Buried in the back pages of my local newspaper:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that the government's warrantless wiretapping program is unconstitutional and ordered a ... halt to it.

U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit became the first judge to strike down the National Security Agency's program, which she says violates the rights to free speech and privacy as well as the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.

"Plaintiffs have prevailed, and the public interest is clear, in this matter. It is the upholding of our Constitution," Taylor wrote in her 43-page opinion.

The ruling won't take immediate effect so Taylor can hear a Justice request for a stay pending its appeal.

More at the Star Tribune

The Justice Department will now have to obtain warrants for wiretaps from the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was good enough for previous presidents but apparently not good enough for Bush.
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments

Binary liquid explosives are a sexy staple of Hollywood thrillers. It would be tedious to enumerate the movie terrorists who've employed relatively harmless liquids that, when mixed, immediately rain destruction upon an innocent populace, like the seven angels of God's wrath pouring out their bowls full of pestilence and pain.

The funny thing about these movies is, we never learn just which two chemicals can be handled safely when separate, yet instantly blow us all to kingdom come when combined. Nevertheless, we maintain a great eagerness to believe in these substances, chiefly because action movies wouldn't be as much fun if we didn't.

Now we have news of the recent, supposedly real-world, terrorist plot to destroy commercial airplanes by smuggling onboard the benign precursors to a deadly explosive, and mixing up a batch of liquid death in the lavatories. So, The Register has got to ask, were these guys for real, or have they, and the counterterrorist officials supposedly protecting us, been watching too many action movies?

More from The Register

From Guardian Unlimited: Kurds flee homes as Iran shells Iraq's northern frontier

Several journalists in Kirkuk have accused American and Iraqi security forces of assaulting them and their crews as they tried to report on the worsening security situation in the northern city.

In at least six separate incidents since June, Iraqi reporters said they had been physically beaten, had their equipment confiscated and been falsely accused of "terrorism".

Senior US and Iraqi military officials admit such attacks have occurred and a series of investigations are underway.

Saman Fakhri of the Iranian-owned Al-Alam satellite television station said the assaults were intended to stop journalists reporting properly on rising levels of violence in Kirkuk.

"Things are getting worse and in response the security forces are directing an increasing amount of their energy and anger against the press," he told Aljazeera.net.

"We're under attack from all sides: the Iraqi Police, the Iraqi Army, the Emergency Services, Coalition Forces and the political parties are subjecting us to physical and verbal abuse.”

More from Aljazeera

Iraq's prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, has angrily charged American forces with undermining national reconciliation after a US-led raid in the eastern Baghdad stronghold of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr reportedly caused the death of three people, including a woman and a child.

"Reconciliation cannot go hand in hand with operations that violate the rights of citizens this way," Mr Maliki said.

"This operation used weapons that are unreasonable to detain someone, like using planes," Mr Maliki said. He apologised for the operation and vowed: "This won't happen again." He also sent an envoy to Sadr City to offer cash payments to families of the dead and wounded.

At the end of June, Mr Maliki unveiled a blueprint for national reconciliation. But neither that, nor a succession of security offensives, have halted the bloodshed in the capital. Four roadside bombs in Baghdad yesterday killed at least 19 people. The deadliest blast killed at least 10 and wounded 69 others in a central Baghdad market. Other bombs targeted police and a busy bus station. Two Iraqi journalists were reportedly killed in separate incidents in Baghdad.

The impoverished Sadr City district provides many of the footsoldiers for Mr Sadr's Mahdi army militia, which is widely suspected of conducting sectarian attacks against Sunnis.

Mr Maliki has vowed to restore security to the capital and rein in the militias but his task is complicated by the knowledge that some groups are linked to some of his main political allies. For example, since the Mahdi army staged two failed uprisings against coalition troops in 2004, supporters of the anti-western cleric have entered politics, forming a powerful bloc within Mr Maliki's ruling Shia alliance.

More from Guardian Unlimited

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD.

More from Yahoo! News

I knew there were still some dihard morons out there, but I had no idea they made up half the American public.

What the fuck, America?
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments

Commentary

Some Americans and many Europeans, including the UK Foreign Secretary, have been calling for the international community to pressure both sides in the Lebanon conflict to agree to a ceasefire. This knee-jerk reaction to horrific violence is as wrong as it is familiar.

Israel has good reasons to take military action against Hezbollah. Calling for a ceasefire ignores those reasons and sidesteps the important issues. Certainly both sides should be discouraged from deliberately targeting civilians. The US and UK could do this by suspending arms shipments to Israel until they cease attacks on civilian targets.

Responding to guerilla attacks by murdering sympathetic civilians is a millenia old tactic, but it fails more often than it succeeds, especially in the age of instant global communication. By indiscriminately bombing Lebanon Israel has alienated a large section of the Lebanese population who strongly resent Syrian and Iranian interference in their country.

And of course the US should join the rest of the UN Security Council in censuring Israel for intentionally bombing a UN observer post. These are the real issues to be addressed. Write your congressman.
- posted by truthspeaker    Comments

Civil war is a more likely outcome in Iraq than democracy, Britain's outgoing ambassador in Baghdad has warned Tony Blair in a confidential memo.

William Patey, who left the Iraqi capital last week, also predicted the break-up of Iraq along ethnic lines.

The bleak assessment of the country's future was contained in Mr Patey's final e-cable, or diplomatic telegram, from Baghdad.

Mr Patey wrote: "The prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.

"Even the lowered expectation of President Bush for Iraq - a government that can sustain itself, defend itself and govern itself and is an ally in the war on terror - must remain in doubt."

Talking about the Shia militias blamed for many killings, Mr Patey added: "If we are to avoid a descent into civil war and anarchy then preventing the Jaish al-Mahdi (the Mahdi Army) from developing into a state within a state, as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon, will be a priority."

More from BBC News

The US government failed to prepare adequate procurement and contracting systems before its 2003 invasion of Iraq, a predicament that has severely hampered the $20bn reconstruction effort, according to a report released to Congress on Wednesday.

Stuart Bowen, the special inspector-general for Iraq reconstruction, said the US needed to overhaul and simplify its current contracting and procurement procedures for "universal use" in future post-conflict situations.

In a 140-page report to Congress, Mr Bowen detailed how a hodge-podge approach to the reconstruction effort, which engaged multiple US government agencies with overlapping jurisdictions, led to procurement and contracting policies that occasionally came into conflict.

Although he stressed before lawmakers at the Senate homeland security committee that aspects of the reconstruction effort had improved, Mr Bowen's report was met with frustration by legislators, who increasingly link the ultimate outcome of the war with the success or failure of the reconstruction effort.

"I don't know if we've ever had such a post-conflict challenge. I have to believe from a historical point of view that this miscalculation [on postwar reconstruction planning] will go down as a major mistake that we made," said Senator George Voinovich.

More from the Financial Times (article available for a limited time)

The military's top uniformed lawyers, appearing at a Senate hearing Wednesday, criticized key provisions of a proposed new plan for special military courts, affirming that they did not see eye-to-eye with the senior administration officials who developed the plan and presented it to them last week.

The lawyers' rare, open disagreement with civilian officials at the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House came during discussions of proposed new rules for the use of evidence derived from hearsay or coercion and the possible exclusion of defendants from the trials in some circumstances.

The new rules have not been formally announced because of the administration's inability to persuade the military lawyers to accept it, even after two meetings with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

The basis for the lawyers' concerns, previously stated in private memos written in 2002 and 2003 for top Defense Department officials, is that weak respect for the rights of U.S.-held prisoners eventually could undermine U.S. demands for fair treatment of captured American service personnel.

More from the Minneapolis Star Tribune