I hate the news media. Why was the one aquitted and why were there six mistrials? They concentrate on the original bust, which is not nearly as relevant, for my money. But makes it more into a terror story and less a useful piece of information.

Now it is clear why the Bush Administration does not want proper judicial process for the prisoners at Guantánamo.

I'm sure they're reading Bruce Schneier on Movie-Plot Threats, so they can get scared of something more plausible next time. Or at least more spectacular.

Damn meddling defense lawyers!

Facts have a liberal bias and must be abolished.

Just imagine how many more threats they can imagine!

Not that many, repeated and recycled ad libidum ?

Kip #3,

Not only are they reading it, I'd bet a grande cup of coffiest that tomorrow morning one of those plots will be announced as the distracting-boogeyman for the weekend.

Maybe they'll bring out a post-waterboard quote from Zubaydah about how the malls are in danger- just not saying when and where the quote is from. That'll hook into the amygdala real good, what with the shootings last week.

Tancredo already has illegal-immigrant Islamic mall-terrorist attacks as part of his standard stump-speech. His solution is to put up barbed wire, minefields, searchlight towers, and machine gun nests along the entire Canadian border.

In the US, you are more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.

As Homeland Security is tasked with protecting us from terrorists, but not from the police, this counts as a success.

Not one person in the US has been killed by dragons since the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. Another success!

The government has been having the devil's own time trying unable to persuade a jury of American citizens that their imaginings are actually crimes under our laws.

I guess they'll just have to change the laws. (oh, oops, between Military Commissions Act should cover just about anything, including breathing in the wrong direction or making insulting snorting sounds when reading "news".)

Remember that the Seas of David were such dedicated Islamic terrorists that they hadn't bothered to convert to Islam first.

So who is in Gitmo?

This article gives a hint:

Many of them are not accused of hostilities against the United States or its allies. Most, when captured, were innocent of any terrorist activity, were Taliban foot soldiers at worst, and were often far less than that. And some, perhaps many, are guilty only of being foreigners in Afghanistan or Pakistan at the wrong time. And much of the evidence -- even the classified evidence -- gathered by the Defense Department against these men is flimsy, second-, third-, fourth- or 12th-hand. It's based largely on admissions by the detainees themselves or on coerced, or worse, interrogations of their fellow inmates, some of whom have been proved to be liars.

James @ #12, it may be even worse than that implies. I've read a few articles over the past few years that suggested that many of the Gitmo residents were victims of tribal grudges, sold to the American military for the bounty on "Taliban" fighters.

"I don't understand you people! I mean all these picky little points you keep bringing up. They don't mean nothing. You saw this kid just like I did. You're not gonna tell me you believe that phony story about losing the knife, and that business about being at the movies. Look, you know how these people lie! It's born in them! I mean what the heck? I don't have to tell you. They don't know what the truth is! And lemme tell you, they don't need any real big reason to kill someone, either! No sir!"

Juror #10 in Twelve Angry Men

Nice one, Serge. I recognized the quote before I saw the attribution at the bottom, I'm proud to say, because I've read the play so many times. Some day I'll be in a production of that.

Kip W @ 15... Which juror would you want to play? I've never seen the play, but the movie is one I never tire of watching if it shows up on TCM even though I have the DVD.

Sorry for the off-topic post, but it's not that far off topic.

I googled up a report about the sort of "supporting evidence" used by the prosecutions in similar trials (also about accusations of terrorist affiliation where juries eventually said that none such exist).

For example, an FBI memo noted that a Jerusalem office manager for Holy Land supposedly told Israeli authorities that charity "was channeled to Hamas."

But defense lawyers countered that the translation from Arabic to Hebrew to English distorted the official's statement and that he should have been quoted as saying, "We have no connection to Hamas."

The prosecutions don't seem to want justice or truth - only public examples. They must be terribly frustrated when juries don't cooperate.

Serge, it's a good question. I'd have to read it again (again!) to see. I think I'd be happy as long as I'm not one of the alternates who gets dismissed at the start of the show, but I'm not sure who I'd most like to play. Maybe the one who holds out the longest. They're all pretty good parts.

Jim Macdonald #11: I'm waiting for someone to suggest that since most of the defendants are Haitian they're Vodun fundamentalists...

Kip W @ 18... If I could act my way out of a paper bag, I'd want to play the juror played by George Voskovex in the movie. Or the one played by E.G.Marshall.

#19 Fragano Ledgister, "Vodun fundamentalists"

Now that's the kind of terrorism I want to see. Terrorists who don't have to kidnap, or hijack, or actually plant explosives.

(from video taped demands)
"Release my comdrades in jail or I'll stick another pin in this here doll that looks like the Vice President. You don't want me to make dolls of you all, do you? And this little airplane toy I've linked through sympathetic magic to an American Airlines 747 now flying over Kentucky. Don't make me make it crash!"

Steve Buchheit #21: That would make an interesting premise for a contemporary fantasy novel.

Even worse than Al-Qaeda! At least AQ leaves you alone once you're dead...

Zombie terrorists?

"...must... blow up... traiiiiinnnn..."

Fragano #22: You could have a lot of fun with the premise of someone doing a "brilliant penny[1]" kind of scam to "prove" they had the power to kill at a distance through some kind of magic, and thus establishing themselves as some kind of scary force in the world. And then being killed at the end by someone who really did have that power, and had been using it for years to keep the planet stable.

[1] I take a million (2^{20}) pennies, and flip each one once a week to predict the direction of the stock market the next week, taking care to make very good evidence that this penny was used. After twenty weeks, I have strong evidence that one of these pennies has an "uncanny" ability to predict the stock market. I offer the penny for sale on eBay for a million dollars. (This is closely related to how some stock analysts have amazing "hot streaks" from time to time.)

21: I'd find the prospect of sympathetic terrorism a little less worrying if I hadn't just read an article (http://newleftreview.org/?view=2635) pointing out that Dubai

a) is a centre of terrorist financing and

b) is spending billions on building small-scale replicas of various prominent landmarks all over the world - and even a small scale replica of the world itself, in the shape of the Nivenesque "World" artificial archipelago (http://www.theworld.ae/).

Clearly they are plotting some sort of sympathetic attack...

#26 ajay, on Dubai building small scale replicas...

Shouted toward the UAE and Dubai "You're just a bunch of Illuminatus Wannabees!"

That'll learn them.

Ajay @26- that sounds like an idea that should be seeded through the internet in a few key places. Then you could follow its propagation amongst various websites until it reaches the mainstream media. By the time it does so, it might have mutated into "Dubai is using scale models to train terrorists".

*sigh* If you're going to talk about Vodun fundamentalists, don't talk about sticking pins in dolls. Vodun only does that in the movies (where it's called Vooooooooodooooooo).

But of course we're talking about imaginary threats, aren't we? So DHS could very well be looking for Jewish fundamentalists who want to kidnap Christian children to use their blood for Passover matzoh, or Catholic fundamentalists who are going to Burn! All! Women! At the Stake! Or Mormon fundamentalists who EACH want to marry ALL our women.

I could go on. My point, though, is this: let's not perpetuate grotesque libels against living religions please. Al Qaeda really does want to kill each and every one of us. But the thing about sticking pins in dolls is like accusing AQ of idolatrous worship of Baphomet.

Al Qaeda does, indeed, want to kill each and every one of us. Unfortunately, the US government has decided that fighting al Qaeda isn't the top item on their priority list. Or even somewhere on their top ten.

Meanwhile, we still have the Fort Dix Six case pending, where the "terrorists" were so alarmed by what the FBI's agent provocateur was saying that they called the cops themselves. I wonder how that'll go if it ever comes to trial?

albatross #25: I've read of that as a mail scam.

That would make an interesting story.

Xopher #29: You're right.

Xopher #29:

Okay, first I find out that all the stuff I learned on TV about guns is wrong, and now you're telling me the stuff about Voodoo is also wrong? Well, at least those movies showing how torture extracts useful information and saves lives haven't mislead me, right? Right?

Xopher @ 29... DHS could very well be looking for Jewish fundamentalists who want to kidnap Christian children to use their blood for Passover matzoh

Throw in a Golem, and the SciFi Channel might be interested. Could we get Claudia Black as a rabbi? (Heck, she'd be as convincing as Ben Browder would be.)

Jim Macdonald #30:

That's why these Islamofacist terrorists are so dangerous--you just can't trust them an inch. Some of the shifty b-stards don't bother converting to Islam; others go and call the cops to report on patriotic FBI plants; still others make grandiose and silly terrorist plans that show that they, like the DHS, get most of their ideas about terrorist tactics from bad movies. And how many dastardly plots did Padilla reveal (or have claimed for him) while he was having his civil rights carefully respected in the deep dark hole into which he was disappeared?

Speaking of Jose Padilla:

His lawyers (when he was finally allowed to have some) argued that Abu Zubaydah had been tortured to identified him as an al Qaeda associate.

The Florida Federal court dismissed the claim as meritless, since Padilla's lawyers couldn't prove Abu Zubaydah had been tortured.

Now it turns out the tapes of Abu Zubaydah's interrogation have been destroyed--the evidence that might have provided the proof.

Now Padilla's arrest was based on information obtained from Zubaydah. The person who signed the arrest warrant was Michael Mukasey, who is now Attorney General.

No wonder he refused to say whether waterboarding is torture. If he knew that Zubaydah had been tortured, then the warrant he himself issued was fatally flawed.

James @ 12: Notably, we have the businessman who was pulled off his plane in Africa for having a cell-phone charger, and the Pakistani political cartoonist who was anonymously denounced as Al-Qaeda (presumably by someone he offended). At least the cartoonist has since been released...

"The worst of the worst, captured on the battlefield" as W would say.

Serge @ 16: Next time you see the movie, pay close attention to what John Fiedler does with Juror #2.

James @ 36: The CIA agent who blew the whistle on Zubaydah's waterboarding still insists that it yielded information that saved lives, which is curious since also he says that up to that point Zubaydah had remained silent for six months, which begs the question of how stale was any information he could have blabbed...

Richard Brandt @ 37... Fiedler was good. They all were. I just didn't think that people looking at me would be convinced by my playing a mousy type. If I were good enough to do that, I'd aim for Henry Fonda's part.

Attorney general won't share destroyed tape info

Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Friday rejected demands from congressional leaders to share information about the CIA's destruction of detainee interrogation tapes. In a response letter, he reminded people that, "At my confirmation hearing, I testified that I would...resist political pressure and ensure that politics plays no role in cases brought by the Department of Justice."

Not so much resisting political pressure as being reluctatant to incriminate himself....

#29 Xopher, sorry, was going for the absurd there. Plus, you know, there was a 1% chance it could have been real, so therefore according to the rigorous intellectualism of the current administration, must be true.

Although I like the idea of the use of sympathetic magic to down aircraft.

Oh, you forgot those children need to be un-baptised for the matzoh recipe to work properly. So don't forget to spay or neuter your pets, and dunk your children (and please take notes so you don't confuse the two).

Or is that the use of an un-baptised child's fat in summoning spells. It's been so long since Sunday School.

Lydy@1: which media? Anything spoken is subject to strict word-count limits, but the Boston Globe (hardly a great paper even if they may now be able to tap the New York Times occasionally) said that the acquitted man broke with the rest of the group and moved to Florida several months before the arrests.
     With that kind of case, I have to wonder what the votes on the rest of the defendants were like -- did the jury see the rest of the case as equally ridiculous?

Serge, Richard: A company that I'd done some things with had auditions for "Twelve Angry Men" while I was there, but I actually held back from trying out because one of the mainstays of the company had a way of sucking every oxygen molecule out of the stage. (Complaining during rehearsals, for instance, that the other actors had the effrontery to react to him while he was acting.) Of course, I should have done it anyway, but I'd just endured a show with him and was in no mood to step into another.

By a coincidence, my recording of the movie is on the same tape with The Wrong Man. It's like the juror is walking home and gets grabbed himself.

... Of course, in today's climate, the most paranoid juror would prevail right away, and if somebody started to side with Henry Fonda, he'd claim secret knowledge that Fonda is a commie dupe (just look at his daughter!) and warn that the punk kid's smoking gun could take the form of a mushroom cloud. Some time after they'd executed the kid, somebody else would confess in prison to having done the crime, but this would be hushed up to prevent damaging suspicion of our system.

Jim Macdonald #36:

There were also allegations that Padilla was tortured, as I recall. (Of course, that's just from people who hate America. Probably, they held him incommunicado for several years in order to soften him up with kind treatment, sympathetic guards, and good food. I mean, it's not like this was done by a government that had tortured prisoners anywhere else, run a network of overseas secret prisons, had many prisoners trying to kill themselves to escape from their hellish treatment, or used the threat of torture to get confessions.)

One thing I've never understood: Why wasn't the Padilla case a warning sign for more people? Here you had the administration claiming that the president had the constitutional authority to have any US citizen on US soil snatched off the streets and held incommunicado indefinitely, on his say so alone, and it got much less public outrage than his tax cuts. If the president has that authority, then why bother having any constitutional protections at all? If W decided to disappear someone for saying the wrong thing or joining the wrong religion, with no review and no appeal, what value would the first amendment have? If he decided to do that to someone for violating a law passed after the crime took place, or based on illegal searches/wiretaps/coerced testimony, what value would the constitutional protections against those things have?

Lots of people who broadly claim to be suspicious of government went along with this. I'd like to understand why. Some of it appears to have been us/them partisan games, some appears to have been effective control of the media (more in terms of what was focused on than what was reported; this stuff was all more-or-less out in the open), some appears to have been based on fear and willingness to let horrible things be done to "them" for some value of "them."

One thing--I think the last seven years offer a kind of spectroscopy on those who claim to distrust powerful government. The earlier you got freaked out by the Bush administration's rush to war and police state measures (with substantial Democratic support, I'll note), the more plausible is your claim that you really are motivated by a desire for small/limited government, rather than by a desire for some specific policy changes that are furthered at the margins by a small government argument.

Kip W @ 42... actors had the effrontery to react to him while he was acting.

Huh?

Well, maybe one day you'll get your chance under more auspicious circumstances.

Kip W @ 42... Last month, TCM showed Twelve Angry Men. Not the first time they have, but it was introduced by guest programmer Jack Klugman. Did you know that the movie was a total failure in its original release and lasted only one week?

albatross @ 44

It goes with those underexposed photos of Padilla that make him look very dark (which he apparently is not).

Don't forget that the various media are complicit, as they prefer 'entertaining' news rather than substantial news (think of all those kidnapped/dead white women we kept getting major coverage of.) [sarcasm] Ratings and Income are so much more important than well-informed citizens.
[/sarcasm]

Serge @45. Yes, seriously. After rehearsals, he was saying that nobody should distract him when he's giving his speech. We were, like, reacting, in the way you do in a comedy. Actors react to other actors, and like that, but no. We must not do anything but stare like statues when he's doing his important thing. I felt that if his grip on the part was that tenuous, he had no business being on stage.

@46. No, I had no idea it had flopped in the theaters. To me, it was a television play. I found out about the movie somewhat later. In fact, there was an improv group near Denver in the early 70s that used to make up a new sound track for a movie once a week on KFML, and I had to skip listening to them when they did Twelve Angry Men, because it was my first chance to finally see it. (I'm told that the "High Street" version had them trying to find their way out of the jury room. "C'mon, men! We found our way in here... there's got to be a way out!")

albatross @ 44:
- To the believers in black helicopters, Padilla was a furriner (if not a nigger per #47); he was one of the enemy. Moreover, what happened to him was in any case unrelated to their paranoia (i.e., selling out the U.S. to other countries); Bush makes enough noise about the Hague, Kyoto etc. to keep them happy, and his actual selling-out (see below) is too subtle/long-term for them to catch.
- There are many stripes of libertarians, and a lot of them (and other genuine "small-government" types) tend to make exceptions to their rules for national defense (however they perceive it -- the fact that too many perceive it as requiring pre-emptive and/or outside-our-borders action makes it particularly exceptional). Not all -- but how much credence would L. Neil Smith have in this debate?
- There are a lot of people for whom "small government" means "Government that interferes with my doing what I want to should be small; government that prevents anyone from interfering with my doing what I want to should be big (as long as it taxes the interferers and not me)." There are others who just mean "Do what you like as long as my taxes go down"; they have no idea what will happen when the Chinese/Saudi loans (i.e., purchases of deficit bonds) that are financing Bush's spend-and-don't-tax program start coming due. To others, it's just a slur to hang on anything they dislike, rather like the way the Bushistas talk about states' rights when the federal government could bring enough muscle to make B's patrons behave, but demand that federal inaction overrule coherent state action against their patrons (cf California++ automobile pollution/economy laws).
- The media have nourished since before TV the idea that the rules don't apply to evildoers \and/ that evildoers can be easily identified. This is not surprising; many (most?) people are very quick to define "us" and "them" and to assume that "they" don't get the same rules. The schools teach why the U.S. revolted as a matter of unfair rules rather than unequal application of the rules, and gloss over parts of history which revolve around making sure rules are applied equally.

There is a wonderful moment near the end of Rite of Passage when Mia realizes -"The world is full of people, and there's not one single solitary spear carrier among them."- More directly, one of the chief messages of Jesus was that \all/ men are brothers (e.g., cf the Good Samaritan story, in which an outcast behaved better than the pillars of society); IMO, some huge fraction of the people who profess Christianity are ChINOs because they either ignore this altogether or put it behind all the martialism, triumphalism, and swinish self-satisfaction that have accreted over the millennia.

Chip #49:

Yeah, L Neil Smith and the late Harry Browne were two really early opponents to the whole post-9/11 power grab and war fever. I saw a lot of folks deeply skeptical about this stuff on the net, but very, very few on national media. I assume this was at least partly because of the sentiments of the people. (Remember the outcry about Bill Maher's true and obvious comment?) But it was a nice education, as was talking to people I knew who'd grown up in police states, and who thought the post 9/11 US media was frighteningly similar to what they'd grown up with. There's something really interesting there, which I'd like to understand better.

And I remember this more-or-less splitting the cypherpunks list, with some people basically becoming Republican, and others being deeply skeptical of everything coming out of Washington. In some sense, this kind of polarizing event pushes people to take sides or resolve contradictions/not-thought-out positions in their own beliefs.

Kip W @ 48... Twelve Angry Men indeed started as a teleplay, but Henry Fonda liked it so much that he bought the rights to it for a movie. Yes, it flopped, but I don't know why. It can't have been because of the cast's performance, which was superb. Maybe the mood of the country in 1957 wasn't interested in a story that says, yes. America has some great things going for it, but its Justice is NOT infallible.

Sorry, total drive by here from another blog (hello, hello, nice to meet you all, great discussion so far!).

Just thought I'd chip in that the whole "us vs. them" thing isn't new, and doesn't require much media encouragement to set in. If anything it's the default human condition which needs fighting against every step of the way. Psychologists have done experiments showing you get us/them favoritism spontaneously for even the flimsiest reasons. I'll be so bold as to suggest an article that talks about this sort of psych research on prejudice. It's a fun read IMHO, but YMMV (and other acronyms).

Serge @ 46: Last month, TCM showed Twelve Angry Men. Not the first time they have, but it was introduced by guest programmer Jack Klugman. Did you know that the movie was a total failure in its original release and lasted only one week?

For certain values of "total failure." Klugman remembers it lasting one week at one theater, but it was among the nominees for Best Picture at that year's Academy Awards.

Serge @ 38: Fiedler was good. They all were. I just didn't think that people looking at me would be convinced by my playing a mousy type.

Why Fiedler was so ideally cast is that you start off viewing him as some mousy little guy, but if you pay close attention, you come to understand that all along he's actually been a tough little cookie.

Richard 53: And the best explanation I've heard for why it didn't win is that The Bridge On the River Kwai was made the same year.