When suspected Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla was whisked from the criminal justice system to military custody in June 2002, it was done for a key purpose – to break his will to remain silent.

For a month, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been questioning Padilla in New York City under the rules of the criminal justice system. They wanted to know about his alleged involvement in a plot to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb" in the US. Padilla had nothing to say. Now, military interrogators were about to turn up the heat....

In essence, experts say, the US government was trying to break Padilla's silence by plunging him into a mental twilight zone...

The Soviets used isolation and sensory deprivation to identify and discredit political dissidents. US prisoners of war confessed to nonexistent war crimes in the Korean War after similar treatment.

In other words, the U.S. Government attempted to torture a confession out of a U.S. Citizen when he refused to admit to a crime that didn't occur. An admission which would have been in the political interest of the Administration, as it would justify the fear of a nuclear threat from Al'Queda, and demonstrate that the Justice Department was putting a stop to it. Paradoxically, the threat from this particular sort of weapon is mostly psychological. If the Administration were interested in defusing it as a real threat they would do so by educating people about the actual effects of such an attack rather than making misleading statements.
Recall this statement by a judge who was on the Republican Party's short list for Supreme Court nomination until he committed political suicide by issuing this ruling:

The government surely must understand... its actions have left... the impression that Padilla may have been held for these years... by mistake...

Yes, it appears he was held "by mistake." He was held, in my opinion, illegally. And he was destroyed...

"It is clear from examining Mr. Padilla that [the point of irreversible psychological damage] was surpassed."

The actual evidence against him seems to consist entirely of this form. Personally, I think a star recruit would have had more to say on this form. A star recruit probably would have indicated more religious knowledge, might have had some military experience, might have listed a skill other than carpentry, might have indicated an... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

They really did shred the Constitution over a paranoid fantasy...

The State Department has a message for White House candidates wanting to expound on sensitive diplomatic issues: Shut up...

First it was Barack Obama's talk of dialogue with dictators and invading Pakistan to kill Islamist militants, then it was Hillary Rodham Clinton refusing to rule out the use of nuclear weapons to that end. Now, the Democratic front-runners have been joined by radical Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo, who threatened to bomb Muslim holy sites to stop terror attacks....

"To somehow suggest that an appropriate response to terrorism would be to attack sites that are holy and sacred to more than a billion people throughout the world is just absolutely crazy," he said...

Tancredo placed 4th in Saturday's straw poll.

U.S. State Department cringes as presidential hopefuls muddy diplomatic waters - International Herald Tribune

The reason he doesn't love you anymore...

Lysol

The Department of Homeland Security is hoping to overcome that limitation by automating the identification of individuals whose behavior suggests they pose a threat via a program dubbed "Hostile Intent."

Pretty soon the "Thought Police" will be able to arrest you for a "Thought Crime".

The software is pretty cool. So is the mood driven PONG. [ Video Link ]

But the spectrum of human emotion can not be lumped into a few categories.

Donnie: Life isn't that simple. I mean who cares if Ling Ling returns the wallet and keeps the money? It has nothing to do with either fear or love.
Kitty Farmer: Fear and love are the deepest of human emotions.
Donnie: Okay. But you're not listening to me. There are other things that need to be taken into account here. Like the whole spectrum of human emotion. You can't just lump everything into these two categories and then just deny everything else!

Homeland Security tests automated 'Hostile Intent' detector

1. Mitt Romney - 4516 votes - 31%
2. Mike Huckabee - 2587 votes - 18.1%
3. Sam Brownback - 2192 votes – 15.3%
4. Tom Tancredo - 1961 votes – 13.7%

The three politicians who raised their hands to indicate that they don't beleive in evolution are Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback, and Tom Tancredo.

Iowa Straw Poll Results: Mitt Romney Wins, Ron Paul Comes Fourth on Product Reviews Net

The search engine problem has been fixed. To continue to gloat about our conviction to the MemeStreams cause I want to point out that some of this was fixed using the ssh client on my Sidekick while driving from Atlanta to Nashville.

Search engine problem fixed

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flaw
demerit
weakness
weak spot
weak point
danger spot
vulnerability

dict.cc dictionary :: Schwachstelle :: English-German translation

Some of you have noticed problems with the search engine. I've actually written the fix, but its in a parrallels image on the hard drive of the mac I wrote about. That image is currently being uploaded out of my cable modem connection to a computer on the internet. With such poor upstream connections on cable modems I equate this to escaping a gravity well. It will take 48 hours to upload this image into the open net and maybe 4 to download it back onto someone's home PC. There are about 12 hours left in the transfer as of this writing. Hopefully the search engine will be back to normal by next week.

"How dare you treat an American officer with disrespect?" he shouted back, indignantly. "Believe me, we have treated you with much more respect than other people. You should go to places like Iran, you'd see a big difference." The irony is that it is only "countries like Iran" (for example, Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe) that have a visa requirement for journalists. It is unheard of in open societies... a disregard for the humanity of those deemed "in the wrong".

LAX is the only U.S. border entry point where I've ever been randomly selected for search. This article indicates that 12 of the 13 journalists ejected from the U.S. for visa reasons last year were ejected by LAX. Maybe it simply makes sense to avoid using that airport for international travel, when possible.

Welcome to America | www.guardian.co.uk