The International Red Cross issued a strong statement yesterday about the abuse allegations made by released British detainees at Guantanamo against their American captors: The Americans may have committed war crimes.

The organisation, which maintains a rigidly neutral stance in public, took the unusual step of voicing its concerns in uncompromising language after the former detainees, known as the Tipton Three, revealed that they had been beaten, shackled, photographed naked and in one incident questioned at gunpoint while in US custody.

Their vivid account of the harrowing conditions at the camp, as told to their lawyers and published for the first time in yesterday's Guardian, has reignited the debate about the treatment of prisoners and the British government's role in their questioning and detention. Last night the Red Cross was joined by the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, which argued that if the allegations were true they indicated systematic abuse, amounting to torture.

If you missed the original report of the Tipton 3's charges, you can read it in yesterday's Guardian. They were captured in Afghanistan, shipped to Guantanamo where they were held for 2 years, and finally released in March with no charges ever being brought against them.

Lawyers for Kobe Bryant's accusers Wednesday said she is re-evaluating whether she wants to continue to participate in the criminal proceeding against him. They said she may rather bring a civil suit against him.

One of the accuser's attorneys, Atlanta civil attorney Lin Wood said, "I'm of the mind that she's only going to be treated fairly in a civil case, where the playing field is level and Mr. Bryant's life will be scrutinized." Wood joined the case several weeks ago. According to legal experts, his hiring by the accuser's family indicates more emphasis is being spent on the civil portion of the case.

Legal analysts aren't surprised. The case against Kobe has been going downhill for some time. With the release of a pre-trial hearing transcript containing testimony by a defense expert that she believes the accuser had sex after the encounter with Kobe and before she arrived at the hospitial for her rape exam, a conviction will be hard to obtain.

But the same credibility problems that have plagued the accuser in the criminal case will follow her into the civil case. Unless a settlement is agreed upon, I don't see a civil case coming out in her favor. This sounds like a last-ditch attempt at a graceful exit strategy.

Houston's crime lab has been reeling for some time from the discovery of numerous convictions tainted by false lab reports. It's about to get worse:

Six independent forensic scientists, in a report to be filed in a Houston state court today, said that a crime laboratory official - because he either lacked basic knowledge of blood typing or gave false testimony - helped convict an innocent man of rape in 1987. The panel concluded that crime laboratory officials might have offered "similarly false and scientifically unsound" reports and testimony in other cases, and it called for a comprehensive audit spanning decades to re-examine the results of a broad array of rudimentary tests on blood, semen and other bodily fluids.

How many cases are affected in this new probe?

Elizabeth A. Johnson, a former director of the DNA laboratory at the Harris County medical examiner's office in Houston, said the task would be daunting. "A conservative number would probably be 5,000 to 10,000 cases," Dr. Johnson said. "If you add in hair, it's off the board."

Barry Scheck, one of Mr. Rodriguez's lawyers, said that Harris County was the worst place in America for a crime laboratory scandal. "We know already that they couldn't do DNA testing properly," Mr. Scheck said. "Now we have a scandal that calls into question many thousands more cases. And this jurisdiction has produced more executions than any other county in America." Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Texas has executed 323 people, 73 for crimes in Harris County.

The first scandal was bad enough:

A state audit of the crime laboratory, completed in December 2002, has found that DNA technicians there misinterpreted data, were poorly trained and kept shoddy records. In many cases, the technicians used up all available evidence, making it impossible for defense experts to refute or verify their results. Even the laboratory's building was a mess, with a leaky roof contaminating evidence. The DNA unit was shut down soon afterward, and it remains closed.

Hundreds of Israeli soldiers have combat stress after completing their national service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Help is on the way. They will soon be treated with cannabis.

The mental health department of the Medical Corps is set to to begin tests in the next few days on volunteers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after reserve duty, the paper said. A scientist who will help conduct the experiment heads a research team, which discovered that cannabis helped mice that had suffered physical stress and even reduced the risk of stroke.

Can you imagine the U.S. ever being so enlightened with our soldiers facing combat stress from their tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan? Didn't think so.

Good news for Detroit residents. Marijuana Policy Project reports:

By a 60% to 40% vote, Detroiters passed a ballot initiative yesterday allowing seriously ill patients to use medical marijuana with their doctors' recommendations.

The initiative goes into effect immediately, so Detroit patients -- who yesterday risked arrest and months in jail for medical marijuana possession -- today woke up in a city that no longer subjects them to prosecution.

Detroit is just the first stop. The initiative is being launched in 22 other cities:

You can't rock the vote any better than this....

Confirming a couple weeks of speculations, a mega lineup of artists including Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, REM, Bruce Springsteen and Dixie Chicks, have announced the not so subtly-titled Vote For Change Tour. The bands will play shows during the first week of October in a number of swing states (areas where the popular vote between the Democrats and Republicans is expected to be close). For the politically challenged, we should explain that U.S. presidents are determined by how many states they win the majority of votes in. Each state is worth a different number of points based on its population, so populated states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Florida are key battlegrounds.

Springsteen will be on Nightline tonight talking about it. Here's the lineup, divided into six groups:

• Pearl Jam with Death Cab For Cutie
• Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band with R.E.M., John Fogerty and Bright Eyes
• Dave Matthews Band with Jurassic 5 and My Morning Jacket
• Dixie Chicks with James Taylor
• Jackson Browne with Bonnie Raitt and Keb' Mo'
• John Mellencamp with Kenny "Babyface" Edmonds

Each group will play in a different Pennsylvania town on October 1. The tours will move on, with some or all of the bills hitting cities in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Minnesota, North Carolina and Florida.

Any chance the concerts could be made available on pay-per-view around the country? It could be a great source of revenue for the party and the candidates.

Moroccan Mounir El Motassadeq is scheduled to be retried in Germany on terrorism charges related to 9/11. His lawyer now plans to argue that the charges should be dismissed because of the likelihood that information from Ramzi Binalshibh, which the Government intends to introduce at trial, was obtained through torture by U.S. personnel:

Key evidence in the planned retrial of a September 11 suspect in Germany was probably obtained by U.S. authorities under torture, his lawyer alleged on Wednesday as he called for the case to be thrown out. Lawyer Josef Graessle-Muenscher said he would use the torture charge to press for the case against Moroccan Mounir El Motassadeq to be dropped as soon as the retrial gets under way in Hamburg next Tuesday.

...The German court case revolves around Ramzi bin al-Shaibah, a captured al Qaeda leader who knew Motassadeq in Hamburg. Both were part of a circle of Arab students there which included Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, three of the suicide hijackers who led the attacks of September 11, 2001. Germany has asked the United States to provide information from the interrogation of bin al-Shaibah, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002, which could help secure a conviction in the Motassadeq trial.

....Motassadeq became the first person anywhere to be convicted in connection with September 11 when he was sentenced to 15 years' jail in 2003 for aiding and abetting several thousand murders and belonging to a terrorist organization.

More torture details here.

Go Kerry! More like these, please.

Democrat John Kerry, in a veiled swipe at Vice President Dick Cheney, said that he won't dole out special favors to corporations if elected president. "My vice president of the United States will never meet secretly with polluters who want to rewrite the environmental laws," the presidential nominee told a cheering crowd packed into a hockey arena Tuesday.

The barb referred to Cheney, who met with industry officials while drafting proposals for new energy laws. Democrats want more information about those meetings and have argued that Cheney, the former head of the Halliburton Co., had allowed the loosening of clean air and water rules at the behest of corporations.

The Bush Blog links to this NRO article which is very disrepectful of Firefighters.

Generally speaking, the likelihood that a firefighter will vote for John Kerry is inversely proportional to the number of fires he has actually fought. Witness all those T-shirted "Fire Fighters for Kerry" you saw at the convention. A little soft around the middle some of them were, weren't they? Do you think some of them could haul a hose pack up 50 flights of stairs? I'm not betting on it. I'm guessing the only fires many of them have seen lately were at IAFF barbecues.

The Homeland Security Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Protection Act of 2004, sponsored by Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) has passed the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee:

The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), today unanimously approved her bipartisan legislation (S. 2536) to further protect the civil rights and civil liberties of Americans. The Homeland Security Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Protection Act of 2004, sponsored with Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), would ensure that officials within the Department of Homeland Security have the ability to balance public safety with the civil right and liberties that are so important to Americans.

The best features of the bill:

The bill creates a new position within the office of the Inspector General whose responsibility would be to oversee civil rights and civil liberties cases that are referred to this office. The bill also would amend the Department of Homeland Security’s mission statement to include the protection of civil liberties and civil rights as priority for the Department and its activities.

Kudos to Senators Collins and Wyden.

Received by e-mail, what do you think:

Update: This is the source.

Tuesday, August 03, 2004 Kerry's bounce WAS as big as Clinton's, and here's why
by John in DC - 9:19 PM

1. The August 2d Newsweek says that in 1992, by one count, roughly 66 percent of all voters were up for grabs. According to the same story, 17 percent are up for grabs now (my friend Rob, who knows such things, says other polls show only 10 percent up for grabs). If you take the 17 percent figure, that's almost 4 times as many voters up for grabs in '92 as compared to today.

2. Clinton got a 16 point bump from his convention in 1992 - that was considered a "massive" bump according to the AP. The average bump, according to Gallup, is 5 to 7 points.

3. Kerry gets a bump of 4 points from last week's convention, according to the latest ABC/Washington Post poll. That's a tad below average, according to Gallup.

4. But more importantly, Kerry's bounce was as strong, if not stronger, than Clinton's, and here's why.

Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk has a short quiz you can take to gauge your knowledge of recent campaign and political news.

I got all the celebrity questions right and most of the policy and economic questions wrong. Could it be the media is more interested in peddling and repeating celebrity stories than substantive ones --and that being repeatedly subjected to them causes us to remember the details? I don't know. On the other hand, had the questions asked about Kerry or Bush policies on crime or civil liberties issues instead of economic issues, I bet I would have aced it. (I did get the intelligence director question right.)