I’ve been going on and on about whether the US is holding people in secret interrogation camps abroad. Now AP reports that the Red Cross Fears U.S. Is Hiding Detainees and has been expressing this concern to the US for some time without getting a satisfactory reply:
But Notari told The Associated Press that some suspects reported as arrested by the FBI on its Web site, or identified in media reports, are unaccounted for.
“Some of these people who have been reported to be arrested never showed up in any of the places of detention run by the U.S. where we visit,” Notari said.
She said she had read media reports that some people are being held at Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean used as a strategic military base by the United States, but the ICRC has not been notified of any prisoners there.
“We just simply have absolutely no confirmation of this in any formal way,” she said.
The U.S. government has not officially responded to a Red Cross demand for notification of all detainees, including those held in undisclosed locations, she said.
That request was made by ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger in January during a visit to Washington that featured meetings with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
“So far we haven’t had a satisfactory reply,” Notari said.
This is a serious issue.
Eric Muller, back from what looks like a great vacation, has some interesting things to say about how the Guantanamo, Hamdi, and Padilla cases amount to a repudiation of the basic thesis of Chief Justice Rehnquist’s book on civil liberties in wartime, All the Laws But One.
My friends Peter Shane and Peter Swire are launching an interesting new law & tech journal to be called I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. I/S will be published in cooperation between by Ohio State’s Moritz’s Center for Law, Policy and Social Science and the Heinz School’s Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society (InSITeS). (I’ve agreed to be on the editorial board, which means I’ll occasionally review submissions.)
I’ve attached the official announcement.
The Moritz College of Law at the Ohio State University and Carnegie Mellon University’s H.J. Heinz III School of Law and Public Policy are pleased to announce a forthcoming new journal, to be called I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society. To be published by Moritz’s Center for Law, Policy and Social Science and the Heinz School’s Institute for the Study of Information Technology and Society (InSITeS), I/S will serve as an interdisciplinary journal of research and commentary concentrating on the intersection of law, policy, and information technology. It represents a one-of-a-kind partnership between one of America’s leading law schools and the public policy school consistently ranked first in the field of information technology and public policy.
Each issue will include a themed research section, featuring articles specially commissioned for I/S. In addition, I/S will also publish commentaries, typically shorter and in a less formal style, addressing cutting-edge policy topics related to IT and society, as well as book-reviews and student research papers. Submissions in each of these latter categories should not exceed 5000 words. Authors interested in having their work considered for the debut issue of I/S should submit their manuscripts no later than August 15, 2004 to Sol Bermann, Senior Staff Editor, Moritz College of Law, 55 West 12th Street, Columbus, OH 43201. Inquiries concerning format, topic, or anything else may be directed to Mr. Bermann at bermann.1@osu.edu.
I/S envisions an eventual three-issue-per-year publishing cycle, including both hard-copy and subscription-based online versions. We are especially interested in papers addressing legal and policy aspects of e-government and electronic democracy, cybersecurity, online privacy and public information policy, e-commerce, information technology and economic development, and telecommunications regulation. The quality of I/S will be insured by its editorial team. The journal will be supervised by four faculty editors, Professors Peter Shane and Peter Swire at Ohio State University, and Professor Ashish Arora and Dr. Ron Gdovic at Carnegie Mellon. Working with them will be two senior staff editors, Sol Bermann and Vikram Mangulmurti, lawyers with extensive experience in privacy and cybersecurity. Ohio State law students will handle much of the detailed editorial work, as is customary among law reviews. But the journal will also have a distinguished editorial board, including key faculty members at the sponsoring institutions and prominent academics and practitioners from around the world, who will help in organizing and reviewing the contents of each issue. The membership of the current board appears below.
Carnegie Mellon Faculty
Alessandro Acquisti
Jamie Callan
Jonathan P. Caulkins
George T. Duncan
Dave Farber
Michael P. Johnson
Ramayya Krishnan
Peter Madsen
Benoit Morel
Lorrie Cranor
Jon Peha
Norman Sadeh
William Scherlis
Marvin Sirbu
Michael Smith
Latanya Sweeney
Rahul TelangOhio State Faculty
Stephen Acker
Jennifer Cowley
Matt Eastin
Sheldon Halpern
David Lee
Ed Lee
David Landsbergen
Ed Malecki
Rajiv Ramnath
Lewis UlmanNational Experts
Jonathan Band
Ken Bass
Julie Cohen
Susan Crawford
A. Michael Froomkin
Michael Geist
Robert Heverly
Reed Hundt
David Johnson
Ethan Katsh
Neal Katyal
Jessica Litman
April Major
Eben Moglen
Lisa Nelson
Beth Simone Noveck
Maureen O’Rourke
Elizabeth Parker
Joel Reidenberg
Jeffrey Ritter
Pamela Samuelson
Jon Weinberg
Phillip Weiser
Jane Winn
Alfred Yen
Jonathan Zittrain
Marc Zwillinger
CNN reports that, “A church’s plan for an old-fashioned book-burning” ran into an unexpected snag: the fire code.
Preachers and congregations throughout American history have built bonfires and tossed in books and other materials they believed offended God.
…just good ol’ fashioned, traditional book-burning, who could object?
The Rev. Scott Breedlove, pastor of The Jesus Church, wanted to rekindle that tradition in a July 28 ceremony where books, CDs, videos and clothing would have been thrown into the flames.
…rekindle the tradition, geddit?
Not so fast, city officials said.
“We don’t want a situation where people are burning rubbish as a recreational fire,” said Brad Brenneman, the fire department’s district chief.
So it’s a rule of general application, not one aimed at political speech, and thus very likely consistent with the First Amendment.
I don’t know whether to be appalled at the idea of modern book-burning, amused at the effectiveness of this pettifogging regulatory obstacle, cheered by the thought of book-burners who can be stopped by an anti-pollution ordinance, or fearful of how this is going to be spun as a symbol of the evils of the modern regulatory state…