No, not by accident. Not as part of a war effort. Not as part of a biological weapons test. Rather, on purpose, as part of Prohibition enforcement efforts:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

—Deborah Blum. “The Chemist’s War: The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition with deadly consequences.”. Slate, 19 February 2010.

Horrific. At least, as the article points out, when they tried poisoning marijuana crops in the 1970s, there was enough outcry to stop it.
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Glenn Greenwald points out some inconsistencies in the government’s stance, which is certainly interesting, but I think the more important critique comes from Arthur Silber. He highlights the key point, which is this:

Other Justice Department officials have said that even if Mr. Mohammed is acquitted, the Obama administration will keep him locked up forever as a “combatant” under the laws of war.

—Charlie Savage. “Holder Defends Decision to Use U.S. Court for 9/11 Trial”. The New York Times, 18 November 2009.

So even if he’s found not guilty, he stays in jail “forever”. If that doesn’t make it a show trial, I don’t know what does.

The following is a short clip of news footage from the Pittburgh G20 protests:

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There are arguments for the death penalty. One significant argument against it is that any human system is going to be fallible and prone to mistakes, and that no amount of mistakes are acceptable when the state executes people as a result.

The judicial system of Texas is providing some awfully good support for that argument. Take the case of Charles Dean Hood, currently on death row, whose case was decided by a judge who had an affair with the prosecutor.

Well, people are human, these things happen, but there’s a system in place to guard against such misconduct, right? In Texas the Criminal Court of Appeals is where Hood’s case would end up—except that the CCA essentially said it wasn’t interested.
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I missed a lot of these moves when they occurred. Even though the “copyright czar” position hasn’t been filled yet, it looks very much like Obama’s administration is little better on copyright issues than the previous administration.
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I’m not surprised, but I’m not happy: ‘Court Jails Pirate Bay Founders’.

I figured, given the amount of pressure brought to bear, that the court would use any means it could to find them guilty. I’m not sure they actually are guilty given the way the laws are written.

(Oh, and for anyone who wants to claim that their defense was to get away on a “technicality”: as my friend Deirdre used to say, all laws are technicalities.)

I don’t know how much the media has been covering the recent developments in the 2001 anthrax attacks, but I suspect they’re not doing much coverage of their own role—just as with the “weapons of mass destruction” story, or maybe even worse, they were a conduit for what the government wasn’t willing to come out and assert: the link with Iraq.

Glenn Greenwald has been doing a good job covering it.

I think I’ve blogged about this subject before, but with my real web server still down, I can’t check… but even if I have, and even though this was on BoingBoing and probably other major linkgrounds, and even though the primary speaker is a Law Professor at Regent University, it’s still important to watch these videos.
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I wish I could have found a source for this other than the Times, but this article discusses the British Ministry of Defence paying out almost three million sterling to the father of an Iraqi killed in British custody in Basra.
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I love this. I’m sorry that it appears to be fraud—I’d be perfectly happy if he had found a legal as well as technical loophole and exploited it. I’m curious about whether or not it would have been fraud if he’d used his real name and details every time. Lastly, it’s quite interesting that he was caught due to government snooping on bogus accounts, and not by financial security systems.

There’s plenty to find disturbing in this story about the interference of the Pentagon with their own judges in their “military tribunal” kangaroo courts, but one thing that caught my eye was the following:

Khadr, now 21, faces up to life in prison if convicted at Guantanamo on charges of murder, conspiracy and supporting terrorism. He is accused of lobbing a grenade that killed U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher J. Speer during the firefight in which he was captured.

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From the what-were-they-thinking department: the German supermarket chain Lidl has been caught spying on their employees.
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Contrary to what you might expect, this post is not a rant against Wal-Mart per se. I was prompted to write it after reading this CNN article about Wal-Mart suing a disabled woman who was an ex-employee. The summary is that she was in a bad accident, was covered by Wal-Mart health insurance for her treatment, then successfully sued the person responsible for the accident—at which point Wal-Mart sued her to recover that money, because her employment contract entitled them to recoup the money they spent on health insurance in that fashion. The CNN article raises some questions about this, but I think they’re the wrong questions.
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The recent revelations that State Department contractors have been snooping through the passport records of presidential candidates, not to mention the fact that Eliot Spitzer’s purchases of sex were uncovered first by his bank and then the IRS, have highlighted the reach of the surveillance state, particularly the sheer amount of information that the government actively tracks. A recent LA Times editorial points out that purely personal privacy isn’t the real key, but rather the ability to use surveillance for political advantage—which should be pretty obvious, even more obvious given its blatant presence in the not-very-distant past.
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More than one percent of the adult population in prison. More per capita than any other nation on the planet, and more by raw numbers as well. This is the leader of the free world*?
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This is one of the most insane local government ideas I’ve ever seen: San Francisco’s Planning Commissioners are considering ordering North Beach pizzerias to close at 02:00—to combat drunkenness.
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Apparently anything less that total compliance warrants being electrocuted. I don’t think this one, involving a motorist protesting at being given a speeding ticket, is as egregious as either the UCLA or University of Florida incidents. But it’s still wrong.
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By which I do not mean magickal thinking… I mean thinking that tremendous change can be effected through events, speech or revelations that are talismanic in nature. The idea that if the correct words could just be spoken, or if the truth revealed, that “the people” would rise up/awaken/revolt/vote differently/stop watching television/reject their role as imperialist enablers/cast off their self-accepted shackles/achieve enlightenment/achieve whatever your particular goal for them is. A certain brand of tax evader in the US falls into this category.
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A colleague of mine who until recently was part owner of an apartment building received today a copy of a magazine aimed at apartment owners, and I thought that the cover was a work of art.
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In the latest demonstration of what they’re really about, the Democratic Party didn’t even try to stop the confirmation of Michael Mukasey as Attorney General. Despite holding a majority in the Senate, the Democrats caved in two ways. (Three if you count the Judiciary Committee vote.) First, seven Democrats crossed the line to support Mukasey. Second, and far more important, the Democrats didn’t filibuster. The Republicans in the Senate have spent the whole damn year filibustering everything, essentially imposing a 60-vote requirement to pass bills—but the Democrats let this one go by with a simple majority. In essence, they mostly want to be seen to be against the nomination without being willing to stop it even though they have the power to do so.

In an amazing display of political cowardice, the four Democratic Senators running for the Presidency didn’t even show up for the vote: Biden, Clinton, Dodd, and Obama. Mukasey was a nominee so compromised that he refused to say whether or not waterboarding (which the US has in the past prosecuted soldiers of other nations for using) was a crime, and in that context Mukasey also claimed that the President might somehow have powers that go beyond the law. But the presidential hopefuls didn’t want to get involved either way. I wasn’t likely to vote for them before, but now I don’t see any way whatsoever that any of those four could get my vote, even if it means voting for some obscure third-party candidate.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Michael Mukasey’s nomination for Attorney General today. Mukasey is clearly another Bush stooge (otherwise he wouldn’t be their nominee) and hardly the person to roll back the assaults on civil liberties perpetrated by his predecessors. Not that Dianne Feinstein and Charles Schumer, the two Democrats on the committee to vote for approval, really care about that. The AP report I link to contains this beautiful paragraph:

The 11-8 vote came only after two key Democrats accepted his assurance to enforce any law Congress might enact against waterboarding.
—“Mukasey nomination sent to full Senate”, Laurie Kellman, Associated Press, 6 November 2007

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Arguments about checks on power often elicit the claim that the checks are unnecessary because whoever is in power is clearly trustworthy and would never exercise the power without some compelling reason. This naturally makes almost no sense, because if they have a compelling reason, the people in charge of the checks will recognize this and go along with it. The claim is then made that those in charge of the checks will “play politics” and/or “move too slowly”—establishing a conflict between a leader who needs to act quickly and decisively in a crisis and some faceless committee of bureaucrats who don’t care about resolving the crisis.
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After reading Bruce Schneier’s post on overblown security responses, I was quite amazed. Some of the incidents he lists are truly ridiculous. However, I think that he’s missing the point if he believes that these results, which cost staggering amounts in terms of time and money for the security forces and the various people caught up in the overreactions, are bugs in the security processes that the authorities have set up. These results are either intentional, or are viewed as beneficial once they are recognized.
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