by TChris

The Transportation Security Agency's screening of luggage may or may not make our lives safer, but letting the agency's workers snoop through luggage in private makes our property less safe.

Since last March, federal screeners have been arrested for theft from passengers' property at John F. Kennedy International Airport, as well as Miami International, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County and Denver International airports.

Although TSA spokesperson Ann Davis characterizes the problem as "quite small," theft and property damage claims have been piling up at TSA, and airlines are starting to worry that they must contend with yet another customer service issue. The TSA's response to the "quite small" problem: a request that Congress limit its liability for damaging or stealing passengers' property to no more than $3 million a year.

Tuesday, the Supreme Court will begin issuing its final month of opinions for the term. Some are critical, including three on Bush's anti-terror policies:

The court will hand down more than two dozen decisions in June, including whether the words "under God" should remain in the Pledge of Allegiance, whether the Internet should remain free of criminal restrictions and whether pedestrians must identify themselves when a police officer asks them to.

But most legal scholars were focused on the series of cases that test the president's powers to hold terrorism suspects. In three cases, the justices will decide whether the military can hold "enemy combatants" — both foreign and domestic — without filing charges or giving them a hearing.

Predictions, anyone?

Whoops. An auditor for the DEA has lost his laptop with data concerning over 100 informants, including over 4,000 pages of sensitive case-file information that if delivered into the wrong hands could allow traffickers to identify the informants. The loss story sounds fishy, because first the auditor told the DEA the laptop was stolen from his car trunk while he was inside a coffeehouse, but later,

...when investigators confronted the auditor last week and questioned his account, the auditor changed his story, saying he had accidentally damaged the computer—then destroyed it and threw it away in a Dumpster to avoid embarrassment.

The DEA is reportedly "livid." Aside from the obvious reason, here's another one:

Only two years ago, the [Inspector General] IG issued a blistering report criticizing Justice agencies, including the DEA and the FBI, for failure to maintain adequate controls on sensitive items—including their laptop computers.

by TChris

It's tough to run for judge in Alabama, where former Chief Justice Roy Moore lost his job on the state's highest court after defying a federal court order to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments from the courthouse rotunda. Christian conservatives have made him a folk hero, and other judges have to contend with his popularity among voters who believe it's evil to respect the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Justice Jean Brown (described by her campaign manager as a "conservative Baptist Sunday school teacher"), facing reelection, is defending her vote to remove the monument by touting its replacement: a courthouse exhibit that displays the Ten Commandments with other documents, including the Magna Carta. Her TV ads say she's "proud" that the Ten Commandments are back in the courthouse. But that doesn't satisfy her opponent, Tom Parker (Moore's "former legal adviser"):

"Who can Alabama conservatives trust?" one of his commercials asks, showing a picture of Justice Brown. "She removed the Ten Commandments, and insulted us with her politically correct, A.C.L.U.-approved display."

It would be more honest to say: "Vote for me and I promise to defy the law just like Ray Moore." Just as it would be more honest for Justice Brown to stop hiding behind the Ten Commandments and explain that a state has no business endorsing a religion, even if it's the religion preferred by voters.

by TChris

It's no secret that the U.S. has been imprisoning people in Iraq without adequate cause to justify the detentions. The sudden drive to release prisoners after the embarrassment of Abu Ghraib demonstrates that many detainees should never have been taken into custody, or should have been released promptly.

Maj. Gen. John Ryder recognized that problem last fall, when he completed a report concluding that hundreds of Iraqi prisoners were being held in Abu Ghraib "despite a lack of evidence that they posed a security threat to American forces."

The unpublished report ... reflects what other senior Army officers have described as a deep concern among some American officers and officials in Iraq over the refusal of top American commanders in Baghdad to authorize the release of so-called security prisoners.

General Ryder, the Army's provost marshal, reported that some Iraqis had been held for several months for nothing more than expressing "displeasure or ill will" toward the American occupying forces. The Nov. 5 report said the process for deciding which arrested Iraqis posed security risks justifying imprisonment, and for deciding when to release them, violated the Pentagon's own policies. It also said the conditions in which they were held sometimes violated the Geneva Conventions.

Ryder gave his report to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the top American commander in Iraq, but Sanchez apparently deferred to the desire of other officers to ignore international law by keeping the prisoners locked up.

Daily Kos has initiated a new project, the DKospedia.

....a collaborative project of the DailyKos community to build a political encyclopedia. The dKosopedia effort was started in April of 2004 and currently consists of 616 articles. Please see our Policies before contributing. Articles are written from a left/progressive/liberal/Democratic point of view while also fairly acknowledging other sides' take.

Readers are invited to contribute original material.

by TChris

It's time for fingerprint experts across the country to start sweating. Until now, jurors have been accustomed to thinking that any testimony given by a fingerprint expert is unassailable. Defense lawyers may find jurors more receptive to attacks on the accuracy of fingerprint identifications after the FBI called the connection between a partial print and Brandon Mayfield "absolutely incontrovertible" and a "bingo match."

[W]hen three top experts manage to blow such an important identification, our longstanding faith in fingerprints must be questioned. Nor is this the only such mistake to come to light in recent months. In January a Massachusetts conviction was overturned when the fingerprint identification, the cornerstone of the case, was shown to be erroneous.

Fingerprint evidence has always depended more on faith than science.

We lack good evidence about how often examiners make mistakes, nor is there a consensus about how to determine what counts as a match. Our current approach to fingerprint evidence, in which experts claim 100 percent confidence in any match, is dangerously flawed and risks causing miscarriages of justice.

Full confidence is impossible to achieve, but it sure sounds good in court. It's time for judges to start questioning the nearly automatic admissibility of fingerprint evidence, as one judge tried to do before changing his mind.

More TalkLeft coverage of fingerprint issues here.

by TChris

Once again, this time in Utah, zero tolerance equals zero thinking:

Because of a zero-tolerance drug policy, a 13-year-old boy has been suspended from school for 45 days for giving a cousin a cold pill - even though it had been prescribed for both children.

Do school administrators seriously believe that denying children access to their prescription medications prevents drug abuse? Zero tolerance policies rarely advance their stated goals, but they make life easier for administrators by relieving them of the burden of using good judgment. It's time to remind public employees that they're getting paid to think, not to enact mindless zero tolerance policies.

by TChris

TalkLeft has written (here and here) about the reasons to oppose the nomination of William Haynes to a seat on the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. People For the American Way has a statement you can sign urging the Senate to reject Haynes' nomination. It's an easy way to make your voice heard.

by TChris

The Mayor of Maple Park, Illinois was arrested last night in a gambling raid conducted by State Police at D.J.'s Tavern West. The Mayor was in good company: Maple Park's chief of police was also arrested.

by TChris

Is the White House melting down?

For months now, the same administration whose members once prided themselves on never contradicting one another in public has been riven by conflicting pronouncements. Senior officials keep missing opportunities to keep their signals straight, prompting cases of vicious backbiting that one senior member of Mr. Bush's national security staff said with disgust the other day "make us sound like Democrats.''

If "some of us sound like Democrats" means "some of us are telling the truth," more power to them. Maybe the White House can't stay on message because the message is so often false or nonexistent.

Even President Bush -- who likes to criticize John Kerry for "flip-flopping" -- has difficulty staying on message, or figuring out what the message is, as evidenced by his varying and indecisive descriptions of the degree of sovereignty Iraq will enjoy after June 30.

It has all sown such confusion that a European foreign minister, asked on a recent visit what he thought of the latest administration plan for the handover, smiled and responded, "Last week's or this week's?''

The linked article recaps some of the administration's internal disagreements and external flip-flops, then asks: "how did an administration that made an art form of singing from the hymnal suddenly lose its rhythm?"

by TChris

The death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan made headlines by virtue of his celebrity: Tillman gave up a $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to enlist in the Army after 9/11. It's making headlines again because the Army admits he was probably killed by friendly fire.