PodCamp 2013 Announcement

Will you be attending PodCamp this October 5?

I'll be there - I'm doing this:

In the wake of recent revelations by Eric Snowden and Glenn Greenwald about the world wide electronic surveillance carried out by the National Security Agency, what are the legal limits of our privacy online? What data have they been gathering, how have they been gathering it and what does that all mean?

Just a note for our friends in the intelligence community: Everything I'll be discussing comes from published sources.  That is to say, nothing's from Anonymous or Wikileaks.  But I suspect you already know that.

Just a note for Anonymous: Hey guys.  Drop me a line sometime.  I'd love to hear from you.

Sue Kerr's hosting a session too.  As is Thomas C Waters.

PodCamp 2013!

I'm giving a PodCamp session this year.

It'll be on October 5 (which also happens to be the birthday of Chester A Arthur, Denis Diderot, Robert Goddard and, well ME) at 2:30 in the pm.

The session description:

In the wake of recent revelations by Eric Snowden and Glenn Greenwald about the world wide electronic surveillance carried out by the National Security Agency, what are the legal limits of our privacy online? What data have they been gathering, how have they been gathering it and what does that all mean?

Now all I gotta do is figure out how to say all that without being sent to Gitmo.

Ha! Funny!

Tom Tomorrow brings up an interesting point in his most recent cartoon.

About the conservatives who are criticizing President Obama for not speaking out more forcefully in support of the protesters in Iran, he says that some of the same folks, not too long ago, were advocating mass death in Iran. Remember this?


Or remember how William Kristol said that Bush might bomb Iran if he thought Obama was going to win?

Or when Joshua Muravchik, resident scholar over at the American Enterprise Institute wrote an Op-Ed in the LA Times in November, 2006, that began with these words:

WE MUST bomb Iran.

Who did they think would get hurt when the bombs dropped?

Glenn Greenwald has the story.

Obama and Torture At The News Conference

First, let's start with Glenn Greenwald:

As for Obama's answer to Tapper on whether he believes the Bush administration "sanctioned torture," what is most significant is that Obama flatly stated that waterboarding -- which Bush officials acknowledged that they ordered -- constitutes "torture." That means that Obama is currently and simultaneously advocating these positions:

* Bush officials ordered torture.

* Torture is a crime.

* Nobody is above the law.

Unless you're David Broder, Fred Hiatt, Peggy Noonan or Tom Friedman, those premises of Obama's, as a matter of logical reasoning, all necessarily lead to one conclusion (hint: it's not: "This is a time for reflection, not retribution"). Greg Sargent has similar thoughts about the significance of Obama's torture answer.

And here's Greg Sargent:

The key moment came at the end of an exchange with ABC News’ Jake Tapper. After Obama acknowledged that waterboarding is “torture” — a word he and his aides had shied away from using of late — came this:

TAPPER: I’m sorry, sir, but do you believe the previous administration sanctioned torture?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I believe that waterboarding was torture. And I think that the — whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake.

Obama implicitly acknowledged here that the previous administration used “legal rationales” to justify “torture.”

This underscores yet again how dicey this is for Obama politically: He’s acknowledging that the previous administration created “legal rationales” to allow itself to engage in behavior that’s outlawed by international treaties. At a minimum, this would seem to give some pretty powerful ammo to those who want some kind of noncriminal probe into what happened.

Then there's this from an interview Sargent did with Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY):

“President Obama said, `They used torture, I believe waterboarding is torture,’” Nadler said, speaking of Obama’s comments about his predecessors. “Once you concede that torture was committed, the law requires that there be an investigation, and if warranted, a prosecution.”

Nadler and other House Dems have already called on the Attorney General to appoint a special prosecutor to look into potential torture crimes. Yesterday’s comments from Obama, Nadler says, make it clearer still that this is the only legal path open to the administration — in part because Obama seemed to acknowledge that his predecessors had violated “international law.”

“The president stated in so many words: Waterboarding is torture, the previous administration has admitted that it waterboarded, and torture is a violation of international law,” Nadler said. “Once this is admitted, there must be an investigation. It forces the Justice Department on this path.”

Investigate the torture. It's the law.

Another Conservative Gets Caught

A few days ago it was local columnist Ruth Ann Dailey who was guilty of passing along debunked stories as true.

This time it's the President of the Center for Security Policy (and frequent guest on Fred Honsberger's radio show), Frank Gaffney.

Via Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon.com, we can see that Mr Gaffney begins his latest column with this quotation of Abraham Lincoln:

Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.

The quotation, though, has been shown to be a fake. Here's factcheck.org from August, 2006:
(there's even a Pennsylvania connection!):

Supporters of President Bush and the war in Iraq often quote Abraham Lincoln as saying members of Congress who act to damage military morale in wartime "are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged."

Republican candidate Diana Irey used the "quote" recently in her campaign against Democratic Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, and it has appeared thousands of times on the Internet, in newspaper articles and letters to the editor, and in Republican speeches.

But Lincoln never said that. The conservative author who touched off the misquotation frenzy, J. Michael Waller, concedes that the words are his, not Lincoln's. Waller says he never meant to put quote marks around them, and blames an editor for the mistake and the failure to correct it. We also note other serious historical errors in the Waller article containing the bogus quote.

For the record Diana Irey retracted the quotation within hours of factcheck's posting of the above. Good for her.

My question is this: Here's a bit of information that's already shown to be false, and yet it's used as a weapon against the President's political adversaries - how long before Ruth Ann Dailey uses the Lincoln quotation and presents it as the truth?