1)After two years of being held in U.S. military custody without trial, Pulitzer-winning AP photographer Bilal Hussein has been ordered freed by an Iraqi judicial committee that dismissed the charges against him.
The allegations amounted to little more than Hussein taking photos of terrorist activities which our occupying forces thought portrayed the insurgency in too good a light.
Unfortunately, the military is still holding Hussein in custody and says a U.N. mandate empowers the military to hold someone they consider a security risk, regardless of what the Iraqi courts say (after all, it’s not like Iraq is an independent government or anything, is it?).
2)Following a March memorandum by Secretary of Defense Gates on prosecuting military contractors, Alaa Mohammed Ali, a Canadian contractor, has been seized by the military, pending charges over his stabbing another contractor with a knife.
The memorandum appears to be Gates’ response to the Justice Department’s lack of interest in prosecuting contractors (there hasn’t been a single completed conviction against any contractor in Iraq over any violent crime). If I’m following what I’ve read correctly, it authorizes the military to deal with cases in a court-martial but only if Justice refuses to take action.
Assuming that Ali gets a fair trial, and isn’t simply detained indefinitely, I think this is good news. There have been multiple accounts of contractors walking through gaps between U.S. law, military law and Iraqi law with no-one to prosecute them (despite the fact we have no trouble holding people such as Hussein), and those gaps need to be plugged.

Westboro Baptist Church is so tasteless, even Jerry Falwell said their practice of picketing at gay funerals (to the effect the deceased was now burning in Hell and deserved it) was offensive.
Since they began picketing military funerals as well, they’ve gone even further over the cliff: Their protests now run on the theme that God sends IEDs and terrorists to kill our soldiers because America is too gay-tolerant and so we must be punished!!
Unsurprisingly, this has produced assorted state legislation and some proposed federal bills to ban protests at funerals. Happy as I’d be if Westboro and it’s leader, Fred Phelps, vanished into oblivion tomorrow, I still feel the need to support their right to (disgusting) free speech.
The argument from supporters of the bills is that this isn’t about regulating the content of Westboro’s speech, but the time, place and manner. Critics of the legislation say it is indeed about content: Would anyone really shut down a dignified, pro-military protest (”Support our troops! Our soldiers are heroes! Antiwar protestors should shut up!”) using this law, or people silently holding up positive signs rather than ones condemning the deceased?
Other critics concede the need and right of families to have space to grieve, but argue they can do that on private property, such as at the funeral home, or at their church. Silencing protesters on public streets and sidewalks or a public cemetery is too big an infringement on free speech.
And once we start, how many other First Amendment exemptions will be carved out? Westboro has announced plans to picket outside hospitals holding wounded veterans: Will that be next? How about on the street outside veterans events, or physical rehab centers where maimed veterans are restoring themselves?
There’s very little merit to anything Westboro has said, but loathsome as I find them, I still think they have the right to say it. Even at a funeral.

That’s one lesson to be learned from the news that a contractor’s employees were snopping around in Barack Obama’s passport files (and also Clinton’s and McCain’s): The more information government gathers on us, the more potential it gives nosey parkers to snoop around, not as part of some conspiracy but just because they’re curious.

Even if it turns out the passport prying were part of some big scheme, my point doesn’t change, because lots of other cases back it up: A percentage of IRS agents, cops and others with investigative powers have proven willing to use them to satisfy personal curiosity, even though their use of files is illegal.

Anyone really think the NSA, the FBI or any other federal agency is different? That people don’t yield to the urge to dig up dirt on their neighbor, their ex-wife’s boyfriend, their ex-wife? And the less supervision and oversight they have, the more it will happen.

Military contractors raise a whole lot of questions when they’re used as widely as they have been in Iraq.

•Chain of command: Contractors aren’t part of it. If you’re military and you’re told to do something hazardous, you do it or else. The worst that can happen to a contractor who refuses to go into a danger zone—and this has happened—is that they lose their job.

•Fraud: We’ve lost hundreds of millions to fraud and mismanagement (military book-keeping is notoriously bad at keeping track of money), but the administration has very little interest in investigating it. One inspector general following the money trails was fired, and Bush recently made a signing statement saying he wasn’t bound by Congress’ creation of an Executive/Congressional panel to investigate profiteering and fraud.

•Special interests: Maybe it’s no surprise that the administration wouldn’t want to have a committee investigating well-connected corporate interests. Which leads to a further question: When you have corporations playing a role in a major military operation, is there a risk of lobbyists influencing policy?

•Crime: Repeatedly I keep reading cases of contractor employees who’ve committed a crime, or allegedly committed a crime, and nothing can be done: We won’t turn them over to Iraqis, they’re outside the military court system and prosecutors back home can’t touch them.

I think whatever our views on the Iraq war, we can all agree this is a bad thing.

And it can be a lot worse, as in the case of KBR employee Jamie Leigh Jones, who says she was gang-raped by coworkers two years ago in the Green Zone.

After Army doctors performed a medical exam which allegedly confirms the rape, the military turned the kit over to KBR. Parts of the kit have now disappeared. Finding Jones had reported the rape, KBR put her in a shipping container without food and water for 24 hours.

The Justice Department hasn’t charged anyone, and ABC News has said they can’t find any government agency even investigating the case.

On the other hand, Mohammad Munaf and Ahmed Omar, two US citizens in Iraq who were accused of working with kidnappers, were taken by the military and held without charge. When their lawyers filed to set them free, they were turned over to the Iraqi courts (our government is trying to convince the Supreme Court that Munaf and Omar should have no standing in US courts because the military in Iraq are part of a US force outside American authority).

So we’re back to the special-interest issue: We can handle crimes committed by US citizens iin Iraq just fine, so long as the alleged criminals aren’t tied to powerful, influential contractors with deep connections to the US government. Go figure.

Sarcasm aside, if we’re going to use contractors, particularly contractors employing military force, there has to be a much clearer law covering what they’re obligated to do and how they’ll be punished if they commit crimes. And a heck of a lot better job at keeping control of the money.

A Washington Post story recounts the plight of Saman Kareem Ahmad, a Kurd who worked as a medal-winning US translator in Iraq for four years, relocated to America and now teaches Arabic to Marines heading to the battle front.

Ahmad applied for his green card, backed up by a sheaf of recommendations from the military, but was turned down as a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party — which Customs and Immigration Services decided qualifies as a terrorist group for trying to overthrow Saddam for years (it’s not officially classed as terrorists, but Immigration has the power to identify “undesignated terrorist groups.”), including anti-Saddam activity during the first and second Gulf War.

Yep, you heard me. Fighting in the same war against the same adversary as the USA has been classified as terrorism.

To add insult to injury, Ahmad’s entire family were wiped out by Saddam’s poison-gas attacks on the Kurds—you know, the ones that have been cited repeatedly over the past eight years as showing why we had to have regime change in Iraq?

At least one other Kurdish translater has been refused a green card on the same grounds.

Pat Buchanan: “First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.”

This is an old argument: African Americans have benefited from their ancestors coming here as slaves. They’d be worse off in Africa. Therefore, slavery is a net positive.

Of course, the same could be said of American Jews: The Eastern European Jews who fled the Holocaust certainly benefited from being here rather than behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Better living standards. Less anti-semitism. You could argue that aside from Israel, this is the best country for Jews to live in.

So by Buchanan’s logic (and that of other conservatives who use the Thank God For Slavery argument), the Holocaust is a net positive, and American Jews should be glad it happened.

Do we see a flaw here?

Obama said he wanted to start a conversation about race. Unfortunately, a lot of the conversation is coming from the mouths of bigots.

Consider, for example, this post from the Instapunk blog about Obama: “You see, you’ve just given life to the suspicion that black people in America are, and have long been, a fifth column — unanimously hating the very country that has afforded the highest standard of living ever achieved by black people in human history. We’re teetering at the edge of believing that you’re a secret society, a massive collection of sleeper cells just waiting for your chance to do serious harm to the rest of us. You’ve made it possible for us to believe that. Because you’re never outraged by what the worst black people do. Because you continue to make excuses for what should be inexcusable to everyone.”

Sleeper cells? Not sharing Instapunks attitude toward African Americans equates to a terrorist network?

And as Glenn Reynolds points out, white candidates aren’t required to express outrage on white behaviour: Nobody requires Bush to specifically say he despises Timothy McVeigh or to offer an opinion on white teens wearing their pants too low, but journalist Tim Russert finds it perfectly logical, apparently, to ask Obama (and in an earlier interview, Colin Powell), to criticize singer Harry Belafonte for making negative comments about Bush (no white interviewees have been asked that question.)

The post also makes an argument that I’ve heard before and always annoys me: “Here’s the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE [n-word—and yes, he actually used the word]. Black people know it. White people know it.”

If the blogger had said that some black people are obnoxious, annoying, inconsiderate or vile, fair enough: Every category of human beings—white, Catholic, Republican, Democrat, atheist, black, Greek, Baptist—contains obnoxious, annoying, inconsiderate and vile people.

But the n-word isn’t short-hand for “You are not a good human being.” In this kind of discussion, used by a self-confessed “old white guy” it’s an insult and a racist smear (and yes, I’m aware some African Americans use it in conversation, but that doesn’t change my opinion any). While Instapunk says he doesn’t want it in general use, he also applies it not only to public figures he despises—Jeremiah Wright, OJ Simpson—but to teens with baggy pants, spinning rims on their car wheels, listening to rap music.

John Derbyshire of National Review Online,explaining how all white Americans are festering with racial hostility under the skin: “Put me in a room with a white American for a couple of hours and I can work them round to the point where they are telling me about their last mugging, the last time some black DMV clerk insulted them, or whatever. And when you get your white American to that point, the mixture of relief and rage with which it all spills out is like a boil bursting.”

He then goes on to explain that “In observing American racial attitudes and politics, the interest is in the variety of ways white Americans smother their despair. Some, of course, don’t. They are the kind of people whose groups you find on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘hate’ list, though many of them are not noticably hateful, only, as they would put it, ‘realistic.’ Hate is not a synonym for despair.”

“Not noticably hateful?” The SPLC lists the Aryan Nations, neo-Nazi groups, Christian Identity organizations (white supremacist Christian extremists), skinhead groups such as Hammerskin Nation, the KKK, the anti-gay Watchmen on the Walls and more (including black extremists, though those obviously aren’t relevant to Derbyshire’s point). Which ones does he think are the realists, pray tell?

Gov. Charlie Crist admist he smoked pot when younger, but doesn’t believe the laws for nonviolent drug-offenders should be changed because “I don’t want to sacrifice public safety.”

So, does he believe he should have been arrested and given the same kind of sentence drug felons today receive? Would that have been better for public safety?

If he doesn’t believe this, what makes him any different from the people getting busted today?

A couple of articles I read recently—here’s the one I have a link to — say that despite all the furor the recording industry has raised over file sharing, downloads and now YouTube playing music without paying royalties, the artists aren’t seeing a dime.
According to the link above, managers for several artists say their clients haven’t seen a dime out of the YouTube settlements made a year and a half ago. Explanations offered by the industry are that YouTub isn’t generating much money, or it’s slow in paying, but since the record companies refuse to divulge any details of what the royalties are or how the deal is structured, it’s hard to tell.
Another article said the same problem has cropped up with the legal settlements over the various file-sharing programs: The program-makers coughed up money, but it’s not reaching the creators.
Or here’s something that happened last year that took my breath away: The Recording Industry Association of America established that anyone playing digital music, even if it’s on your own personal internet station, has to pay a royalty to RIAA. Of course, if you’re playing your own royalty, you get the money back … but RIAA won’t pay unless you sign up, fork over a fee and join the group first.