So I tried the Starbucks Delocator that everyone is talking about (except of course one organization that got sat on by Starbucks.)
So, yah, it's great everyone is googlebombing the site so it's the top hit for Starbucks Delocator.
But have you tried USING the Starbucks Delocator? I found the initial results to be somewhat depressing.
How is it that the Administration can flout a law that requires it to tell all the members of the Intelligence Committee what it is up to? According to White House Has Tightly Restricted Oversight of C.I.A. Detentions, that's what it's doing.
The White House is maintaining extraordinary restrictions on information about the detention of high-level terror suspects, permitting only a small number of members of Congress to be briefed on how and where the prisoners are being held and interrogated, senior government officials say.
Some Democratic members of Congress say the restrictions are impeding effective oversight of the secret program, which is run by the Central Intelligence Agency and is believed to involve the detention of about three dozen senior Qaeda leaders at secret sites around the world.
By law, the White House is required to notify the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of all intelligence-gathering activities. But the White House has taken the stance that the secret detention program is too sensitive to be described to any members other than the top Republican and Democrat on each panel.
My first reaction was, 'these people don't care at all about the law.'
My second reaction was, 'Congress could force disclosure if it wanted to. The problem here is that Congress is being supine.'
To date, Congress has not opened any inquiry or held hearings on the C.I.A.'s detention program, despite indications that agency personnel were involved in abuses of some prisoners. That record is in contrast to the public scrutiny that the Congressional armed services committees have imposed on the military's involvement in interrogation and detention, including the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Yup, pretty supine.
But then there's a third reaction, and that one is if anything worse than the first two: Congress doesn't want to know. Could it be that lots of Senators — especially the Republicans who, were they guilty with knowledge might have to take part in internecine warfare — are secretly grateful to have the secrets kept away?
[Plus, on close reading, call it a fourth reaction, the NYT article is a little ambiguous as to whether the Admnistration is flouting the law overtly, or just abusing the classification system. And it being late, I haven't the energy to research it right now.]
The Pentagon has released a document called Joint Doctrine for Detainee Operations. There's a lot there and I haven't digested it all. Three things jump out at me.
First, this document has been in the works for a year. What were they doing before then? What took so long once they started?
Second, as more fully described below, the document sets out a new and very broad definition of who is an “enemy combatant” — the class of persons the Administration claims are outside the protection of the Geneva Convention system, being neither soldier nor civilian (a better reading of the GC system, I'd argue, is that everyone is one or the other). According to the new definition, anyone who is a “affiliated” (what's that mean?) with a group listed under Executive Order 13224 [i.e. in theory any group identified by Presidential order!] is a potential enemy combatant. That sweeps very broadly indeed.
Third, the document is redolent with exhortations that everyone is to be treated humanely, even Enemy Combatants. And it sets out detailed rules as to how captured persons are to be processed, questioned, etc. In that, it's something of a critique of practices to date. And maybe a welcome sign of belated reform.
More on the theme of Other Lives, a scary/voyeuristic and sometimes touching site called PostSecret (found via the Captology Notebook).
Some of the confessants say they find it therapeutic.
Via Electrolite and Michael Bérubé, one of those Other Lives web postings that … I really can't finish this sentence.
Oh heck, just read Creek Running North, Life and death. And the comments.
We hold today that the noncommercial use of a trademark as the domain name of a website – the subject of which is consumer commentary about the products and services represented by the mark – does not constitute infringement under the Lanham Act.
So says the 9th Circuit in Bosley Medical Institute v. Kremer.
It's important to keep decisions like this in mind when dealing with WIPO's Borg-like attempts to route around US trademark law by trying to “restate” or “explain” the UDRP, the arbitration-like system which ICANN has imposed on domain name disputes. WIPO is trying to get its arbitrators to think that either they or WIPO are the source of the substantive law that applies in domain name disputes. But that's not what the UDRP says — it clearly refers to the national law that would be applied against a defendant in a court case. WIPO opposed that rule during the drafting of the UDRP but was forced to accept it. It's been chipping away at it ever since.
An example of this is WIPO's recent push for “consistency” in UDRP decisions — something that flies in the face of the agreement that the UDRP should seek to replicate the decisions that would be reached in national courts — decisions which are not the same, as the national law differs. The decisions should be consistent with the relevant national law — not with each other.
Decisions like this — which hold First Amendment values as superior to commercial claims that the law should shield them from effective critique — differ from the law that applies in the UK and on most of the European Continent (especially Germany and Belgium). But they're our rules, and we have a right to them until our legislature changes them.
Recent Bluessky Posts
Jotwell Blenderlaw