by Last Night in Little Rock

On Monday, the FCC's new regulation requiring Internet Service Providers and VoIP services to enable law enforcement to have a backdoor to eavesdrop goes into effect with 18 months to comply, as noted on CNET.com. CNET notes that the final order (pdf) was the result of years of lobbying by the FBI and DEA, altough its justification is terrorism investigations.

The regulation was issued in September as noted here.

The breadth and vagueness of the order concerns many.

by TChris

When senators complain that "terrorists" shouldn't be entitled to habeas corpus review of their detentions, they're missing the point. It isn't enough for the administration to claim someone is a terrorist. As P. Sabin Willett makes clear, the administration doesn't always get it right.

Willett represents a client at Guantanamo named Adel.

Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.

So Adel is now a free man, right? The Bush administration's secret tribunal did justice, right? Wrong.

A woman has been arrested in the Jordan bombings. She will confess on Jordanian tv this afternoon. She was to be one of the four bombers but her equipment didn't work and her husband and co-bomber scuttled her out of the hotel ballroom right before he blew himself up, taking with him many of the wedding guests.

The woman's brother was al Zarqawi's right hand man in the Anbar province of Iraq who was killed last year.

More details here.

Update: She was just on tv confessing. She didn't say her husband pushed her out of the way, only that his belt went off and her's didn't so she fled with the others in the ballroom.

All of the bombers were Iraqi. The Jordanian Government is going out of its way to reassure the Iraqis in Jordan that they are still welcome there.

Actor Bruce Willis is offering $1 million to any civilian who captures Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Dog the Bounty Hunter has said several times he'd love to find Osama.

Question: How about finding Osama or someone else in the Middle East? Could you do it?

Dog: Absolutely. Waiting for the phone call from GW.

On CNBC, Dog said he could find Osama in 90 days.

Bruce, meet Dog. Dog meet Bruce.

by TChris

As reported here, the CIA is housing and interrogating suspected terrorists in foreign prisons. The propriety of using secret prisons, where abuse (or even killings) may go unreported, is worthy of public debate, but Sen. Frist is unconcerned. Instead, he’s concerned that the administration's dirty little secret was made public.

"My concern is with leaks of information that jeopardize your safety and security - period," Frist said. "That is a legitimate concern."
...

Frist was asked if that meant he was not concerned about investigating what goes on in detention centers.

"I am not concerned about what goes on and I'm not going to comment about the nature of that," Frist replied.

In an internet posting, al Qaeda has taken credit for the Jordan blasts that killed 59 people.

The AP is reporting that a U.S. citizen was killed in the attacks and two were injured.

by TChris

British lawmakers, unmoved by scare tactics and reluctant to sacrifice civil liberties, declined to adopt Tony Blair's proposal to authorize police to detain suspected terrorists for 90 days without filing charges.

Instead, lawmakers, including some from Blair's own Labour Party, voted for a maximum detention period of 28 days without charge.

A 28 day detention based on nothing more than suspicion is egregious, but at least it's less draconian than three months behind bars. Sadly, Blair doesn't get it.

Breaking: Suicide bombers at Western hotels in Jordan have killed 20 57. Blame is being levied at al-Qaida.

One of the bombs may have been placed in a false ceiling.

Update: here.

Laura Rozen of War and Piece writes about why the Bush-Cheney proposal to exempt the CIA from the torture amendment should be rejected. Among her arguments:

I was in a torture chamber once, in the basement of a police station in Kosovo days after it was abandoned by Serb forces defeated by Nato. It was hideous as you would imagine. The British soldiers who were with me were equally shocked. A lot of the instruments and interrogation drugs I saw there also suggest they were not designed to cause organ failure or death in their victims, just pain and terror, as Mr. Cheney and his office mates suggest is what they are going for in terms of legal wiggle room. And like Mr. Cheney and his office mates, Mr. Milosevic and his Serb troops didn't seem to overly concern themselves with the Geneva conventions, until it was a bit late. Having laid my eyes on what such a scene looks like, I just associate such activities with the forces of not only the pathological and depraved, but those who are headed for defeat. If you've seen it, you realize in a way that's hard to explain, it's the tactics of the losers.

by TChris

The Supreme Court agreed this morning to hear Salim Ahmed Hamdan’s plea for a real hearing before a real court, rather than a military tribunal at Guantanamo. TalkLeft background on Hamdan’s case is here and here and here.

Chief Justice Roberts was on the lower court panel that deferred to the Bush administration’s desire to keep detainees like Hamdan out of the judicial system. Roberts did not participate in the decision to grant certiorari, and presumably won’t play a role in deciding the case. That’ s good, since we already know what Roberts thinks about the issue. Alito would probably be just as deferential to the executive branch as was Roberts, raising the possibility (if Alito is confirmed) that the lower court’s decision might stand on a tied (4-4) vote in the Supreme Court.

by TChris

The Senate, defying the White House, overwhelmingly passed Sen. John McCain’s bill to prohibit the abuse of detainees. That language is not in the House version of the military spending package to which it was attached in the Senate, so House and Senate conferees will need to decide whether to include it in the version that goes to the president. Vice President Cheney’s effort to persuade McCain to soften the bill’s language went nowhere.

House Democrats planned to introduce a motion that would instruct House conferees to adopt McCain’s language. They’ve been stymied by Speaker Dennis Hastert’s refusal to appoint the conferees. Now why would Hastert be dragging his feet?

Democrats on Thursday were quick to accuse Mr. Hastert, a close friend and political ally of Mr. Cheney, of taking steps to postpone a vote that would embarrass the vice president at a time when his former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby Jr., is under indictment in the C.I.A. leak case. "At a time when we should be protecting American service men and women from torture and improving our sullied international reputation, the majority in the House is more interested in protecting the vice president and this administration from embarrassment," said Representative Ellen O. Tauscher, a California Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

by TChris

Vice President Cheney, hoping to gut the recently passed (by a 90-9 vote) Senate bill banning torture of detainees, met with the bill's primary sponsor, John McCain, to propose an exception that would permit the CIA to use the prohibited interrogation techniques "with respect to clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad" if "the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack." McCain said no.

Mr. McCain has kept the pressure on as the issue moves to a House-Senate conference committee, perhaps later this week or next. ... The matter will probably be settled in a private meeting in the next week or two among four senior lawmakers: Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Representative C. W. Bill Young of Florida, both Republicans; and Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii and Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, both Democrats. All are on the conference committee.

The White House also opposes a proposal advanced by Sen. Carl Levin to create an independent commission that would review accusations of prisoner abuse by American forces abroad.