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DOD official slams US law firms for defending Guantanamo detainees
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US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Charles “Cully” Stimson has set off a firestorm of protest by publicly questioning the propriety of some of the country’s top law firms representing Guantanamo Bay detainees. In an interview on Federal News Radio Thursday on the fifth anniversary of the US military prison, Stimson predicted that “when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line in 2001 those CEO’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms.” The former Navy lawyer said “It’s shocking…The major law firms in this country…are out there representing detainees.”
I guess “innocent until proven guilty” is only found in history books these days..
Through a Glass, Darkly
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The old theories have failed. The new Christ, fifty years ago no more than a corollary to American power, twenty-five years ago at its vanguard, is now at the very center. His followers are not anxiously awaiting his return at the Rapture; he’s here right now. They’re not envious of the middle class; they are the middle class. They’re not looking for a hero to lead them; they’re building biblical households, every man endowed with “headship? over his own family. They don’t silence sex; they promise sacred sex to those who couple properly—orgasms more intense for young Christians who wait than those experienced by secular lovers.
Intensity! That’s what one finds within the ranks of the American believers. “This thing is real!? declare our nation’s pastors. It’s all coming together: the sacred and the profane, God’s time and straight time, what theologians and graduates of the new fundamentalist prep schools might call “kairos? and “chronos,? the mystical and the mundane. American fundamentalism—not a political party, not a denomination, not a uniform ideology, but a manifold movement—is moving in every direction all at once, claiming the earth for God’s kingdom, “in the world but not of it? and yet just loving it to death anyway.
The Christian nation of which the movement dreams, a government of those chosen by God but democratically elected by a people who freely accept His will as their own, is a far country. The nation they seek does not, at the moment, exist; perhaps it could in the future. More important to fundamentalism is the belief that it did exist in the American past, not in the history we learn in public school and from PBS and in newsmagazine cover stories on the Founders but in another story, one more biblical, one more mythic and more true. Secularism hides this story, killed the Christian nation, and tried to dispose of the body. Fundamentalism wants to resurrect it, and doing so requires revision: fundamentalists, looking backward, see a different history, remade in the image of the seductive but strict logic of a prime mover that sets things in motion. The cause behind every effect, says fundamentalist science, is God. Even the inexorable facts of math are subject to His decree, as explained in homeschooling texts such as Mathematics: Is God Silent? Two plus two is four because God says so. If He chose, it could just as easily be five.
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The movement now sees that to reclaim America for God, it must first reclaim that tradition for Him, and so it is producing a flood of educational texts with which to wash away the stains of secular history.
Such chronicles are written primarily for the homeschoolers and the fundamentalist academies that together account for at least 2 million of the nation’s children, an expanding population that buys more than half a billion dollars of educational materials annually. “Who, knowing the facts of our history,? asks the epigraph to the 2000 edition of The American Republic for Christian Schools, a junior-high textbook, “can doubt that the United States of America has been a thought in the mind of God from all eternity??
Most interesting quote, if you think about it, is this:
“Those who control the past,? Federer said, quoting Orwell’s 1984, “control the future.? History, the practical theology of the movement, reveals destiny. [..] “‘Those who control the present,’? Federer continued his quotation of 1984, “‘control the past.’? He paused and stared at me to make sure I understood the equation. “Orson Welles wrote that,? he said.
Money for nothing, and bombs for free.
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Getting rich by getting it wrong
How the elite pundits who pushed the war profited in money and prominence, despite being completely wrong. Mean while many pundits who opposed the war from the start were sidelined.
Agents Say Fast Audits Hurt I.R.S.
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Top officials at the Internal Revenue Service are pushing agents to prematurely close audits of big companies with agreements to have them pay only a fraction of the additional taxes that could be collected, according to dozens of I.R.S. employees who say that the policy is costing the government billions of dollars a year.
“It’s catch and release,? said Douglas R. Johnson, an I.R.S. auditor in Colorado for three decades who said he grew so frustrated at how large corporations were allowed to pay far less than what he thought they owed that he transferred to the agency’s small-business division.
With one exception, other working agents would talk about the issue only on condition they not be identified because they feared being fired. They said a policy intended to avoid delays in auditing corporations was being pushed so rigidly that it prevented them from pursuing numerous examples of questionable corporate tax deductions.
I.R.S. officials said the complaints were misguided. In an interview yesterday, Debbie Nolan, the I.R.S. executive in charge of auditing large and medium-size businesses, denied that audits were being closed over the objections of agents who had evidence that significant additional taxes were owed. Ms. Nolan said she had not heard any such complaints from auditors.
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Many of these agents said they were troubled most when the sums involved pre-negotiated agreements with the I.R.S. on how much profit multinational companies could take overseas in tax havens and how much must be taken inside the United States.
“They are giving away the store,? one agent in New Jersey said.
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Mr. Lynch, the auditor who retired in California, and many others complained that the effect of the policy was to allow the Bush administration to achieve administratively a further easing of the corporate income tax burden far beyond what Congress has approved legislatively.
Homeland Security won’t let us ship “Certainty” in empty boxes
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“Homeland Security has gotten to FedEx. I tried to ship some make-believe products from Greenwood Space Travel Supply (the “front” for Seattle’s branch of 826 Valencia), including ‘Rocket Fuel’ and ‘Certainty.’ FedEx, however, wouldn’t let me, saying that they were ‘too suspicious’ and looked like ‘bomb-making materials.’ Despite the fact that they were mostly just empty containers with funny words on them. Hilarious, but sad.”
Me [going into post-9/11, TSA-style super-dumbfounded mode]: So what you’re saying is you can’t ship any sort of containers, even if they’re empty? You know that we originally ordered these empty cans and jars from a company, and *they* shipped them to *us*. FedEx guy: They must have used a different vendor ["vendor"? I can't remember, some word like that, like a "service"].
Which I imagine he said because he couldn’t bring himself to say, “It’s the *words* that are *on* the containers that are dangerous”—even after I had opened them all and demonstrated the utter harmlessness/emptiness of the containers themselves.
Do you feel safer yet?
History Repeats Itself: How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers
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As regular readers know, I’ve been working through a series of posts on how economics works when scarcity is removed from some areas. I took a bit of a break over the holidays to catch up on some reading, and to do some further thinking on the subject (along with some interesting discussions with people about the topic). One of the books I picked up was one that I haven’t read in well over a decade, but often recommend to others to read if they’re interested in learning more about economics, but have no training at all in the subject. It’s Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers. Beyond giving readers a general overview of a variety of different economic theories, the book actually makes them all sound really interesting. It’s a good book not necessarily because of the nitty gritty of economics (which it doesn’t cover), but because it makes economics interesting, and gives people a good basis to then dig into actual economic theory and not find it boring and meaningless, but see it as a way to better understand what these “philosophers” were discussing.
Reading through an early chapter, though, it struck me how eerily a specific story Heilbroner told about France in 1666 matches up with what’s happening today with the way the recording industry has reacted to innovations that have challenged their business models. Just two paragraphs highlight a couple of situations with striking similarities to the world today:
“The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: ‘If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.’ One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.”
Requiring permission to innovate? Feeling entitled to search others’ property? Getting the power to act like law enforcement in order to fine or arrest those who are taking part in activities that challenge your business model? Don’t these all sound quite familiar? Centuries from now (hopefully much, much sooner), the actions of the RIAA, MPAA and others that match those of the weavers and button-makers of 17th century France will seem just as ridiculous.