced, in foreign governments and corporations — are waging a powerful war against freedom of speech.

WikiLeaks may well make us uncomfortable in some of what it does, though in general I believe it’s done far more good than harm so far. We need to recognize, however, as Mathew Ingram wrote over the weekend, that “Like It or Not, WikiLeaks is a Media Entity.” What our government is trying to do to WikiLeaks now is lawless in stunning ways, as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald forcefully argued today.

These are also acts of outright censorship. No, Amazon is not bound by the First Amendment. But if it’s bowing to government pressure, it’s helping a panicked government tear up one of our most basic freedoms.

consitutional lawyer/columnist Glenn Greenwald, who has taken the lead on a lot of this, also has a column on how so much of the mainstream media has been recklessly repeating falsehoods and misinformation about the leaks and their affect.

Yet, at the same time, a small but growing number of journalists and editors are speaking out with a rising sense of unease.

For instance here’s what senior editor Amy Davidson said at the New Yorker:

…Beyond Assange and his own legal situation, there is something disturbing going on: Joe Lieberman hounding private companies (before any legal actions has been taken); the way the site was repeatedly taken down; calls by politicians and journalists to kill the leakers or have them treated as enemy combatants (what does that mean? Guantánamo?); the Swiss bank account frozen (the Swiss say Assange had a false address on his form; but our ambassador there has also said some heavy-handed things to them); Visa and MasterCard stopping all transactions related to WikiLeaks. One could say that this is part of the bargain WikiLeaks signed up for—what did they think would happen? But, if it is permissible to use these measures against the site, why couldn’t they be used against any media organization that published classified information? Why WikiLeaks and not the Times, Guardian, or Der Spiegel (or The New Yorker)? If it’s because they and we are more respectable—what does that even mean? Any talk of creative uses of the 1917 Espionage Act, as by Senator Dianne Feinstein, should make one wary. (Glenn Greenwald has been following the legal side of the story.) Not that that much due process seems to have been involved in efforts to shut the site down. Does it just take the Administration saying something is illegal for it to be illegal?

Good question.

A few days after administrators from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs made idiots of themselves by telling students that tweeting, linking, posting or otherwise traceably conversing about WikiLeaks would harm their future career prospects, Columbia has suddenly come to its senses and realized that their earlier career advice made them look….really, really bad.

So they’ve walked back their original POV and become more embracing of….oh…free speech and that sort of thing.

Wired has the story. Here are some clips:

Last week, the SIPA Office of Career Services sent an e-mail to students saying that an alumnus who works at the U.S. State Department had recommended that current students not tweet or post links to WikiLeaks, which is in the process of releasing 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables — many of them classified — because doing so could hurt their career prospects in government service.

“Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government,” the Office of Career Services wrote.

Now, SIPA Dean John H. Coatsworth has clarified the school’s policy and issued a ringing endorsement of free speech and academic freedom.

“Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution,” Coatsworth wrote in an e-mail to the SIPA community Monday morning (full e-mail message below). “Thus, SIPA’s position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences.”

SIPA Professor Gary Sick, the prominent Middle East expert who served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, went even further in repudiating the memo.

“If anyone is a master’s student in international relations and they haven’t heard of WikiLeaks and gone looking for the documents that relate to their area of study, then they don’t deserve to be a graduate student in international relations,” Sick told Wired.com in an interview.

Now if Attorney General Eric Holder, who appears to have gone actively insane on the topic, will have a similar come to Jesus the 1st Amendment moment.

JAMES FALLOWS AT THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY HAS A CONTEST FOR THE BEST WIKILEAKS QUOTE

No, he’s not downplaying the seriousness of the leaks Fallows assures us, it’s merely that there are some damn good quotes hiding in that quarter of a million document flood.

INTERPOL HAS ISSUED AN ALERT FOR THE ARREST OF WIKILEAKS’ FOUNDER JULIAN ASSANGE

Assanges mother is pretty distressed. Reuters has the story.

The mother of Australian WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said on Wednesday she was distressed by an international police alert for her son’s arrest and did not want him “hunted down and jailed.”

Global police agency Interpol issued a “red notice” on Tuesday to assist in the arrest of Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, who is wanted in Sweden on suspicion of sexual crimes.

Assange, 39, a former computer hacker now at the center of a global controversy after WikiLeaks released a trove of classified U.S. diplomatic cables at the weekend, denies the Swedish allegations…..

MEANWHILE…a “hacktavist” who calls himself Jester has claimed credit for crashing the Wikileaks website two days in a row, reports the LA Times..

HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYERS LEONARD WEINGLASS AND MICHAEL RATNER JOIN DEFENSE OF WIKILEAKS

Leading US human rights lawyers, Leonard Weinglass and Michael Ratner, have joined the defense team for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, writes Tom Hayden.

Hayden also writes that the US Justice Department is seeking indictments on espionage charges [against Wikileaks] from a grand jury quietly impaneled this week in arch-conservative Alexandria, Virginia.

Why is this drama important? Not because of “life-threatening” leaks as claimed by the establishment, but because the closed doors of power need to be open to public review. We live increasingly in an Age of Secrecy, as described by Garry Wills in Bomb Power, among recent books. It has become the American Way of War, and increasingly draws the curtains over American democracy itself….

A WITNESS LIES, A MAN IS CONVICTED, THE 9TH CIRCUIT IS BORED, VETERANS ARE FURIOUS.

The NYT Times Adam Liptak has the story. Here’s how it opens.

Elven J. Swisher wore a replica of a Purple Heart on the witness stand when he testified that the defendant had tried to hire him to kill three federal officials.

Asked about the medal, Mr. Swisher pulled a document from his pocket to show that he was entitled to it and many others for his service in combat in the Korean War.

Mr. Swisher said the defendant, David R. Hinkson, an armchair constitutionalist with eccentric views about the tax code, had asked him how many men he had killed. “Too many,” Mr. Swisher recalled saying.

All lies. Mr. Swisher had never seen combat, had killed no one and had served without distinction. The document was a forgery. Mr. Swisher has since been convicted of lying to federal officials, wearing fake medals and defrauding the Department of Veterans Affairs of benefits for combat injuries.

But the jury knew none of this, and with Mr. Swisher’s testimony it convicted Mr. Hinkson of soliciting three murders. He was sentenced to 33 years for those crimes, along with 10 years for tax evasion, and he is serving his sentence in the maximum-security prison in Florence, Colo.

When Mr. Swisher’s lies came to light, Mr. Hinkson challenged his convictions for soliciting the murders. The jury had believed him guilty of more than loose talk, he said, only because Mr. Swisher had falsely presented himself as a battle-hardened killer.

But the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, ruled against him last year by a 7-to-4 vote.

Mr. Swisher’s lies, the majority said, were no big deal…..

Read the rest and opine.

COMMUNITY HEALTH CLINICS WORK TO TAKE UP THE SLACK IN SOUTH LA

With MLK Medical Center not due to reopen until 2013, residents of surrounding South LA communities are relying for basic health care on overcrowded underfunded neighborhood health clinics.

Neon Tommy has visited several of those clinics and has returned with reports about at how these desperately-needed community health faculties—and the patients who depend on them for critical services—are getting by.

In one of the stories, Ryan Foughnder and Kaitlin Parker spent time at a Lynwood women’s clinic and found the place barely hanging on in terms of funds, but proud of the quality of care it was providing.

MORE THAN 1000 LAUSD WORKERS WILL LOSE THEIR JOBS WITH LATEST ROUND OF CUTS.

The LA Times reports.

THE CITY AND CHIEF BECK WANT TO HIRE MORE COPS, BUT THE LAPD UNION SAYS PAY OVERTIME FIRST

Joel Rubin and David Zahniser have the story—and it’s an interesting one.

Here’s how it opens:

It came as little surprise this week that the influential union that represents Los Angeles’ rank-and-file police officers waded into the debate over hiring more police during a major financial crisis.

What caught people off guard, however, was the union’s conclusion that the hiring should stop.

Los Angeles Police Protective League President Paul M. Weber, in an interview and an opinion article submitted to The Times, called on the city’s leaders to suspend their current policy of hiring new officers to replace those who resign or retire. It is a stance that, on the surface, runs counter to the union’s traditionally staunch support for a larger police force.

Instead, Weber said, the department should shrink itself in order to use its scarce funds to restore overtime pay that has been cut because of the city’s budget woes and to fill some of the hundreds of civilian posts at the Los Angeles Police Department that have gone vacant.

Police Chief Charlie Beck said the union’s plan would jeopardize public safety. “We’d all like to return to a time where officers are paid for the overtime hours they work,” he said. “But it is not in the interest of public safety to do that” by thinning the ranks of officers.

And Matt Szabo, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, added, “It’s hard to imagine how the union is motivated here by the public’s safety,” noting that the LAPD has pushed down crime significantly in recent years.