In a new interview with journalist Craig Oliver, Canadian Maher Arar and his wife renew their call for a full inquiry into his seizure at JFK by American authorities who transported him to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured. [Background here.]

Oliver: why have you decided not to let this thing go?

Arar: Because what happened to me could also happen to other people in the future, so I felt it's an obligation upon me as a human being and as a Canadian, to do something for other people in the future and, so to keep my story alive will help other people. It will also put more pressure on the government to call for public inquiry and we have not found the answers yet for what happened to me.

It's a long and interesting interview, we recommend reading the whole thing.

Thousands of soldiers are being forced to stay in the service through "stop-loss" orders and many of them are very unhappy about it.

....thousands of soldiers [are being] forbidden to leave military service under the Army's "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.

"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist. To the Pentagon, stop-loss orders are a finger in the dike -- a tool to halt the hemorrhage of personnel, and maximize cohesion and experience, for units in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Through a series of stop-loss orders, the Army alone has blocked the possible retirements and departures of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year. Hundreds more in the Air Force, Navy and Marines were briefly blocked from retiring or departing the military at some point this year.

....To many of the soldiers whose retirements and departures are on ice, however, stop-loss is an inconvenience, a hardship and, in some cases, a personal disaster. Some are resigned to fulfilling what they consider their patriotic duty. Others are livid, insisting they have fallen victim to a policy that amounts to an unannounced, unheralded draft.

One soldier said, "I'm furious. I'm aggravated. I feel violated. I feel used." The military's response has not been sympathethic.

"We're all soldiers. We go where were told," said Maj. Steve Stover, an Army spokesman. "Fair has nothing to do with it."

Sounds like involuntary servitude to us. We just hope it's not another sign the draft is coming.

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Doctors who choose to treat patients in chronic pain by prescribing painkillers are being increasingly subjected to criminal prosecution. Doctors charge they are the target of overzealous prosecutors and DEA agents. The Pain Relief Network is fighting back.

....charges of illegally prescribing prescription narcotics, criminal conspiracy, racketeering and even murder have been brought in dozens of states against scores of doctors who treat chronic pain with prescription narcotics. At least two have been imprisoned, one committed suicide, several are awaiting sentencing, many are preparing for trial, and more have lost their licenses to practice medicine and accumulated huge legal bills.

Their crime, it seems, is that they were supplying their chronic pain patients with sometimes large numbers of prescriptions for controlled but legal medications to treat their pain. The result, the doctors say, is that the established medical use of opium-based drugs for pain is becoming criminalized by aggressive drug agents and zealous prosecutors. Adding to their concern, the official rhetoric has escalated to the point that federal and state prosecutors often accuse arrested doctors of being no different than drug kingpins or crack dealers.

....Some pain doctors are organizing to push back, and in recent months a loose national movement has been formed to contest what some call the "war" being waged against pain doctors, pharmacists and suffering patients. A new group called the Pain Relief Network is organizing a march on Washington in April to protest the prosecutions and has hired an attorney to develop a legal strategy for appealing some of the convictions.

Texas authors are rightfully upset by the sudden enforcement of a ban against visiting prison inmates.

A long-standing but little known Texas Department of Criminal Justice policy prohibiting nonacademic book authors from interviewing privileges was suddenly being enforced. No exceptions.

...."We are legitimate media," said [Suzy] Spencer, who has penned three true-crime books. "We're not out to damage TDCJ. We're just out to do our jobs. I don't see why if AP gets an interview, we should not be able to."

They have enlisted the support of the National Writers Union and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, both of which wrote letters of protest to prison system general counsel Carl Reynolds. "We find it ironic that you would seek to limit access to the very journalists who have the ability to provide the most thorough and detailed accounts of criminal cases," wrote Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee. "This criterion is arbitrary and unfair to nonfiction book authors."

The change in policy seems to be due to a change in leadership of the prison system's public information office. The new public information director says authors usually take more time to conduct interviews and he doesn't want to have to use his staff to monitor writers--or to have to verify credentials.

How's this for a catch-22?

[Director] Viesca pointed out that book authors are free to write an inmate and request to be put on his or her approved visitor list. That would allow them more contact with the inmate than most reporters get. But Casey said visitors, unlike members of the press, are not allowed to bring in notepads, pens and tape recorders, rendering an interview almost worthless.

We think Viesca's title should be changed from "public information director " to "public information suppressor."

Bump and Update: We just finished watching the interview. It left us feeling very sad. We totally believe Michael Jackson--from his account of his mistreatment during his arrest to his denial of the current criminal charges. We think the case against him is bogus. He's not charged with sharing a bed with children. He's charged with providing alcohol and sexually molesting one child--a child who is on record as saying nothing untoward every happened. A child whose mother is also on record as saying Michael Jackson was an exemplary person in her child's life.

A mother who now says she became suspicious that Jackson gave her child wine. Where did she take her suspicions? To the police? No. To a lawyer. Which lawyer? Out of the 175,000 practiicing lawyers in California, she chose the one who had obtained a multi-million dollar settlement for another child ten years ago. The lawyer sent the kid to his cherry-picked therapist. Then the lawyer went to the DA in the 1993 case, who has said all along the case against Jackson would be reopened if another accuser came forward. Notwithstanding that the Los Angeles Department of Children & Family Services concluded the charges were unfounded, this prosecutor filed the case.

Michael Jackson will fight this to the bitter end. His fans will be with him. We'll be there too.

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Original Post 12/26/03 3pm

Michael Jackson speaks out Sunday night on 60 minutes in an interview with Ed Bradley.

...he vehemently denies the charges against him. An impassioned Jackson says, "Before I would hurt a child, I would slit my wrists," in reaction to a Bradley question about the charges brought against him that he molested a young boy.

Jackson also says that the police search of Neverland Ranch was overdone and so violated his privacy that his home will never be the same. He tells Bradley, "I won’t live there ever again. It’s a house now. It’s not a home anymore. I’ll only visit."

He also discusses his time in police custody, talking about the injury he says was inflicted on him by the police when they handcuffed him and other details about his arrest.

A Massachussetts army national guardsman at the Guantanamo prison was killed by a gunshot to the head. It sounds like a suicide but all authorities will say for now is that the investigation is continuing. [link via Agonist].

Did Bush commit another stealth attack by signing the latest anti-terror law on a Saturday--the same Saturday Saddam was captured? Probably not. While the bill does contain provisions that were in the never-introduced Patriot Act II, it did pass both houses and there was press about it at the time--and we cautioned and complained about it several times.

Our last post was when it passed both houses of Congress. Before that, we wrote about it here , and in more detail, where we called Congress' actions a "stealth attack" here .

We don't think Saddam's capture had anything to do with Bush signing the bill. It got a sufficient amount of press, but not enough people were concerned about it to make it controversial. The NYTimes covered it, but the link is now dead. Here's an article that's still accessible.

We put out an action alert when the bill was first introduced in September, pointing out that the Administration's game plan was to introduce Patriot Act II piecemeal to avoid protests.

We first warned about the piecemeal plan to pass the provisions of Patriot Act II back in May.

So, this isn't new news or surprising news or a stealth attack--but we hope it makes more people start paying attention -- because this bill certainly isn't the last one the Administration has planned for us.

The lists are starting to come in....check out South Knox Bubba's who has these gems among many more:

• President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft call press conference to announce enactment of Patriot Act III by Executive Order. Law enforcement officials and legal scholars puzzled by bewildering list of new regulations, such as national registration of gas-powered lawn trimmers and edgers, restrictions on the sale of Kaboom brand household cleaning products, and mandatory tracking and reporting of National Hebrew Kosher All-Beef Frank sales.

• After winning the Democratic presidential nomination from James Carville in a poker game, Hunter S. Thompson stuns the nation by winning 92% of the popular vote and the electoral votes of every state except Alabama running on a platform of free guns, free dope and whisky, and free cable TV porn for every American. Bush demands a recount. No paper trail can be produced. John Ashcroft calls for an investigation of Diebold.

• On the day he is released from prison, Tommy Chong purchases the winning Power Ball lottery ticket, claims a $260 million prize, and hires a crack team of cyber-sleuths to investigate John Ashcroft. They discover a huge cache of bizarre and disturbing child porn involving altar boys, Crisco, and twelve swarthy men dressed as the Apostles on Ashcroft's personal home computer.

Update: Don't miss Vodkapundit's predictions either.

We've had bad travel days, but Joe Trippi's recent experience sounds like a real nightmare:

On his way from Iowa to Washington, D.C., to appear on ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos," Trippi was stuck on the airport tarmac in Chicago for more than two hours Saturday night, eventually missing all the flights to D.C., because there were no gates available.

Determined to have him on the air, ABC chartered a plane to fly him in, but the only one they could find was in Cincinnati, and it couldn't pick him up until 1 a.m. That should have been plenty of time for Trippi to collect his luggage and get to the private terminal, but the airline had lost his bags.

He arrived in Washington at dawn, luggage-less, wearing his usual rumpled outfit. At the Mayflower Hotel, the concierge told Trippi he was in luck: Filene's Basement was having a pre-Christmas sale at 7:30 a.m., so he could buy a suit there before his TV appearance.

The Washington Post assesses the death penalty in an editiorial, 2003: The Year in Death:

In 2002, 65 percent of executions took place in only three states -- Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri. This year Texas alone accounted for 24 executions. The top three states -- Texas, Oklahoma (which killed 14) and North Carolina (seven) -- together carried out 69 percent of the executions nationally. Add in Georgia, Florida, Ohio and Alabama, each of which killed three, and 88 percent of the executions have been accounted for. Only 11 states -- along with the federal government -- carried out executions, the lowest number since 1993. In other words, even as the number of executions holds relatively steady, fewer states are doing more of the dirty work.

This is good news for those who believe, as we do, that capital punishment ought to be abolished. Right now the political consensus in most states does not exist to get rid of it. Politicians are committed to the death penalty, and solid majorities of the public support it as well. The best prospect for long-term change lies in the ongoing demonstration that the death penalty isn't necessary or effective and carries great dangers. States with moribund death penalties can evolve over time into states without death penalties with no great disruption to their criminal justice systems or to the expectations of their electorates. The fewer states that execute people regularly, the more exceptional become those like Texas and Oklahoma -- which insist on using capital punishment as a routine instrument of justice.

Serious reform and ultimate abolition of the death penalty will take time. That's okay. So long as it gets here. And it seems the tide is turning, if ever so slowly:

Capital punishment in America will not disappear all of a sudden. But if serious reform efforts continue and the penalty becomes ever more regional in its application, it could begin to fade away.

Federal judges are showing their increasing willingness to balk at the Adminstrations' war on terror:

For many months after Sept. 11, 2001, the scales of justice consistently tipped in favor of the Bush administration's approach to fighting terrorism and detaining suspects deemed threats to national security.

Now, some civil rights groups and legal experts point to signs of a judicial backlash as cases inch closer to the U.S. Supreme Court. "The real change is that appellate courts are saying, `Wait a second, you can't do that,' " said Jim Ross , senior legal adviser for Human Rights Watch. "Historically," he said, "the further you get away from the notion that the nation is in immediate, imminent danger, the more courts have been inclined to step back and reassess."

The article recaps the recent 2nd Circuit decision on Jose Padilla and the 9th Circuit opinion on the Guantanamo detainees. [link via How Appealing.}

California's prison guard union has been out of control for a long time. And it's not getting any better. Read this chilling article in today's LA Times (free subscription required)

Five years ago, after prison scandals gripped California with tales of guards setting up inmates in human cockfights and then shooting them dead, the state Department of Corrections vowed to change its ways.

Whistle-blowers would be protected, not punished. Internal investigators would be encouraged to pursue abusive guards. And the correctional officers union no longer would have a hand in dictating policy.

That new day never came, interviews and documents show.....the Corrections Department remains troubled by allegations that rogue guards still go unpunished, union bosses continue to exert strong influence, and top administrators still thwart whistle-blowers.

Here's some background on the California prison guard problem....and how Gray Davis became beholden to it. As we said a few months ago,

Some suggest turning to private prisons. The prison guards union has objected to that. We have a better idea. Reduce the number of inmates. Release the drug and non-violent offenders. Home detention and electronic monitoring is another option.

We're glad Gov. Arnold is considering this solution.