News-Record.com

Glenn Greenwald's book "How Would a Patriot Act?," which I reviewed here, will debut this Sunday June 11 at No. 11 on The New York Times' Paperback Nonfiction bestseller list.

This is a book that was released May 15 and isn't even in most bricks-and-mortar bookstores yet.

Either I am the Most Influential Book Critic Evah, or Greenwald has caught some lightning in a bottle.

I know which one I'm putting my money on.

Some members of the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggest that the city's tentative response to its report means that real change will have to come from the community, not the City Council.

UPDATE: Story is here.

Via my colleague Jim Young: A re-enactment of the recent Michael Barrett-A.J. Pierzynski baseball brawl ... in LEGO®vision! (The whole event becomes much more understandable when you realize that the ESPN replays didn't show that there was a crossbow involved.)

(Possibly NSFW: language)

One last reminder: The N&R and local blogger Sue Polinsky are co-hosting a get-together at 6:30 p.m. tonight at the News & Record, 200 East Market Street, at which we'll be discussing citizen journalism in general, and possible news-reporting partnerships between you and the N&R in particular. We haven't had a huge number of people say they'll come -- I think my current head count is 10, plus whatever other N&R staffers can drop by -- but some of those who are coming are accomplished bloggers and/or online activists who I'm sure will be bringing good ideas to the table.

It's free, and we'll have some munchies and soft drinks.

You can park for free after 6 p.m. at the metered spaces on Market in front of the building, or in the N&R parking lot (you'll likely need to enter from the Church Street side after 5 p.m.). At this point I don't yet know whether we'll have the front door open, but if we don't, our Church Street entrance is open and staffed by security 24/7.

If you haven't yet responded but think you can come, please shoot me an e-mail before, say, noon today so we'll know how much to get in the way of refreshments. Questions? E-mail me or call 373-7088.

Hope to see you there!

We all know that the Number of the Beast is 666. (Well, except for those who think it might be 616.)

But the Beast apparently has other signifiers, including:

More at the link.

The world's funniest blog not written by Mr. Sun! is back:

Fafblog!

I was delighted with the turnout we had for last night's discussion about citizen journalism, particularly inasmuch as I inadvertently scheduled it opposite a City Council meeting at which some key budget issues were to be thrashed out.

I didn't call the roll, but if I recall correctly, attendees included:

• Sue


• Sean Coon


• David Hoggard


• Bruce Burch


• Cara Michele


• Jon Lowder (from Winston-Salem), who also brought his lovely and talented but (as far as I know) nonblogging wife, Celeste.


• Jill Williams, executive director of the now-disbanded Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission


• Ndesanjo Macha


• Tony Ledford, a nonblogging but frequent commenter at some N&R blogs, particularly Letters to the Editor


• N&R courts reporter Eric Collins, who'll be blogging eventually.

(I'm forgetting some people, I know -- I'm sorry.)

I'd love to be able to give you a neat, chronological summary of the discussion. (Even more, I'd love to be able to link to streaming video and/or a podcast.) But because I was participant as well as observer, and my note-taking was haphazard when I took notes at all, I can't do that.

Some points, though, in no special order:

-- We frequently get asked why we don't do X, or whether we have ever thought about doing Y. Regarding Y, the answer is "probably." But the N&R's news department has an appetite for doing stuff online that exceeds available resources. Our department relies on people in another division, News & Record Interactive, who must divide their time between revenue-generating sites for outside clients and news content for our Web sites (and guess which is the higher priority). Only a few of those folks even work with the News Department, and only one (last I checked) worked directly on the kinds of things that make interacting with the site fun and worthwhile. These folks are very talented and work some very long hours, but there's only so much they can do. One way or another, we're going to have to get more programmers for News, and Editor John Robinson knows that.

-- We're struggling, with a very limited promotional budget or other resources, to reach out to people in the community who might want to join with us in reporting stories for print and online. We believe such people exist, even if they're busy with full-time jobs and families and lives. We want to reach out to them, to remove as many barriers as possible that might keep them from participating with us to the extent that they want to. We're open to any and all ideas, although ideas that don't involve a lot of money or technical expertise (see previous point) stand the best chance of being tested first.

-- We understand we need to reach people where they are, even if where they are is offline. One participant, and I'm sorry I don't recall who it was, suggested we put loaner laptops in the hands of people who don't even own computers and ask them to blog for us for, say, a month at a time. A variation on that suggestion: we loan digital audio recorders to people, then turn what they say into podcasts.

-- At least some people are interested in pulling together a group of people who would review and critique local news coverage by various outlets, along the lines of what was recommended in the Greensboro Truth & Reconciliation Commission's recent report.

A number of people had other suggestions for ways in which the N&R might enhance its Web site and/or improve its transparency and interactivity. I won't list them all here, but I took notes and am forwarding them to the appropriate people here in the building.

Finally, a number of people asked that we meet again soon. I'm looking for July dates now and will post here when we've got a date set. I will definitely try to avoid scheduling opposite City Council meetings, as I inadvertently did last night, as well.

If you were there, feel free to jump in below with anything you think I overlooked.

I've had to follow a trail of blood more times in my life than I like to think about, which is the only reason I bring this up: This morning, when I came into the office, I had to follow a very blood-like trail of spilled coffee up the stairs to the second floor, where the newsroom is. Indeed, the trail was so blood-like I half-expected to find Sam Spade in a trenchcoat slumped against the wall on the second-floor landing, clutching his side with coffee leaking around his fingers.

I found nothing at all, of course.

Question: If I was half-tempted to lick the coffee up off the floor, does that mean I have a caffeine problem?

This just in via e-mail from Downtown Greensboro Inc.:

Vanilla Ice at N Club, Friday June 9th: Members Appreciation Night at Much/NClub featuring Vanilla Ice ...

I guess this is a good thing ... if, by "appreciation," they mean "make them start projectile vomiting" ...

I've been blogging openly, under my real name, for so long -- coming up on two years here; continually for more than four years and off and on since 1997 in my nonwork life -- that I sometimes slip a little into the delusion that what I do is both normal and safe.

It isn't.

In fact, blogging as a defined part of one's job isn't even "normal" in this newsroom, let alone in the U.S. white-collar work force at large. For most people, it also isn't safe. And every once in a while, we get an ugly reminder of that fact.

Blogging, done right, can enhance a lot of businesses. But if you're blogging from work and it's not part of your job, please think twice about that. If you blog anonymously or pseudonymously and having your real name connected with your blogging might create professional or personal problems for you, please reconsider. Is your blogging worth getting fired over, to you?

In a perfect world, our personal opinions wouldn't create any negative consequences for us. In the world we live in, however, they can and do, all the time, and with very limited exceptions you'll have no recourse when it happens. If your employer gets angry over your blogging, you might or might not have the opportunity to quit blogging before you get fired. That's bad enough if you're single and supporting no one but yourself. If you're supporting others, it's infinitely worse.

Even if the worst consequence you might suffer is the hurt feelings of someone you care for, ask yourself whether the pleasure of blogging is worth inflicting that hurt.

Blogging is intoxicating. I know that better than most because I have been more intoxicated than most. But as with any intoxicant, too much, or even a little at the wrong place and time, can result in disaster, and neither the online world nor the real one is particularly forgiving.

So be careful out there.

I started working full-time, by which I mean 35 or more hours a week, in the fall of 1979, my sophomore year of college. And I have worked full-time (by which I mean frequently in excess of 55 hours per week) ever since. That's coming up on 27 years now.

Twenty. Seven. Years.

And in all that time, do you think a single soul -- a friend, a loved one, anyone who cares about me as a person, wants me to succeed in life and has my best interests at heart -- bothered to inform me that you're supposed to wear underwear to work?

No. I have to learn this by reading about it in today's News & Record.

Thanks a lot.

One of the suggestions from participants at Tuesday night's discussion is about to become reality: We're going to start a contest for best reader-submitted photo on our photo blog. Photo editor Rob Brown says we hope to have readers vote weekly, with the weekly winners each getting a small prize and competing at the end of a year for a bigger prize.

More details to come. In the meantime, you can practice by submitting photos now.

What with my real job and all, I've been a little too busy to blog any more about the government's vast, and pretty plainly illegal, electronic-surveillance programs. But at the moment, while I'm awaiting callbacks from sources on a couple of stories, I'll try to get us caught up.

• The government wants Internet companies to keep records on users' activities for two years, USA Today reported June 1. The government says it's to assist in investigating child-porn cases and terrorism cases.

  I don't know for sure whether this is a good idea or a bad idea, but I've got to question giving a blank check to an administration that can't even obey the laws we've already got. Moreover, if gun dealers aren't required to keep records that long, why should ISPs be? Are computers any more likely to be used in child porn than guns are in violent crime?

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney is also quoted as worrying that this measure could make ISPs "an arm of the government." That argument resonates with me because news organizations have to resist precisely that pressure from time to time. Independence doesn't just make our news report more trustworthy, it also makes us better able to do our jobs.

• Even many conservatives understand that fact. One is Mark Corallo, formerly spokesman for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who called current AG Albert Gonzalez' subpoenaing two newspaper reporters over the crime of steroid use in baseball "the most reckless abuse of power I have seen in years."
• A federal judge in Detroit will hold a hearing Monday to rule on a motion by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights to rule the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic-spying program illegal. That seems pretty clearly to be the case from the plain meaning of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but up 'til now, primarily because the administration has been claiming "state secrets" rather than let a case go to a judge, there has been no court ruling either way, even in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Any ruling, one way or the other, likely would be appealed and would lead to more questions that the administration appears most reluctant to answer.
• Meanwhile, the government is more commonly -- and more broadly -- asserting the "state-secrets" privilege to keep from having to defend its actions in court. Ostensibly, it is doing so to protect legitimate national-security secrets, particularly those pertaining to antiterrorism efforts. (It is attempting to do so in the ACLU/CCR lawsuit I just mentioned, for example.) As the article points out, the privilege used to be used to keep particular documents or witnesses out of a legal proceeding, but it is being used increasingly to "to try to snuff out lawsuits at their inception." I think it's valid to ask, if the government says what it's doing is legal, why it appears so afraid to test that claim in a court of law -- even the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
• The American Bar Association has appointed an all-star commission to look at the president's use of more than 750 "signing statements" since taking office to indicate that he would not be bound by parts or all of some bills he has signed into law. Members include Among them are former Rep. Mickey Edwards, R-Okla. (1977-93), Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official under President Reagan, and former FBI director William H. Weld, who served under Reagan and the first President Bush. This is good news. As a layman, I can't see how this president or any other can simply tell Congress that he gets to decide what the law is, so I'm glad that some high-powered lawyers, including prominent Republicans, will be looking at this issue.
• Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who chairs the Judiciary Committee, apparently thinks he's back in fifth grade, to judge from this letter to Vice President Dick Cheney:

  TO: Dick
  FROM: Arlen
  RE: You are such a butthead.

  Hey, I walked right in front of you at the caucus luncheon twice yesterday and you didn't even talk to me. Why won't you talk to me?

  OK, that's not quite what he said, but, boy howdy, it's closer than you'd like to think a United States senator would be capable of getting in a letter intended for public consumption.

  And it would be funny if it weren't about so serious a subject: Specter, who has threatened to use his committee to actually try to hold the administration accountable for its illegal surveillance, is complaining that Cheney has gone behind his back to other committee Republicans in an attempt to shut that effort down. Now, I'm just a journalist in a middle-sized market and not a United States senator or anything, but I'm pretty sure that if I had Specter's gavel and a sitting vice president pulled a stunt like that, I'd be doing a lot more than sending out a whiny letter.

• OK, in fairness to Specter, he is doing more: He's backing down:

  A prominent Republican senator backed away on Tuesday [June 6] from his pledge to question executives from telecommunications companies that have allegedly been cooperating with the government's secret wiretapping program.

  Arlen Specter said that after discussions with the Bush administration and Senate Intelligence Committee colleagues who had been more fully briefed on the National Security Agency program, he was "prepared to defer on a temporary basis" requiring representatives from AT&T, Verizon Communications and BellSouth to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he leads.

  The Pennsylvania senator, who had emerged as one of the few vocal Republican skeptics of the warrantless surveillance, had promised to organize such a hearing after USA Today reported last month that the nation's three leading telecom companies had opened up their lines to the NSA. (Some of those companies have since denied their participation.) He said Tuesday that the companies voiced willingness to discuss the topic in a closed session but wouldn't be able to reveal classified information, a stance he found "insufficient and unacceptable."

  Specter said he was willing to suspend the inquiry largely because Vice President Dick Cheney had provided assurances that the White House would be more receptive to pending legislation -- including a proposal chiefly backed by Specter himself -- that would send the existing NSA program and all future surveillance plans to a special court for review of their constitutionality.
  

• But that's not all Specter's doing. No, he's also actually proposing to effectively eliminate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and retroactively legalize the activities of all, up to and including the president, who violated it. Well. That will show them, huh?

So that's where we are on all this stuff: It looks the judge in Detroit wants to take a hard look at this. But Congress appears not to mind that the NSA is illegally wiretapping Americans or that the vice president is trying to snuff out Congressional oversight. Well, most of Congress -- Sen. Patrick Leahy is complaining: "Why don't we just recess for the rest of the year ... and simply say we'll have no more hearings, and Vice President Cheney will just tell the nation what laws we'll have -- he'll let us know which laws will be followed and which laws will not be followed."

It's as if the two houses of Congress have morphed into Alphonse and Gaston, stumbling over one another in their attempts to hold open the door of lawlessness for the administration.

JR blogs here about the recent New York Times Book Review's list of the most distinguished American fiction in the past 25 years, along with a similar list compiled by North Carolina authors. It sort of puts me in a bind. On the one hand, as an English major I feel sort of obliged to stand up for the discipline. On the other, most of my "pleasure" reading for the past decade or more has been either nonfiction or the kind of trashy, quick-read fiction that wouldn't be mistaken for literature even in the darkest of alleys.

Of the books on the Times list, I've read "Beloved" by Toni Morrison; three of the four Rabbit Angstrom novels; "A Confederacy of Dunces," by John Kennedy Toole; "Winter's Tale," by Mark Helprin (I enjoyed this when it first came out, but I think I must have overlooked a lot of its value, so I should re-read it); "White Noise," by Don DeLillo; "The Counterlife," by Phillip Roth; and "Independence Day," by Richard Ford.

If I were compiling my own list, I'd have to include "Cold Mountain," by Charles Frazier; "A Lesson Before Dying," by Ernest Gaines; "Gospel," by Wilton Barnhardt; and "Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch," by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. The latter is kind of lightweight as literature goes, but never was there a more clever and affectionate satire written -- the only thing in any creative area that I think comes close is Mel Brooks' film "Young Frankenstein."

Most of the nonfiction I read isn't exactly what you'd call literary, but some of it is. As possible contenders in that group, I'd have to throw out "Liar's Poker," by Michael Lewis; "The Killer Angels" by Michael Shaara; "Blood Done Sign My Name," by Tim Tyson; and "To Hate Like This Is to be Happy Forever," by Will Blythe.

Finally, I'll continue JR's meme:

• The book that I stayed up all night reading: "The Stand."
• The book I always recommend to others: "Good Omens."
• Most recent book that gave me an Oprah moment: I'm not sure what an Oprah moment is, so I'll pass on this one.
• The author whose books I buy as soon as they come out: I don't really have one of these.
• The literary character I still miss: Yeah, I miss Travis McGee, too.

The United States trails many other industrialized nations in a number of technological criteria, such as broadband penetration, and last week's House vote against net neutrality is only going to make that situation worse. (The defeat of any net-neutrality proposal in the Senate, should one be offered, is a foregone conclusion.) Back in the good old days, when American politicians at least pretended to prefer free markets to crony capitalism, this would never have happened.

(UPDATE: Here's the roll-call vote so you can see how your congresscritter voted.)

But the consequences of this vote are going to be broad and, for most Americans, unpleasant, inasmuch as it will make us much less competitive in global markets. Meanwhile, guess who's eating our lunch in this regard? Among others, the French. Yeah, you heard me.

If you eat nothing but Diet Coke and Mentos, will you explode?

Maybe:

The Detroit court case about warrantless domestic wiretapping that I mentioned here is being liveblogged, kind of, by Wired.com here.

EW.com picks its 10 greatest movie chase scenes. No. 1 will be no surprise, and of the seven I've seen I can't quarrel with any. But I am surprised that this one didn't make the list.

To our site's RSS feeds, I mean.

We've got feeds up now for almost all our blogs as well as major content categories, all in one place. I'm not clear on what exactly has to happen behind the scenes to make these happen, but I'm delighted they have. If you have suggestions for other RSS feeds you think we need to be offering, please e-mail me or hit the comment link.

I noted a few weeks back that Time magazine had let go the award-winning reporting pair of Donald Barlett and James Steele, apparently because it didn't want to pay them what they were worth.

Time appears to have an interesting concept of "worth." It apparently had no problem paying $4 million for pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's new baby. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen estimates that that money could've kept Barlett & Steele on the Time payroll, with research help, for another 10 years.

Anyone who wants to argue that this makes sense even in business terms is welcome to get in touch with me right after pictures of the baby become, on their own, a bestselling book. I won't be holding my breath.

So Charlotte Observer reporter Michael Gordon and photographer Todd Sumlin just happened to be down at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, this past weekend, doing a feature on the prison's commander (who's from Kings Mountain, 45 minutes or so west of Charlotte), when three inmates hanged themselves.

Gordon, surprise, acted like a reporter: He filed a story. (And at least two others on succeeding days.)

As a reward, he and Sumlin were kicked off the base, and reporters from the Los Angeles Times and the Miami Herald who had arrived to cover the suicides also were ordered to leave.

Pentagon spokesman J.D. Gordon (whose relationship, if any, to Michael Gordon is not characterized), speaks out of both sides of his mouth on this incident. He told the trade magazine Editor & Publisher, "We are not into content management. The issue was that other media were threatening to take us to court." But the same spokesman also said Gordon's reporting had caused "controversy" and added, "He was doing a hometowner [i.e., an article on someone famous by a newspaper in that person's home town], a hometowner takes one day. You would think that a man allowed down for a whole week would be a bit more gracious about it. Have the good grace and class to leave."

Leaving aside the dubious assertion that a decent hometowner necessarily can be done in a day, how dare reporter Gordon do his, you know, job and all?

It would seem that Bumgarner, the prison commander, also suffers from a failure to understand the source of the problem:

But inside the detention facility, military leaders started clamping down on discipline and security in what they say is an effort to stop another round of suicide attempts already being planned.

"Right now, we are at ground zero," an emotional prison commander, Col. Mike Bumgarner told his officers at his [Monday] morning staff meeting.

"The trust level is gone. They [prisoners] have shown time and time again that we can't trust them any farther than we can throw them. There is not a trustworthy son of a ... in the entire bunch."

With that, Bumgarner, a Kings Mountain native, ordered his staff to assess and curtail existing policies on detainee clothing, meals, recreation time, prison lighting and discipline. He ordered more frequent patrols in the cellblocks. He said existing rules on detainee behavior must be enforced quickly and fully.

"If a brother [a term used both by U.S. troops to refer to Muslim prisoners and by male Muslims generally to refer to themselves] covers up a window with a sheet or blanket, you give him an order and then you go get him ...," Bumgarner said.

Later in the day, the colonel said the tougher restrictions would stay in place for the foreseeable future.

"Once I get a better read of things, I can manage a better balance of their quality of life with the security of this facility."

I'm all for more frequent patrols to prevent suicide. But the rest of it? Let's see: Suicide = betrayal of the commandant's trust. Degrading the quality of life of hundreds of prisoners -- in a facility where quality of life is already so bad that five United Nations experts have called for its closure -- is justified because of the suicides of three and the alleged planning of suicide of several more. Quality of inmate life and facility security constitute a zero-sum game.

And war is peace and ignorance is strength.

And it ain't just Bumgarner and Gordon:

"These men are smart, creative and committed, and they have no regard for life, neither ours nor their own," Guantanamo Bay commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris said Saturday during a news conference in Miami.

"We have men who are committed to al-Qaida and the Taliban. They were captured on the battlefield. They are continuing their fight against us here."

Yeah. And suicide is just a good PR move.

In fact, none of the three had been charged with a crime, although they'd been held for more than two years with little access to lawyers or courts. And at least one was going to be released soon, although he hadn't been informed of that fact.

Since Pentagon spokesman Gordon feels up to telling us how to do our jobs, I'm going to tell tell him how to do his: Stop treating prisoners so badly they come to see suicide as preferable. Stop violating international law. And stop whining about the media when your problems are a direct result of your organization's behavior.

(Full disclosure: I've got family and friends who work at the Observer, but I don't know either reporter Gordon or photographer Sumlin.)

The state of New Jersey has subpoenaed records of five phone companies to try to determine whether they violated state consumer-protection laws.

The government, predictably, sued on Wednesday, claiming that complying with the subpoenas would endanger national security.

You'll have to pardon me for being skeptical of that claim. We managed to win the Cold War without this level of federal paranoia, so I've got to wonder whether there isn't something else going on here.

What a week. And it's only Wednesday.

Yesterday morning we learned that numerous federal, state and local police agencies have bought Americans' phone records from private data brokers without obtaining the legally required warrants or subpoenas for them. The federal agencies known to have done so include the Department of Homeland Security and a number of Justice Department agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals' Service.

The liberal Americablog first drew wide attention to the problem of these brokers in January when it bought retired Gen. Wesley Clark's cell-phone records from one of the brokers. In a display of bipartisanship not seen since 9/11 or the Pleistocene Era, whichever came most recently, the House voted 409-0 to ban such sales (HR 4709). Funny thing, though: A related bill, HR 4943, the "Prevention of Fraudulent Access to Phone Records Act," which also had been introduced, "disappeared" from the legislative calendar after USA Today broke the story about the government's illegal gathering of our phone records. There's been no action on the bill whatsoever and none has been scheduled. Meanwhile, the Senate version of the bill passed unanimously by the House (S 2177) has sat untouched since being introduced and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee in January.

Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., head of the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee, says he's going to be holding hearings this week on the issue. Good for him, but the way Congress has been handling its oversight responsibilities in general and legislation on this subject in particular of late, I'll believe it when it happens.

Meanwhile, after earlier reports of an AT&T center in San Francisco being used to monitor Americans' phone activity, Salon.com is now quoting two former AT&T employees as saying the company operated at least one other such center near St. Louis.

If you don't care about this illegality, maybe you'll care that the best solution to the problem right now appears to be coming from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

A final note: U.S. Rep. Howard Coble, the Republican whose 6th District includes much of Guilford County, chairs the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security, so he might have some jurisdiction over this issue. If you have strong feelings one way or another about this issue, you can e-mail him here.

UPDATE: The House Judiciary Committee, on a voice vote (i.e., it's not immediately clear who voted how), this morning passed a resolution calling on the National Security Agency to "turn over all requests made by the National Security Agency and other federal agencies to telephone service providers to obtain information without a warrant." Because this is a resolution, not a subpoena, it has no legal force unless/until the full House approves it. Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc., says that if the NSA doesn't comply, that's exactly where he'll go.

I'm unsure how serious Sensenbrenner is about this. Part of me thinks that if he were serious, he'd have asked his committee to vote out a subpoena from the git-go, inasmuch as the administration obviously does not want any legislative or judicial oversight of its warrantless surveillance and has resisted every effort thus far by either of those branches to exercise any. Still, Sensenbrenner is at least saying the right things, so we'll see what happens.

Anyone whose biggest pet office peeve is ringing cell phones is blessed beyond measure and just needs to stop whining.

As I continue work on an article examining the issues of conspiracy and intentionality raised by the Truth & Reconciliation report, a rigorous discussion -- 39 comments, as I type this -- of what should happen as a result of the report is going on over at Ed Cone's place. Like Ed, I think Mr. Sun's comment in that thread is of particular interest. In fact, it seems to be the one point anyone in the thread has made so far around which there has been much agreement, although the notion that p. 382 should be excised from the report may be coming up fast in the stretch.

One of the subplots of the delightfully twisted 1989 movie "Heathers," which I last saw probably right after it came out on video, was, if I remember correctly, the notion that a pop song called "Teenage Suicide (Don't Do It)" could actually convince kids not to commit suicide (and hit No. 1 on the pop charts). Now, this subplot was taking place against the backdrop of a plot in which the main character and her boyfriend are killing off other students and making those deaths look like suicides, but the movie's tone with respect to the song was pretty clear: it was inane.

So I'm pretty sure the people making this public-service announcement either didn't see "Heathers" or didn't get it if they did.

Geoffrey Chaucer doth interviewe -- ahem, interviews -- Paris Hilton:

GC: Telle me aboute a daye yn the lyfe of Parys Launcecrona.

PL: Ywis, Y do rise from my bowere and do washe myn selfe, and then, lyk, Y throwe the watir doun to the strete for to coole the browes of poore men and labourers. For Y am lyk alle aboute the charitee.

I mentioned earlier that I've been working on a story examining some issues of conspiracy raised by the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission's recently released report. That article is now finished and, as I type this, is schedule to run on Sunday.

Related at least somewhat to the Greensboro TRC report is the fact that Wilmington recently underwent a similar process in regard to the violent overthrow in 1898 of a legitimately elected city government -- the only such case in U.S. history. Local blogger Sean Coon has a couple of posts on the issue and its Greensboro connections. Sean in turn links to the Wilmington report and an outstanding radio program on the subject. As I said in the comments, I'm 46 and have lived in this state all but a few months of my life, and I was past 40 before I ever heard anything about the events of 1898.

Ladies and gentlebloggers of Blogsboro ...

You've sparred with him in our Letters to the Editor.

You've grappled with him at Ed Cone's place.

He's one of those commenters who takes such delight in commenting that people frequently invite him to start his own blog ... and now he has done it.

Please welcome ... Bubba's Noteworthy! Go show him some love.

My article is now online here; please leave a comment or e-mail me if you have a comment or question.

The New York Times' report Friday on the administration's secret surveillance of financial transactions appears to me to have drawn more than the usual amount of blogospheric complaint. (UPDATE: Times Executive Editor Bill Keller responds to the criticism here.)

I think this is true for two reasons: First, although the program doesn't use warrants or subpoenas, that fact doesn't make it dead-bang illegal the way the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does the administration's warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens' phone calls and Internet traffic. (For one thing, it involves a Europe-based cooperative.) Second, unlike the circumventing-FISA program (which needs a short, descriptive name not ending in "-gate," IMHO), which has produced no antiterrorism successes that we know of, the bank program, the Times reports, has had some successes.

Typically, after reports such as this, bloggers who support the president have criticized the media for their reports, while bloggers who oppose the president have supported the media, although the level of support has varied according to the clarity, or lack thereof, of the media issues involved. But with this report, even some bloggers who can be counted on to criticize the president are pronouncing themselves, at the least, ambivalent on the question of whether or not the Times should have reported on the program. (When anyone at Glenn Greenwald's blog, which has criticized the president unrelentingly, posts that at the least there are issues to be discussed, then I think it certain that there are, indeed, issues to be discussed.)

The response of the administration-supporting blogs, however, appears generally to be far less ambivalent: It's treason.

On this particular issue, I don't know whether the Times should have reported what it did or not. I'm inclined to think that if the program is legal and providing some benefit, AND if disclosing it would limit or eliminate future benefits, then reporting on it would be wrong. At the same time, I find it difficult to believe that terrorists such as al-Qaeda who have relied on wire transfers to move money around the world would not have suspected that such transfers were being monitored.

That said, the Times is up against a context it ignores at the country's peril (and which Keller's letter, linked in the update above, does not address): the repeated failure of this administration to recognize, and act within, existing law. From torture to wiretapping, the administration repeatedly has chosen to act as if settled law does not in fact exist, and frequently to lie about its actions in these areas. If the administration tells The New York Times the program is legal and effective, and that reporting about it will cause harm to national security, why should the Times believe the administration this time when doing so in the past has led it, and the nation, to grief?

These are complex questions. They need to be dealt with forthrightly, dispassionately and fairly.

Moreover, pre-emptive claims of "Treason!" proceed from the presumption that the accusers know not only what the accused did but why he/she did it. In the case of the Times, the closest accusers can come is a sort of implied inference that because publication would inevitably damage the country's ability to fight terrorism, then causing that damage must have been the Times' reason for publishing.

That's an awful lot of as-yet-unsupported suppositions. In addition, one could just as reasonably -- and perhaps more so -- infer that because the administration's approach to fighting Islamicist terror has been so flawed (protection of our ports, anyone?), the administration must have intended to allow us to remain vulnerable and thus is guilty of treason.

I suggest we start by focusing on actions and facts before we move on to examination of motivation. And I suggest we examine motivation very carefully before hurling accusations of treason.

And I suggest we all remember that competence, in journalism and government, carries a moral component.

UPDATE: Oh, dear. Looks like if we're going to shoot reporters for doing their jobs (comment at 0157 6/24) or figure out ways for them to die of "heart attacks" (comment at 1220 6/24), we're first going to have to execute the Treasury Department's Undersecretary for Enforcement. Plus which, it looks like this secret program actually wasn't all that secret.

Oh, well.

Well, yes and no, if journalism ethicist Ed Wasserman's Miami Herald column is to be believed:

... I'm interested in a related phenomenon, which has less to do with overall numbers than with a generational shift.

When you consider who is being discarded in the various waves of right-sizing that the news business has indulged in to keep its owners, if not its customers, satisfied, you stumble on the unsettling truth that the advance guard of an entire newsroom generation is being shown the door, 10 or 15 years before they would, in the normal course of things, have finished their working lives. ...

I had a conversation a year or two ago with an ex-reporter, who had long experience covering national security, about why his newspaper, one of the country's best, had fallen into lockstep in reporting credulously on the run-up to the Iraq war and had underplayed fierce dissent within our government. He said, essentially, that the coverage decisions were being made by people who weren't acquainted with the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the Iran-contra affair, or the other landmark late 20th century instances of official U.S. deceit or ineptitude. So they got snookered.

That was a disturbing answer. It made me realize that managing generational change is a delicate matter of achieving a balance of memory and energy, the seasoned and the fresh, certainty and skepticism. It's a matter not of lowering costs, but of carefully calibrating a newsroom culture. And it's a challenge that, I'm afraid, is being blown.

I'm more than a year into newsroom codgerdom being old enough to sue for age discrimination, should I be so moved. That's kind of sobering, inasmuch as I've been saying for a while now that 50 is the new 30, or at least the new 35.

On the other hand, I still think this Internet thingie is a passing fad, I still haven't figured out what "blugging" is and you kids need to get off my lawn.

Remember how Congress was all set back in January to clean up lobbying? Eh, not so much:

Committee chairmen once predicted the bill would be finished in March, but the Senate did not pass its ethics bill until March 29 and the House passed its version May 3. The House has yet to name negotiators to draft the final package.

Legislators and public-interest group advocates say the most likely result this year is a minimalist package that would allow members to say they have responded to the Abramoff situation and other scandals but would do little to crimp their ability to accept lobbyist favors.

The change, these people say, reflects a calculation that the political storm has mostly passed and that the need for more intrusive efforts to alter the congressional culture and the lobbyist-lawmaker relationship is less urgent.

Several students attending this year's Eastern Music Festival here in Greensboro have a blog. Go check 'em out.

Letter to the Editor, Denver Post, 6/26/06:

Why have those who have continually howled at our treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo met the recent kidnapping and sadistic and brutal murders of our two young soldiers with deafening silence? Where is your outrage now? Not only should we behead 100 prisoners in retaliation (complete with Web-posted snuff videos), but also the editors, commentators, college professors and left-wing congressmen who would suddenly break their silence to come out in support of these enemy jihadists. We need to stop listening to these sanctimonious hypocrites who apply the rules of war only to our side. Let us untie the hands of our troops and allow them to fight and win.

Dave Petteys, Littleton

It's tempting to write off the controversy over The New York Times' reporting on surveillance of financial transactions as utterly meaningless. So tempting. And yet ...

I do not mean to say the Times did anything illegal, even though that's what the president and vice president have been saying. Quite the contrary: Although classified, the program had been no secret at all, and if you doubt me, then take the word of one of the president's own counterterrorism experts:

"There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. "The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."

(UPDATE: Additional background here from former banker TBogg and his banking commenters on just how widely known (outside the U.S.) SWIFT and its capabilities are.)

That being the case, it's a little unclear why the program was classified in the first place, although that classification is consistent with the administration's policy of decreasing public access to the workings and records of government -- a policy that predates 9/11.

It also raises a question: Do the president and vice president not know the Times (and the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal) did nothing wrong? I don't know. And if they do know it, then why are they saying what they're saying? I don't know that, either. (UPDATE: Media critic Dan Kennedy hazards a hypothesis:

The White House and its defenders also give the game away by refusing to differentiate between the NSA no-warrant wiretapping program -- obviously illegal, given that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires warrants -- and the SWIFT program, which appears to be on more solid legal ground.

By lumping them together, folks like U.S. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., make it clear that they're only interested in scoring points against the media.

(Why score points against the media? To energize their voting base for the fall elections, if in fact "scoring points against the media" is what they're trying to do and they aren't honestly mistaken.)

What I do know is that the incident has sparked a wave of pro-administration protest that the Times, the reporters and senior editors should be prosecuted for espionage, if not treason. Some commenters are even calling for vigilantism, as in this post at the Powerline blog, the one that took credit for taking down Dan Rather:

It is unfortunately past time for the Bush administration to enforce the laws of the United States against the New York Times. The Times and its likeminded media colleagues will undoubtedly continue to undermine and betray the national security of the United States until they are taught that they are subject to the same laws that govern the conduct of ordinary citizens, or until an enraged citizenry decides, like Bill Keller, to take the law into its own hands and express its disagreement some other way.

Nice First Amendment you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.

Well, I would remind the Powerline boys, secure in their Minnesota law offices, of a couple of things.

First, they've been wrong on pretty much every legal issue involving the administration to come down the pike. (UPDATE: There's even a law about this, to go along with those of Murphy and Godwin, called Ezra's Law, coined by Ezra Klein: "Powerline ... has no bleeping idea what they're talking about at any given moment.") They don't deal in law on their blog; they deal in stroking some very paranoid fantasies.

Second, this is North Carolina. Down here, even the journalists carry guns.

Y'all have a nice day.

TO: House Speaker Dennis Hastert
FROM: Lex
DATE: 29 June 2006
RE: Your little temper tantrum

Yo, Self-Serving Fat Boy: Before you get your panties in a wad over The New York Times (and The Wall Street Journal, don't forget, although for some reason defenders of the administration always do) "disclosing" a program whose existence was only slightly more secret than the fact that the sky is blue, you might want to have a word with one of your friends:

No one would have mentioned his name at all if President George W. Bush hadn't singled him out in public. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, West Point '76, is not someone the Army likes to talk about. He isn't even listed in the directory at Fort Bragg, N.C., his home base. That's not because McChrystal has done anything wrong—quite the contrary, he's one of the Army's rising stars—but because he runs the most secretive force in the U.S. military. That is the Joint Special Operations Command, the snake-eating, slit-their-throats "black ops" guys who captured Saddam Hussein and targeted Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

JSOC is part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to "work the dark side" after 9/11. To many critics, the veep's remark back in 2001 fostered his rep as the Darth Vader of the war on terror and presaged bad things to come, like the interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But America also has its share of Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls "the shadows." And McChrystal, an affable but tough Army Ranger, and the Delta Force and other elite teams he commands are among them.

After the Zarqawi strike, multinational forces spokesman Gen. Bill Caldwell refused to comment on JSOC's role, saying, "We don't talk about when special operating forces are involved." But when Bush revealed to reporters that it was McChrystal's Special Ops teams that had found Zarqawi, Caldwell had to gulp and say (to laughter), "If the president of the United States said it was, then I'm sure it was."

Just sayin'.

Now, don't we have some terrorists to catch and an executive branch to oversee? Why, yes, we do. So put the Constitution down, hand me your scissors and go do your freakin' job.

Oh, and Denny? Last time I checked that Constitution, you worked for me and not the other way 'round, so I don't give a flying flip at a rolling doughnut what you "expect."

Alexis de Tocqueville, author of "Democracy in America," is reputed to have said, "America is great because she is good, and if she ever ceases to be good, then she shall cease to be great." There's no evidence he ever actually said it ... not in "Democracy in America," anyway. But it's an interesting saying nonetheless, and a noble idea: that what we do as a nation, how well or poorly we live up, in the real world, to the values and virtues we espouse, is the true measure of our greatness.

Thanks to the Supreme Court, we took a huge step back toward greatness this morning.

The court ruled 5-3 (with Chief Justice Roberts, who did not participate because he participated in the appeals-court ruling that brought the case to the high court, abstaining) in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the military commissions established by President Bush at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, violate both military-justice laws and the Geneva Convention.

But according to Marty Lederman at ScotusBlog, who knows a whole lot more about this stuff than I do, those commissions are the least of the issue (all emphases in original):

More importantly, the Court held that Common Article 3 of Geneva* applies as a matter of treaty obligation to the conflict against Al Qaeda. That is the HUGE part of today's ruling. The commissions are the least of it. This basically resolves the debate about interrogation techniques, because Common Article 3 provides that detained persons "shall in all circumstances be treated humanely," and that "[t]o this end," certain specified acts "are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever"—including "cruel treatment and torture," and "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment." This standard, not limited to the restrictions of the due process clause, is much more restrictive than even the McCain Amendment. See my further discussion here.

This almost certainly means that the CIA's interrogation regime is unlawful, and indeed, that many techniques the Administation has been using, such as waterboarding and hypothermia (and others) violate the War Crimes Act (because violations of Common Article 3 are deemed war crimes).

So by a 5-3 vote, the high court is telling the administration, in effect, "What part of 'No torture!' do you not understand?" It's a shame -- or, more accurately, a crime -- that it had to come to this, but at least the Supremes are saying what decent Americans already know: Torture has no place in our national policy.

But wait! There's more!

Near the bottom of page 3 of the ruling, Justice Stevens, writing for the majority, says:

Neither the AUMF [Authorization for the Use of Military Force] nor the DTA [Detainee Treatment Act] can be read to provide specific, overriding authorization for the commission convened to try Hamdan. Assuming the AUMF activated the President’s war powers, see Hamdi v. Rumsfeld*, 542 U. S. 507, and that those powers include authority to convene military commissions in appropriate circumstances, see, e.g., id., at 518, there is nothing in the AUMF’s text or legislative history even hinting that Congress intended to expand or alter the authorization set forth in [Article 21 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice*].

(For those of you wondering, this is what an "originalist" court ruling looks and sounds like: If you are the president and Congress had wanted you to do something, it would have written a law enabling you to do something. And it came from the pen of Stevens, perhaps the most liberal member of the court. Think about that the next time you hear anyone complaining about "activist" judges.)

Now, this finding applies not only to the particular type of military commission being used against plaintiff Hamdan, it also would appear to destroy one of the two legal arguments being used to support the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic wiretapping program. Supporters, including but not limited to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, have argued that the Authorization for Use of Military Force against the 9/11 attackers authorized warrantless domestic wiretapping, which otherwise would have been a clear criminal violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Looks like we can put a fork in that argument. And if you're wondering why the administration has fought so hard to keep any and all litigation over FISA violations from getting into court (even the secret FISA court), well, now you probably know.

UPDATE: Looks like the Court also has kicked the legs out from under the other argument in favor of warrantless domestic wiretapping, that it's implicitly approved in the president's constitutional warmaking powers. This argument appears to run up against the high court's 1952 ruling in Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer, in which justices basically said that presidents cannot use their constitutional warmaking authorities to claim authority to do X if Congress already has explicitly barred X. Indeed, lawyer Glenn Greenwald notes, Justice Kennedy explicitly referred to Youngstown in his concurring opinion.

(Because violations of FISA were not at issue in this case, this means nothing from a practical standpoint unless the administration is publicly willing to acknowledge that its flimsy legal arguments justifying criminal violations of FISA have just been blown out of the water. But that's exactly what today's ruling has done.)

If we let one branch of government destroy the rule of law, the Bill of Rights and the other things that make America the great country that it is, then whatever al-Qaeda might or might not do is unimportant: We will have ceased to be good, and we therefore will have ceased to be great. Today's ruling is an enormous good, affirming the importance of the rule of law, and points us once again toward greatness.

Now let's see whether the administration will follow the law.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald explains in more detail here what Geneva Article 3 requires, and how the administration has failed to meet those requirements, i.e., broken the law.

UPDATE: It is true that most of what the court barred today would be legal if the administration had simply asked Congress to write laws making it so. And that could still happen, although I can't imagine the Back-Out-of-the-Geneva-Convention-and-Legalize-Torture Act of 2006 would have much backing.

Still, whatever you might think of the merits of that approach, it would have the virtue of working within the same system that has worked so well for us since the Constitution was ratified. And, really, that's all I ask: that we act in a way consistent with our espoused principles and that we follow the law.

*Links not in original