There’s a lot in the weekend’s papers and around the blogs that should not be missed.

*The LA Times has an important editorial about the necessity to define and standardize just what we mean when we say “drop out,” so that school districts (LAUSD a notable example) can no longer play Hide the Dropout. The Times rightly gives credit to US Education Secretary Margaret Spelling for calling for the standardization.

*On Saturday, Glenn Greenwald at Salon notes the frequency with which the media mentions Barack Obama’s bowling score and the fact that the Clintons are rich, but how comparatively rarely our media managed to comment on the declassification of John Woo’s torture memo that makes clear that the Bush administration “…declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to ‘domestic military operations’ within the U.S.

*The LA Times also has a smart and thoughtful Op Ed by novelist Rabih Alameddine about the dangerous and prejudicial way we use the words “God” and “Allah” in this country.

*But for me the weekend’s most upsetting and essential read is the report in the New York Times that Army leaders are worried about the mental health of our troops when they are subjected to repeat tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Here are some relevant clips:

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I never imagined I’d comment on this...but the latest wrinkle in the story has gotten under my skin.

For the last few days the Eliott Spitzer hooker scandal has been juicy and distracting in a schadenfreude kinda way. We felt bad—and angry—for Spitzer’s wife, Silda, an attorney who gave up her career when her husband ran for office and had to stand beside the weasel Eliot twice as he did his mea culpas. But, had it not been for the fact that Spitzer fashioned his career based on a holier-than-thou, corruption-busting tough guy image, it was hard to get too upset about the fact that the governor went to a high priced call girl.

I mean really. Prostitution, at least at the call girl level, is a victimless crime. (Young immigrant women in the back rooms of massage parlors who are little better than indentured sexual servants are something else again.)

Other than the fact that it’s, well, illegal, the hooker thing seemed morally preferable to say…..carrying on with a young intern.

Then yesterday, we learned a little about Spitzer’s pricey paramour, courtesy of the New York Times.

It turns out that “Kristin,” the fabulous. thousand-dollar an hour call girl that cost Eliot Spitzer his job as governor, is in reality 22-year-old Ashley Alexandra Dupré (born Ashley Youmans).

A pretty girl with a poignant and hopeful MySpace page, Ashley says she left home at age 17 , and that there was abuse. After bouncing around, being “broke and homeless” she eventually headed to New York in the hope of finding a career in music. After a bad boyfriend ran out on her, she was looking for a way to survive financially and evidently somebody mentioned the escort option.

So the fabulous $1000-an-hour “Kristen,” while a pretty and rather winning-looking young woman, was not some drop dead gorgeous, exotic sex goddess, but an emotionally banged-up New Jersey girl young enough to be Spitzer’s daughter. Literally.

Spitzer has three daughters ages 13, 15, 17.

Bottom line: Spitzer has, over the years, spent possibly $80 to screw young women just a few years older than his eldest kid. (And exactly the age of my kid, and my kid’s friends.)

What a CREEP! What a lousy, selfish, narcissistic jackass! Aaaarrrggggh!

A pox on you, Eliot Spitzer.

(Okay. Next post will be about gangs and other pithy issues. But I just couldn’t let this pass without saying something.)

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Today appears to be the morning for focusing (again) on the Bush adminstration’s belief that it doesn’t have to play by any rules it doesn’t like.

Before you read the following clips from this morning’s Washington Post, remember that not one but TWO federal statutes require that presidential communications, including e-mails involving senior White House aides, to be preserved for the nation’s historical record. Okay, now read and cringe:

E-mail messages sent and received by White House personnel during the first three years of the Bush administration were routinely recorded on tapes that were “recycled,” the White House’s chief information officer said in a court filing this week.

During the period in question, the Bush presidency faced some of its biggest controversies, including the Iraq war, the leak of former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson’s name and the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videotapes.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no reason to believe any e-mails were deliberately destroyed. [HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-ha-ha-ha-ha]

From 2001 to October 2003, the White House’s practice was to use the same backup tape each day to copy new as well as old e-mails, he said, making it possible that some of those e-mails could still be recovered even from a tape that was repeatedly overwritten. “We are continuing to analyze our systems,” Fratto said last night.

[SNIP]

Although the White House said in the filing that its practice of recording over the tapes ceased after October 2003, it added that even some e-mails transmitted through the end of 2005 might not have been fully preserved. “At this stage, this office does not know” whether additional e-mails are missing, said the affidavit filed minutes before a court-ordered deadline of midnight Tuesday night by Theresa Payton, chief information officer in the White House Office of Administration.

The White House disclosure was filed with the D.C. District Court in response to a lawsuit filed by two advocacy groups, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive, which alleged that millions of e-mail messages sent between 2003 and 2005 are missing from White House servers.

Anne L. Weismann, chief counsel for the ethics group made the observation that, “these are not the steps of a White House committed to preserving records or meeting its obligations under the law.”

Ya think?

Oh, yeah, and there’s this:

In a related controversy, House investigators have determined that hundreds of thousands of e-mails from former presidential adviser Karl Rove and other White House aides are missing because they were sent using external accounts set up by the Republican National Committee.

Listen, I’m sure it’s all the interest of national security.
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Alright, I’m now off for my first day of torturing …er….teaching USC journalism students. Wish me luck!

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Still no TVs that any of us can find at Bennington (in all seriousness) but fortunately I’m able to watch the debate on the Web.

Missed the Republicans. But I’m now staring at the Democrats as, I’m assuming, many of the rest of you are.

From the beginning, it’s been a fascinating dynamic. Hilary took a chance and went on the attack and it backfired right away. She looks like she’s shooting from a defensive position. She did her usual attack on Obama for his health care plan. He seem dignified and even presidential in his response. She seemed unnecessarily agressive.

While Obama took the high ground, when the ball was handed to Edwards, he turned bad cop to Obama’s good cop.

“Every time we speak out for change,” he said, “the forces of status quo are going to attack.”

Oooh, snap!

“I didn’t hear these attacks from Senator Clinton when she was ahead. And now she’s making them.”

Richardson had been quiet, but when he got a minute to speak, he got the first big laugh. “I’ve been in hostage negotiations that are more civil than this.”

On the Iraq war Hillary tried to have it both ways. She said the surge is good, but the Iraqi government isn’t stepping up to the plate and the Bush administration is screwing up. (Although she was less than specific as to how.) Yet she said all this in a rather unfocused stream that, in the end, was less than effective. She also said that she’ll start bring people home. (As has everyone.) But it sounded more like a “draw down” than any kind of significant withdrawal of forces. Overall it was a split message, which I believe will be problematic for her.

On the same subject, Barack sounded knowledgeable yet firm, and he hit all the important points that those disenchanted by the war want to hear. It was a risk, but my bet is it will be a successful one. He found his footing in this debate in a way that wasn’t really evident in the previous debates.

Edwards and Richardson also advocated for getting the troops out in much clearer terms that Clinton. Interesting the way the three of them have differentiated themselves from Clinton. One sometimes wonders if there is any behind-the-scenes, track 2 negotiating going on between the various camps.

To Clinton’s credit, in the second half, she started to tone down the attack dog routine. She did, however, play the girl card.

“I am an agent of change,” she said. “If the first woman is elected president, that’ll be a big change.”

(NOTE to John Edwards: You really must stop it with the Working in the Mill routine. Use it on the stump, if you must, John. But as a TV audience we are wa-a-a-aaay over it.)

Maybe it’s my fatigue, but the questions from the moderators have seemed generally more agressive, and that’s a good thing.

Obama talked over and over about the need to bring the people into the process and to inspire them, that this is the only way to shift the status quo….

In the end, Obama feels like the leader and the front runner. Next Tuesday we’ll see if he really is.

Okay, no more from me. I’m fighting a cold so am going to Zzzzzzzzzzzz. (Please forgive any appalling typos. I’ll catch ‘em in the morning.)

Let me know what you think–about the Dems and Republicans.

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UPDATE: The press releases started arriving in my email box at about 1:30 PM Friday stating that California’s DiFi will be supporting Mukasey’s confirmation. (Color me not surprised. Diane’s always regretted that the U.S. isn’t a monarchy.) Patrick Leahy says NO. Chuck Schumer, who has boxed himself into a corner on this one, is also voting to confirm.

This means Mukasey has the votes to clear the Judiciary committee.

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The opposition to Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey continues to grow as he refuses to say where he stands on waterboarding—specifically, whether or not it is torture.

He has gone so far as to call it “repugnant”—which is just an upstreet way of saying “icky.” But Mukasey says he does not know whether it violates U.S. laws against torture. “I don’t know what the technique is,” he said. Not exactly believable. But, okay, just for discussion’s sake, let’s explore the issue: We’ve all heard the one sentence description of waterboarding, that it’s simulated drowning. But, what is it like really?

It turns out that the term “simulated drowning” isn’t quite accurate. NPR’s Alex Chadwick interviews counterterrorism consultant Malcolm Nance, who has trained hundreds of American service members to be ready for interrogation techniques. Nance has been waterboarded himself, and he’s applied the technique to others. It’s torture, he says , pure and simple. It doesn’t simulate drowning. It is drowning. The only reason that someone to whom it is applied doesn’t actually die, is because the torturer stops.

It turns out that waterboarding has been used as a torture technique since the Spanish Inquisition. The Japanese who used it were tried for war crimes after World War II. And, according to Nance, anyone who calls it by anything other than its real name is simply spinning the facts.

You can hear him describe the precise details of waterboarding here. And then for additional information and views on the subject, go to his blog, where he writes:

We live at a time where Americans, completely uninformed by an incurious media and enthralled by vengeance-based fantasy television shows like “24”, are actually cheering and encouraging such torture as justifiable revenge for the September 11 attacks. Having been a rescuer in one of those incidents and personally affected by both attacks, I am bewildered at how casually we have thrown off the mantle of world-leader in justice and honor. Who we have become? Because at this juncture, after Abu Ghraieb and other undignified exposed incidents of murder and torture, we appear to have become no better than our opponents.

With regards to the waterboard, I want to set the record straight so the apologists can finally embrace the fact that they condone and encourage torture….

“If you support the use of waterboarding on enemy captives,” Nance says, “you support the use of that torture on any future American captives.”

And you not only support it, he says, you have guaranteed it.

Who will complain about the new world-wide embrace of torture? America has justified it legally at the highest levels of government. Even worse, the administration has selectively leaked supposed successes of the water board such as the alleged Khalid Sheik Mohammed confessions. However, in the same breath the CIA sources for the Washington Post noted that in Mohammed’s case they got information but “not all of it reliable.” Of course, when you waterboard you get all the magic answers you want -because remember, the subject will talk. They all talk! Anyone strapped down will say anything, absolutely anything to get the torture to stop. Torture. Does. Not. Work.

The sad, disingenuous performance of Judge Michael Mukasey simply serves as one more disturbing reminder of the fact that we have an administration willing to trade our national honor and the future safety of our service men and women for a technique that gives us the illusion of safety. This isn’t just evil. It’s also….what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, yeah: insane.

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For fifteen years the U.S. government has claimed that the U.S. located Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, was a terrorist organization that funded Hamas.

Hoping to nail down evidence of their nefarious deeds, the feds wire-tapped the Holy Land folks, seized the group’s files, and eventually succeeded in shutting down the organization itself in 2001—all without filing a single charge. Finally, in 2004, the feds arrested five of Holy Land’s top officials, and charged them with a combined 200 criminal counts—ranging from tax violations to materially helping terrorists. (Oh, and by the way, four of the men charged were American citizens.)

The problem was, after fifteen years and a whole lot of American taxpayer money, the government lawyers and investigators couldn’t seem to prove wrongdoing—at least not so far as jury could figure it.

So, on Monday, the trial against those five Holy Land officers collapsed in a mistrial. According to a nicely-reported story by the LA Times’ Greg Krikorian, the whole thing was made stranger by the fact that the two jury holdouts at first failed to vote for conviction, if the jury foreperson is accurate. Or possibly they didn’t vote at all. Things still aren’t clear. Furthermore, the the two holdouts were observed to be sleeping throughout most of the trial and the later deliberations.

But whatever. After a two-month trial and nineteen days of deliberations, the government’s “landmark” terrorism finance case fell in on itself in a smoking pile of awful.

For the record, the Holy Land Officials maintained that the organization had only ever raised money to help the poor of Palestine, particularly children.

The prosecution claimed the Holy Land’s money was sent to “zakats”—charity committees—which were really fronts for terrorist activity.

Key defense testimony came from career diplomat Edward Abington, the former U.S. consul general in Jerusalem and the second-highest ranking intelligence officer in the State Department before his retirement. He told jurors he was briefed daily by the CIA and was never told that any of the zakat committees were under Hamas’ control.

Abington also recalled how he had personally visited each of the zakat charity committees named in the indictment and did not believe they were linked to terrorism.

Last year, one of my Irvine students reported on the arrest and two-year incarceration of another of the Holy Land’s officers, which brought the larger case to my attention. (As it happens, my student did an excellent job researching and writing.)

The case sounded like egregious overreaching then, and even more so now.

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I’d been hearing for a month now that Sy Hersh had a major piece coming out in the New Yorker on the struggle going on inside the Bush administration regarding how, when and with what excuse to attack Iran. Well, as of Sunday, Hersh’s article is finally out online. (It won’t be in the print magazine until next week.) It’s titled “Shifting Targets: The Administration’s Plans for Iran and I strongly recommend that you read it.

A friend of mine who knows Hersh well talked with him at length about the article when Hersh was in the last stages of writing it. He says that Hersh, of necessity, has pulled some punches on this in terms of the urgency of the situation, but the main part of what Hersh knows—what he has been told by insiders (who are leaking to him like crazy because of their own concerns about what the Bush administration is likely to do)—is there in the piece.

As you read, keep in mind that last week the Senate handed the White House what amounts to its tacit permission to attack Iran. They did it in the form of the Kyl-Lieberman Senate resolution. (Hilary voted for it, Obama missed the vote, Edwards condemned it.) The resolution says that the United States should designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization…and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists. Understand, the Islamic Guard is not some rogue group. This is the largest branch of Iran’s military. So what do you think that means?

Okay, now here are a few excerpts from Hersh’s article:
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It is stain enough on our nation’s integrity that, in a moment of reckless cowardice in the face of a bullying administration, the U.S. Congress passed the Military Commissions Act last year. This is the law that, as the New York Times crisply put it in Monday’s editorial, “created a separate, substandard and clearly unconstitutional system of trial and punishment for foreigners.”

Yet, although that dark little piece of legislation is bad, what is far, far worse is the provision contained within it that allowed for the suspension of the Great Writ of Habeas Corpus, which for eight centuries has protected people from being locked up indefinitely without a show of cause.

Today, the Senate is likely to take a step in undoing what it did back 2006, when it votes on the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act.Passage of this bill won’t fix everything, but it will at least reverse the vilest aspect of the Military Commissions Act.

As to why it’s important, the NY Times says it quite well:

The protection from arbitrary arrest, embedded in the Magna Carta and in the Constitution of the United States, is one of the most powerful weapons against tyranny in democracy’s arsenal. Before President Bush, only one American president suspended habeas corpus — Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War — and the Supreme Court duly struck down that arrogation of power.

In 2004, the Supreme Court again affirmed habeas corpus, declaring that Mr. Bush had no right to revoke the rules of civilized justice at his whim for hundreds of foreigners he declared “illegal enemy combatants.” But Mr. Bush was determined to avoid judicial scrutiny of the extralegal system of prisons he created after the Sept. 11 attacks. With the help of his allies on Capitol Hill, he railroaded the habeas corpus suspension through the Republican-controlled Congress.

The administration’s disinformation machine portrayed the debate as a fight between tough-minded conservatives who wanted to defeat terrorism and addled liberals who would coddle the worst kinds of criminals. It was nothing of the kind.

There is nothing conservative about expressing contempt for the Constitution by denying judicial procedure to prisoners who happen not to be Americans…..

....American justice rests on the principle that the only way to protect the innocent is to treat everyone equally under the law.

(The WaPo also has an editorial on the subject worth reading.)

Lawmakers with any sense from both sides of the aisle support this bill.

Let’s hope they don’t blink.

Unfortunately, the bill isn’t a slam dunk. In fact, the National Review ties itself in series of legal Boy Scout knots trying to show how perfectly swell it is to deny Habeas to anyone the government declares, without due process, to be an enemy combatant.

Frankly, the National Review is not just wrong, it should be ashamed of itself.

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PS: I know I’ve mentioned it before, but for my money there is still no better journalistic presentation of the Habeas issue than the segment of This American Life called Habeas Schmabeas. It won a Peabody Award in 2006, and has been updated for 2007.

(Illustration from Salon.com)

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Sunday’s Los Angeles Times has an excellent opinion piece that flags the dangerous trend among U.S. judges to rubber stamp any and all claims of the state secrets privilege by the executive branch. The op ed is written by my writer pal (and UCI boss) Barry Siegel.

And just to help you put Barry’s piece in recent and vivid context, a little memory refresher:

On September 26, 2002, Syrian-born Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, a computer engineer with a smart, pretty wife (who has her own PhD in economics), and two young children, was detained at JFK airport. Arar had stopped in New York on his way back to Ottowa after vacationing in Tunisia. Without allowing Arar real access to a lawyer or anything resembling due process, US officials claimed he had ties to Al Quaeda and, despite the fact he held a Canadian passport, shipped him to Syria as part of the US’s shadowy “rendition” policy. In Syria, Arar was kept in a cell that measured approximately three feet wide, six feet deep and seven feet high—in other words, just about the size of a grave. “The grave,” is how Arar came to think of the place where he would spend the next year of his life, brought out, by his account, only for interrogations, beatings and occasional torture.

Arar was finally released on October 5, 2003, and flew to Montreal the next day, 375 days after U.S. immigration officials arrested him.

When the Canadian Commission of Inquiry issued its report into Arar’s case, Justice Dennis O’Conner stated catagorically that there was no evidence at all that the engineer, father of two, was involved in any kind of terrorist activity. His arrest and subsequent imprisonment, beatings, and torture was an artifact of false and fuzzy info passed to US officials by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that the Americans never bothered to examine at all before shipping Arar off to Syria.

Arar sued the US government for damages over his detainment and rendition to Syria. In February of 2006, US Judge David Trager ruled that the case couldn’t go forward because the court couldn’t possibly interfere in a case involving crucial national security issues. “The need for much secrecy can hardly be doubted,” wrote the judge.

Right.

It’s exactly this kind of blind, “the king can do no wrong” judicial acceptance that Siegel questions.

The retreat of the judiciary has also meant that accused enemy combatants and victims of “extraordinary rendition,” such as Maher Arar and Khaled El-Masri, have not been able to protest their treatment in court. Nor have a variety of penalized whistle-blowers and federal employees making discrimination claims against the government. Nor have contractors embroiled in business conflicts with the military, a scientist defamed by accusations of espionage or a sixth-grade boy investigated by the FBI for corresponding with foreign countries during a school project.

Over time, the desire to protect military secrets has started to look a good deal like the impulse to cover up mistakes, avoid embarrassment and gain insulation from liability.

Anyway, read the whole thing. Barry is particularly equipped to do this commentary as he has just this month turned in the final draft of his new book “Claim of Privilege,” about the 1950 case of U.S. v. Reynolds, and the 1953 precedent-setting Supreme Court decision that started it all.
That historic case, writes Siegel, concerned the crash of an Air Force B-29 two years earlier near Waycross, Ga.

A lawyer for the widows of three civilian engineers who died in that crash wanted the Air Force’s accident report, expecting it would shed light on the cause of the disaster. An assistant U.S. attorney balked, arguing that the report could not be released without seriously hampering national security….

The case went up to the Supreme Court and the secret keepers won. Reynolds became the landmark case invoked ever after whenever an administration wanted—for good or for ill—to keep information hidden.

In the nearly half-century between the Reynolds case and 2001, the U.S. government has invoked the privilege in a total of 64 cases.

In the last six years, the Bush administration has invoked it 39 times.

Many of us have come believe that, more often than not, this knee-jerk claim of secrecy has far more to do with maintaining power at all costs, and covering mistakes, incompetence and negligence than it does anything relating to the safety of the citizens of the United States of America.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of cover-ups, Barry has this note about the original Reynolds case:

Declassified half a century later, the disputed B-29 accident report turned out to tell a tale of military negligence — maintenance failures, missing heat shields, cockpit confusion — not one of national security secrets about a radar guidance system. The government, it seems, was seeking to cover its embarrassment and hide its mistakes, not to protect the country’s security.

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This illustration is from the website of graphic artist John Mavroudis who, together with artist, Owen Smith, created the New Yorker Magazine cover design for last year’s 9/11 anniversary issue. The website shows the interesting visual evolution of the design. (The design above is one of those never used.)

And while we’re on the subject of war and remembrance, I still have one more Voices from the Road installment to post. (I’ll get to it later in the week, I promise.) When it’s posted, it will bring the number interviewed to 37 Americans of various political POVs. But Republican or Democrat, the one most common theme among all those with whom I spoke, is that they want out of the war in Iraq. Some brought it up after my recorder was already turned off. Still, they wanted to talk about it, to at least tell somebody how they felt. Yet, most seemed to have little confidence in their leaders ability or will—on either side of the fence—to accomplish that goal any time soon. Phantom limbs indeed.

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