Sorry POWs, you actually weren't tortured.

NYT reports detaineee interrogation instructions found to have been

...copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

How convenient. When these tactics are being used against our soldiers, we call it torture. But when it comes to the U.S. using identical methods, we'll tear apart Geneva on the basis of prison location, type of prisoner, etc.-- because those are the variables that constitute torture, not the actions.

Supreme Court decides U.S. Constitution applies at Guantánamo

From the NYT, Thursday's Supreme Court decision regarding the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba

...granted detainees the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts, meaning that federal judges will now have the power to check the government’s claims that the 270 men still held there are dangerous terrorists.

[...]

Detainees’ lawyers have long claimed that the government will not be able to justify the detention of many of the men. Pentagon officials, on the other hand, have maintained that classified evidence establishes that many of them are dangerous. The federal courts will now have the power to sort through those claims.

And regarding Habeas Corpus (a means of seeking relief from unlawful detention, such as that a prisoner must be charged with a specific crime or released, a prisoner's right to an attorney and the right to present evidence of innocence):

The question of whether detainees have habeas rights has long been a central issue in the battle over Guantánamo. Scores of such cases had been in the courts before Congress sought to strip federal judges of the power to hear them. Habeas suits by virtually all the 270 detainees are now expected to commence or be revived, lawyers said.

Such cases give federal judges broad powers to review the government’s reasons for holding a prisoner. But once a judge is satisfied that there is a legitimate basis, a case can end quickly with a ruling in the government’s favor.

“Habeas is not a ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a detainees’ lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “It just provides a fair, legitimate and independent sorting process to determine who should and who should not be held.”

Update: McCain and Obama Split on Justices’ Guantánamo Ruling

McCain: "...it obviously concerns me. These are unlawful combatants; they’re not American citizens."

Obama: "This is an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law, and rejecting a false choice between fighting terrorism and respecting habeas corpus."

Winos unite!

Red wine might be even better for you than previously thought. The chemical, reservatol, found in small amounts in some red wines helps fight the decline of tissue.

NYT reports

Serious scientists have long derided the idea of life-extending elixirs, but the door has now been opened to drugs that exploit an ancient biological survival mechanism, that of switching the body’s resources from fertility to tissue maintenance. The improved tissue maintenance seems to extend life by cutting down on the degenerative diseases of aging.

Plus, wine gets me fuxed up.

No surprise here

Regarding the Justice Department's report released yesterday that states FBI agents repeatedly complained about interrogation techniques used in Guantánamo Bay:

From the Washington Post

Nearly half of the 450 FBI agents who worked at Guantanamo reported that they had observed or heard about military interrogators using a variety of harsh interrogation techniques on detainees, with the most common being sleep deprivation and short-shackling -- or locking a detainee's hands and feet together to prevent comfortable sitting or standing -- for long periods of time.

Military officials at Guantanamo Bay used some aggressive techniques before they were approved, possibly in violation of Defense Department policy and U.S. law, the report said. They also continued to use "stress positions" and other such techniques well after they were prohibited by Defense Department policy in January 2003, the report said.

and from the NYT

FBI agents at the base created a “war crimes file” to document accusations against American military personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file, a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday.

[...]

Many of the abuses the report describes have previously been disclosed, but it was not known that F.B.I. agents had gone so far as to document accusations of abuse in a “war crimes file” at Guantánamo...Sometime in 2003, however, an F.B.I. official ordered the file closed because “investigating detainee allegations of abuse was not the F.B.I.’s mission,” the report said.

And as a conclusionary measure, in one of her best articles on the CIA interrogation tapes "The Harm Initiative: How We Got Hoodwinked Into Tolerating Abusive Interrogations", from Dahlia Lithwick a few months ago

John Yoo and Steven Bradbury [from the Office of Legal Counsel at the DoJ] think that an interrogation method is torture only if it produces irrevocable damage. But long after the torture tapes are forgotten, what may be irrevocably damaged is our capacity for outrage.

The blue lights are watching (well, sort of).

The Baltimore Sun is reporting that the city will be removing some blue light cameras as they modernize their video surveillance systems.

Police have complained for years about the limitations of the [current systems] which must be monitored on site with a laptop-style controller.

So the cop has to be near the camera in order to monitor the video. Doesn’t that defeat the point? Couldn’t they just stick their head out the window and watch the drug deals live?

The new units will be wired back to monitoring systems, but that still won’t solve the main issue. Even when the police are armed with video showing an alleged crime, the image quality is so poor that a prosecutor can’t use it.

"They are an expensive operation [at $30,000 apiece], and for the purpose of prosecution and evidence they really have had very little effect on building more cases," said Margaret Burns, a Jessamy spokeswoman.

Not so fast though! The article does tell us about one crime solved using the cameras!

A camera positioned at Calhoun and Cumberland streets did help homicide detectives solve a November 2006 murder. In that case the footage documented an assailant as he used a tree branch to bash a man sleeping on a park bench. The victim then fell to the ground, and the suspect left him for dead. Homicide detectives found the assailant's cell phone and located his sister. Though the footage was hard to make out, police said, she was able to identify her brother as a suspect.

Is this really the best they could come up with? Not only is this example almost two years old, the cell phone was the main mystery-solver, not the camera. Plus, the suspect had a bitch of a sister.

Apparently though, some neighborhoods clamor for a camera to be installed on their blocks as they act as a deterrent. The article states that on average, outdoor crime falls 7% after a blue light camera has been installed.

They could just install fake cameras (which would be equally effective if the main use is as a deterrent), but we’re spending free money here so who cares?

American-led humanitarian invasion in store for Myanmar?

From Robert Kaplan of the NYT, this sounds like another fun situation for us to stick our noses in help out with:

There is an increasing degree of chatter about the possibility of an American-led invasion of the Irrawaddy River Delta.

...Because a humanitarian invasion could ultimately lead to the regime’s collapse, we would have to accept significant responsibility for the aftermath. And just as the collapse of the Berlin Wall was not supposed to lead to ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, and the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein was not supposed to lead to civil war, the fall of the junta would not be meant to lead to the collapse of the Burmese state. But it might.

...It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone. But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward.

And you thought mini-feed was invasive...

In an agreement with 49 attorneys general, Facebook is vamping up its safety policies. They will have a new "Report Abuse" icon and users under 18 will have to read their new "Safety Tips" upon signing up.

NYT also reports

Facebook will also no longer let people significantly change their ages without review and has agreed to take down within 24 hours any material flagged as inappropriate...The company is developing behavioral technology to weed out fibbers...Such technology could, for example, identify when someone is friends with people of a significantly different age — an indication that perhaps an older person is trying to contact young people.

I'm sure the only people that read the new "Safety Tips" will be the people who read "User Agreement and Guidelines" contracts while installing software.

And predators...make sure you get your age right the first time.

This is all well-intentioned obviously but it seems a bit much. As far as I know it's not illegal to friend someone online that is a different age than you. What are they going to do with these flagged people? Send their names to the FBI, or worse: Chris Hansen? And don't most predators pose as minors anyway?

This all comes down to users not being idiots. The updates Facebook has made to its privacy tools in the last year or so are great and more than enough to protect yourself.

While the above child-related plans sound fancy enough, they won't make a difference. For the most part, kids that get themselves into these issues are stupid to begin with or have parents that are neglectful in their guidance. No amount of government intervention or company changes are going to solve those problems.

Coming up: "Users required to submit birth certificates and fingerprints to Facebook"

Another plant to worry about

So maybe this is what all of those "legal marijuana" ads and spam emails are about. Yesterday's article on Slate about Salvia Divinorum and the upcoming (potential) prohibition about it states the plant (which is not marijuana) causes, for about 5-20 minutes

visions; feelings of fright; loss of physical coordination; uncontrollable laughter; confusion; feelings of being underground, or underwater, or flying, or floating; experiences of "non-Euclidean" spaces; and more

So far, eight states have made it illegal, with sixteen more considering it (illegal in Delaware, still legal in Maryland). But according to the government in 2006, less than two million people have tried it in their lifetime and no deaths have been recorded as a result of it.

So, uh...what are we panicking about again?

Suspicions confirmed: I learned nothing in college

"America's Most Overrated Product: the Bachelor's Degree"

Some highlights:

• "50 percent of college seniors scored below "proficient" levels on a test that required them to do such basic tasks as understand the arguments of newspaper editorials or compare credit-card offers."
• "Almost 20 percent of seniors had only basic quantitative skills."
• "The percentage of college graduates deemed proficient in prose literacy has actually declined from 40 to 31 percent in the past decade."

So not only will my B.A. become more and more worthless as the market becomes more saturated with college graduates, it is further devalued by the fact that employers realize that a degree pretty much means nothing about a person's skill level.

And nicely put by the author:

Colleges are quick to argue that a college education is more about enlightenment than employment... 44.6 percent [of college freshmen] said they were not satisfied with the quality of instruction they received. Imagine if that many people were dissatisfied with a brand of car: It would quickly go off the market. Colleges should be held to a much higher standard, as a higher education costs so much more, requires years of time, and has so much potential impact on your life.

At least I'll be able to woo employers with my legal education. Oh wait, I won't learn anything there either.

Teenage singer has breasts beneath clothes

Why is this Miley Cyrus photo controversial? People reports that Cyrus posed for

...a racy, as-yet unreleased Vanity Fair photo shoot in which she appears to be nude...

Are teenage girls not allowed to admit they have naked bodies? I honestly don't know if these photos would have been made a big deal if Cyrus herself hadn't started this by stating,

I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be 'artistic' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed.

I guess I'm off America's puritan pulse, but about what is she embarrassed? And why is she drawing this scrutiny to herself?

Vanity Fair article and photos here

My feet are dirty but happy

Confession: I am forever barefoot, even while making copies in my office. I don't like to wear shoes, and when I must, I try to stay away from standard functional shoes.

Luckily though, New York Magazine is reporting that barefoot and moccassin-type shoes are back on the "Healthy" list. I am a believer after this experience:

About three months ago, I was in need of new flip flops. I wandered around the shoe store, and stopped at the Reef display. I was extremely impressed by their arch, which is about 3/4" higher than the rest of the sole. $40 later, I thought my feet will be so happy this summer while caressing my new arched flip flops.

I left for Florida a few days later and wore them for a week straight. As I traipsed around to restaurants and the beach, I developed a limp. The seemingly glorious rubber and leather fulcrum felt like it breaking my foot bones with each step.

I assumed that my shoe habits had destroyed my feet and that I now had to undo the damage. Determined to break in my Reefs, I eventually pulled through. I also bought some Dr. Scholl's arches that I later realized wouldn't fit in my mocassins.

The article says though, that after studying different modern civilizations, those that do not wear shoes (Zulus, in this case) have the healthiest and most similar feet to those of our ancestors 2000 years ago. It explains how we and most of the world have ruined our feet and gait by applying padding, raised heels and arches to a tool that was originally only supposed to protect us from thorns and the occasional stubbed toe.

Damn, had it right the first time.

Original article: How We're Wrecking Our Feet With Each Step We Take

A cure for vegans who crave bacon?

For a few years, I was a vegetarian. After expressing that I had thought about breaking my carcass boycot, a friend gave me a bag of beef jerky as a joke. I succumbed to temptation within a few hours.

The NYT is reporting that PETA is now offering a million dollars to the first person to come up with

...tissue cultures that could be consumed like meat without the expense of land or feed and the disease potential of real meat.

Completely different than your standard tofu, this alternative is actually meat produced in vitro (cloned, I believe?).

This brings up new issues within the vegetarian/vegan community as no animals are killed with this product. Despite PETA's endorsement of the idea and the lack of harm to animals, many PETAers (and vegetarians otherwise, I'd assume) are still disgusted with the idea of eating this animal tissue.

This also comes at an interesting time as the organic section of American grocery stores expand and some people are pushing for the FDA labeling of cloned foods. I'm curious to see how consumers respond to this if a viable product can be made.

Eco-friendly bottles poisoning tree huggers everywhere

On Tuesday, Slate.com published this article "Why do we focus on the least important causes of cancer?". I am a poster child for this epidemic.

A year ago I substituted, among other things, my dish detergent for one made from coconuts and earth salt, and my shampoo for one made from soy and moringa pterygosperma seed extract (No, I don't know what that is but it makes me feel better). I know that it's unlikely that these products will kill me, but it's so easy to switch (and usually the products smell very nice).

Today, The Times published this article, which states:

Nalgene, the brand that popularized water bottles made from hard, clear and nearly unbreakable polycarbonate, will stop using the plastic because of growing concern over one of its ingredients...Some animal studies have linked the chemical to changes in the hormonal system.

I've used these bottles (ironically pictured in Brita's "Responsible Water" ads) daily for about four years, so here's to one more cancer concern added to my ever-growing list.