Law

When law professor (and President of the Evangelical Theological Society) Francis Beckwith converted from evangelical Christianity to Catholicism earlier this year, he made somewhat of a public splash. When he subsequently resigned as a Fellow of the Discovery Institute in July, neither DI nor Beckwith made any public comment. But law professor Peter Irons writes at Ed Brayton’s Dispatches from the Culture Wars blog: Beckwith, who is a recognized scholar on church-state issues, has made no public statement on the reasons for his resignation (and his private comments on those reasons, while revealing, are not for publication, at least now). After Beckwith resigned, the DI quietly removed his bio from its website, and he just disappeared into the ether.Ed Brayton’s blog post is reporting on the addition of a new Discovery Institute Fellow, movie reviewer and culture critic Michael Medved, an intellectual lightweight who believes in Sasquatch. (The link here also includes criticism of Medved for an article about American slavery, but I actually think Medved’s article is better than the critique of it.) As Irons notes in his comment, “In replacing Beckwith with Medved, the DI has traded intellectual substance for Hollywood glitz." And Medved isn’t even a good movie reviewer. ...

The unclassified, for official use only, operations manual for U.S. soldiers stationed at Guantanamo Bay has been leaked to the Internet on the Wikileaks.org website, which is being crushed by traffic at the moment. The manual allegedly contradicts U.S. military claims that the International Committee of the Red Cross has not been denied access to some parts of the facility at Guantanamo. The manual unsurprisingly prohibits soldiers from subjecting prisoners to “abuse, or any form of corporal punishment,” since specific interrogation procedures are no doubt covered in separate classified documents. Still, it’s a good thing to see in writing. A Reuters story at Yahoo has more specifics, and I’m sure we’ll see mirrored copies of the document appearing elsewhere to reduce the load on Wikileaks.org. ...

After Answers in Genesis met with Creation Ministries International in Hawaii to hammer out their differences verbally in mid-August, CMI issued a statement indicating that they had agreed to convert their verbal agreement into a written one over the next 60 days. The time has come and gone, and apparently no written agreement has been reached. CMI’s web pages about their lawsuit are back online. For more information about the dispute, see the “Answers in Genesis schism” label on this blog or the excellent summary at Duae Quartunciae. UPDATE (November 16, 2007): I’ve posted a more detailed account of the settlement breakdown. ...

If you advocate torture and car bombs, how can you have any moral justification for saying that those who use such tactics against us are wrong or evil?

Declan McCullagh live-blogged the U.S. House of Representatives hearing on “Yahoo Inc.’s Provision of False Information to Congress," which was about an incident in which Yahoo responded to a subpoena from the Chinese government for the identity of a subscriber who turned out to be a Chinese reporter, who was convicted of leaking “state secrets." Anybody note anything ironic or hypocritical in these excerpts? 10:20 a.m. ET: Apparently, the Beijing State Security Bureau provided a document to Yahoo–similar to the FBI’s national security letters–to Yahoo China on April 24, 2004. It invoked the term “state secrets” when demanding information about Shi Tao. Callahan never saw the document, which was written in Chinese, before testifying last year. Lantos says Callahan should have demanded a translation before his testimony, and Yahoo should have known that any request invoking state secrets is suspect because “state secrets is a trick phrase used to fabricate phony but devastating (charges against an) innocent person who shares our values in an open and free society." 10:30 a.m. ET Now the two Yahoo execs are being asked to apologize to Shi Tao’s mother, who is sitting in a front row of the hearing room. Lantos: “I would urge you to beg the forgiveness of the mother whose son is languishing behind bars thanks to Yahoo’s actions.” I wonder if Lantos and other Patriot Act supporters will apologize to Americans like Brandon Mayfield (falsely jailed under the Patriot Act) or Sami al-Hussayen (a Webmaster who provided hyperlinks to Muslim sites and was prosecuted under the Patriot Act). 10:45 a.m. ET Rep. Chris Smith, the New Jersey Republican who was chairman of the Foreign Affairs panel last year, is now speaking. He’s saying that “Yahoo knew the police requests had to do with ‘state secrets.’” That may not be as descriptive as he (and the other panelists) seem to think. It seems to me that it’s a catchall term that’s probably invoked regularly by China’s security apparatchiks. It’s not like the police requests said “give us this information so we can put an innocent journalist in jail." 12:20 p.m. ET Now it’s Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican: “Were any of them fired?” He’s referring to Yahoo employees. Rohrabacher again: “Are you going to comply with requests from authoritarian governments in the future?” Callahan replies: “We are looking at ways to operationally and legally structure the entity… so we would not have to do that." 12:52 p.m. ET Lantos again, to Yahoo’s Callahan, excerpted: “Morally you are pygmies… An appallingly disappointing performance. I think we cannot begin to tell you how disappointing Mr. Yang’s and your performance was… attempt to obfuscate and divert… outrageous behavior."Why don’t we see some of this moral outrage from Congress directed at the executive branch of the United States, at a time when 64% of the country disapproves and 50% of the country strongly disapproves of the president’s performance (beating Nixon’s worst performance)?

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars observes that “the US has not only always considered waterboarding to be torture, but has aggressively prosecuted other nation’s for war crimes for using that technique on American POWs,” quoting Judge Evan Wallach: After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: “I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure.” He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. “Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning,” he replied, “just gasping between life and death." ...

From metafilter: When Ron Paul email spam started hitting inboxes in late October, UAB Computer Forensics Director Gary Warner published findings on the spam’s textual patterns and the illicit botnet used to spread it – findings which were picked up by media outlets and tech websites like Salon, Ars Technica, and Wired Magazine’s “Threat Level” blog, the latter in a set of followup posts by writer Sarah Stirland: 1, 2, 3. The Ron Paul fan response was swift and decisive: clearly the botnet was the work of anti-Ron Paul hackers trying to discredit his campaign, and Rudy Giuliani had paid Stirland (and not UAB Computer Forensics) to do a smear piece – as claimed by a YouTube video pointing to posts on RudyGiulianiForum.com. Thus proving, once again, that the Ron Paul campaign’s greatest liability is not so much his far-right conspiracy-driven antifederal libertarianism, but rather the spittle-flecked anger of his own noisiest supporters.There are definitely a lot of nuts among Ron Paul’s supporters. Meanwhile, he raised $3.8 million yesterday (apparently a number revised downward from $4.3 million) in the largest one-day online political fundraiser ever. Intrade currently shows Paul as the third most likely GOP nominee, after Giuliani and Romney. A few other Ron Paul-related blog posts that I realize I’ve neglected to mention here, from Dispatches from the Culture Wars: “Is Ron Paul a Dominionist?" Argues that Paul appears to have much in common with some theocrats. “Sandefur on Ron Paul” Doubts that Paul is a dominionist, but suggests he might be a Thomas DiLorenzo-style neo-confederate who thinks we don’t even need a federal government (in which case he wouldn’t really be the supporter of the Constitution that he seems to be) and that the U.S. Civil War wasn’t about slavery (which is pernicious nonsense). I also just came across this story, which says that Paul would like to see the U.S. Constitution amended to remove the subject of abortion from the purview of the courts, which is yet more anti-constitutional insanity. ...

…read this description of it from Malcolm Nance, former chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school in San Diego: I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people. It has been reported that both the Army and Navy SERE school’s interrogation manuals were used to form the interrogation techniques employed by the Army and the CIA for its terror suspects. What is less frequently reported is that our training was designed to show how an evil totalitarian enemy would use torture at the slightest whim. Having been subjected to this technique, I can say: It is risky but not entirely dangerous when applied in training for a very short period. However, when performed on an unsuspecting prisoner, waterboarding is a torture technique - without a doubt. There is no way to sugarcoat it. ...

Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation responds to criticisms from Chuck Norris. Scary number quoted: Campus Crusade for Christ’s 2006 annual revenue, $497,516,000. (Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars presents some of the evidence that Clinton’s presidency differed in degree, not kind, from Bush’s: If you despise the Bush administration for weakening constitutional protections, zealously increasing executive authority and weakening the checks and balances inherent in our constitutional scheme, preferring secrecy to accountability, being in the pocket of big business and sending American troops on one foreign military adventure after another, you should recognize that the Clinton administration that preceded this one differed only by degree, not kind, on those matters. And there is little reason to believe that a second Clinton administration would be all that much better.The book All the President’s Spin, by the folks who ran the Spinsanity.com blog during Bush’s first term, makes a similar point about how Clinton managed the media. It was under Clinton that we got not one but two attempts to censor the Internet with the Communications Decency Act. On the other hand, there were far fewer American lives lost in military action and we did get the export controls on encryption loosened, so that users of PGP didn’t become criminal exporters of munitions just by carrying a laptop to another country. In a conversation last week, a friend of mine suggested that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency and will demonstrate her military hawkishness by doing something like invading Syria, and will end up making followers out of the right-wingers who currently hate her, ultimately sending us further down the road towards fascism and complete disregard for the rule of law. ...