We file this under the "How Other's See Us" category. We think it shines a bright light on an issue that too many Americans believe doesn't affect them--that of military tribunals. After all, who really cares about the nameless, faceless, middle-eastern men held in captivity in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for 18 months? Not too many people here, but fortunately, the rest of the world is watching.

The Australian Herald Sun reports that the U.S. is planning to turn the Guantanamo Bay prison camp into a death camp.

THE US has floated plans to turn Guantanamo Bay into a death camp, with its own death row and execution chamber. Prisoners would be tried, convicted and executed without leaving its boundaries, without a jury and without right of appeal, The Mail on Sunday newspaper reported yesterday.

The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians.... General Miller said building a death row was one plan. Another was to have a permanent jail, with possibly an execution chamber.

The Mail on Sunday reported the move is seen as logical by the US, which has been attacked worldwide for breaching the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war since it established the camp at a naval base to hold alleged terrorists from Afghanistan.

But it has horrified human rights groups and lawyers representing detainees. They see it as the clearest indication America has no intention of falling in line with internationally recognised justice. The US has already said detainees would be tried by tribunals, without juries or appeals to a higher court. Detainees will be allowed only US lawyers.

....American law professor Jonathan Turley, who has led US civil rights group protests against the military tribunals planned to hear cases at Guantanamo Bay, said: "It is not surprising the authorities are building a death row because they have said they plan to try capital cases before these tribunals. "This camp was created to execute people. The administration has no interest in long-term prison sentences for people it regards as hard-core terrorists."

Thanks to R. Striker for sending this our way.

Trent Lott is behind a move to change the senate filibuster rules that will begin when Congress returns after the Memorial Day Weekend. His purpose? To secure the confirmation of controversial Bush judicial nominee Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

A rules change would require a two-thirds vote in the Senate, an unlikely occurrence. GOP leaders also are considering trying to change the filibuster rule from the chair of the Senate, which would require only a simple majority vote to approve if Democrats challenged the ruling. That tactic is known as the "nuclear option." Democrats have warned of "fallout" if Republicans resort to that maneuver.

Pickering was rejected by Democrats on the first go-around because of his perceived racial insensitivities. Our prior coverage of Pickering is assembled here. According to this recent article in Salon, there is new evidence to support the claim of racial insensitivity--and in particular, to support a newer claim that Pickering was not truthful to the Committee during his 2002 confirmation hearing testimony.

Pickering told the Judiciary Committee that he engaged in efforts to better race relations in the 1960's. In 1964, he changed parties and became a Republican. He denied to the Committee that the motive for the switch was "to protest the national Democratic Party's support for civil rights and its attacks on segregation."

The new evidence to show Pickering was being disingenous, at best, and a liar, at worst, comes from newly discovered documents at the University of Mississippi Library, consisting of the files of his former law partner, avowed segregationist J. Carroll Gartin.

Gartin, who as lieutenant governor from 1956 to 1960 and again from 1964 until his sudden death in 1966 was a leading member of Mississippi's notoriously racist Sovereignty Commission.

According to Salon, :

Gartin's papers show conclusively that, contrary to McConnell's description, Pickering himself was one of those "white citizens and politicians who resisted integration and civil rights," not someone working to oppose such forces. Instead of "trying to establish better race relations" in the 1960s, Pickering worked to support segregation, attack civil rights advocates who sought to end Jim Crow, and back those who opposed national civil rights legislation, above all the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Or, in the words of a public statement he signed in 1967, Pickering wanted to preserve "our southern way of life," and he bitterly blamed civil rights workers for stirring up "turmoil and racial hatred" in the South.

Steve Gilliard, filling in for Kos today at Daily Kos, has a delightfully wicked wrap-up on the Guliani-Nathan nupitals.

No one would mistake this blog for a wedding annoucements page, but it's rare to have such an act of evil described in such a banal way. It would be as if Bill Clinton gave away Monica Lewinsky at her wedding and the press reported that the former president gave away a White House intern he became friendly with.

There's lots, lots more. We're glad somebody said it. Herr Guliani just gives us the creeps.

The New York Post reports that an Ohio truckdriver has been arrested as an Al Qaeda operative planning an attack in the U.S.

Federal agents have nabbed an Ohio truck driver after unmasking him as an al Qaeda operative in plots to collapse a suspension bridge and blow up an airliner in the United States, according to a new report.

The information reportedly was obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been cooperating from his overseas detention facility for some time. Mohammed is allegedly Al Qaeda's former chief operations officer.

Newsweek is the source of the report on the Ohio trucker and other suspected planned al Qaeda attacks in the U.S. this summer. The Ohio trucker story does not sound like recent news, particularly since he also has been cooperating with authorities for some time.

Intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK that during his interrogation, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed fingered an Ohio truckdriver. In a major breakthrough, the Feds picked up the truckdriver, who began to cooperate. According to law-enforcement sources, the truck- driver was involved in plots to bring down a bridge and blow up an airliner. The truckdriver was asked by his Qaeda masters to obtain the proper tools for loosening the bolts on a suspension bridge. As for the airliner, the truckdriver said that cargo trucks could easily drive underneath passenger jets without arousing suspicion.

Also, keep in mind that interrogations of suspected al Qaeda members are likely to result in deliberate misinformation as well as credible information.

The San Francisco Chronicle has some warnings about the newly renamed Terrorism Information Awareness project:

THE PENTAGON'S plan to mine countless governmental and commercial databases is no less worrisome than it was earlier, after a soothing report to Congress and a name change for better public relations. The Defense Department's "Total Information Awareness" program has been rechristened "Terrorism Information Awareness," to offset the impression that the brainchild of former Adm. John Poindexter would compile electronic dossiers on all Americans. The Department of Defense describes it, rather, as an effort "to protect U.S. citizens by detecting and defeating foreign terrorist threats before an attack." "

....The Pentagon's high-tech research now would collect untold trillions of additional "dots" from all kinds of records and transactions, plus far-out data like the shapes of faces and the way people walk (gait analysis), to provide more anti-terrorist tools.

....Civil libertarians are concerned, with good reason, about whether this can be done without intruding on the privacy and other rights of all of us whose everyday lives will be under surveillance. That is why Congress blocked further spending on the system pending a further report from the Pentagon (submitted May 20) on safeguards for innocent citizens. The Department of Defense has an "oversight board" to assess "privacy and civil liberties impacts," and assures us of its "commitment to the rule of law."

All well and good. But Congress should continue to keep Poindexter and his electronic spy team on a short leash as they use our dental records and pedestrian patterns in their search for terrorists.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, dedicated to preserving our privacy rights in the digital world, has this analysis of the DARPA report on the Total Information Awareness Project. The actual report is available here.

Are any prison reformers out there? If so, we just received this email asking for information on how to address the following problem:

Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus Skin or Soft Tissue Infections in Lewis Facility in Arizona DOC is a highly contageous bacteria infection that is running rampant through Lewis Facility and being denied by the health care staff as being "spider bites". One inmate has had this stapf infection for over a year.

It is to epidemic propotions and they either deny it exists or try to treat it inadequately with non effective antibiotics to avoid the treatment needed - 4 days of IV antibiotic drip with the costly appropriate antibiotic, the cultures and blood tests required. In Sept, 2002, 928 inmates had MRSA in the LA County Jail system which were originally diagnosed as spider bites and subsequently found to be MRSA by the CDC.

Lewis Facility denies epidemic and has isolated or quarantined ZERO prisoners even from outside visitation. Please advise me of who to inform of this contagion that can break through this wall of prison health indifference to the needs of the inmates and surrounding community. Thank you.

CalPundit is depressed.

No more blogging today. No more news, no more TV, no more Republicans telling me that the only way for my country to prosper is to give ever more to the rich and ever less to the poor, to starve any government program that dares to help education, healthcare, the needy, or the elderly, and to base our role in the world solely on a mirage of military dominance so breathtakingly misguided that it would make Julius Caesar himself choke on his porridge. What is it that drives otherwise sane people to believe that these are the things that will make America great in the 21st century? Maybe I'll be back tomorrow. Maybe not. In either case, have a nice Memorial Day.

John Cole and Matt Yglesias respond. We provide this response under our hat of criminal defense lawyer:

Newt Gingrich and his "Contract on America" were only one step behind George Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft. The right wing now dominates this country. Liberal/progressive thought takes the back seat.

As criminal defense lawyers, we toil every day in the trenches known as courtrooms. We can't give up. We remember to stand erect (male lawyers would say "we puff up our chests,") and we repeat to ourselves, "I am proud to be a criminal defense lawyer," and we go in there and fight the good fight. We lose more than we win, but we know the scales of justice function like a pendulum, and someday, the scales again will tilt in our favor. Until then, staying silent is not an option.

Every person we fight for, no matter how heinous their alleged crime, is a human being. A human being with the right to dignity and with a past and a present, a person who can claim at least one person who loves him or her unconditionally, even if it's only their mother. We stay in the trenches and we fight for that client's ounce of dignity and spark of humanity.

The message here: Get out of bed. We don't have the luxury of being depressed. There is too much work to do. We have battles to fight and wars to win. We need you, Kevin, and those feeling the same way, to recognize there is power in numbers, and if you all go to sleep instead of hanging in here to fight the good fight with us, then all of us have lost.

Kevin, take Memorial Day off from blogging as you planned. But come back Tuesday will a renewed sense of purpose and spirt: We will win. We are fighting for good and what's right. We may not win today, or even tomorrow. But when that pendulum swings the other way, we will be victorious. Never give up. Each of us has a role to play and all of our voices are needed.

John Ashcroft is a non-elected official with pious, radical-right views who is now in the position to impose his wackiness on the rest of us. We can take him out--through the electoral process. We just have to get out the vote and defeat Bush. Please, do anything except stand mute.

We are proud to announce that bloggers are now being included in at least one Journalism class' final exam, and we are included: [ed: at the request of the journalism professor who saw this post this morning, we are deleting the course name and website]

Visit each of the following online commentaries, and list what the main proposition of the argument being made. Then state whether it is a proposition of fact, value, or policy. It may appear that there are several different propositions, but I am looking for the main, over-arching proposition. DEFEND your decision as to why it is which type (tell me why it is a proposition of fact, etc.).

1.) Who Pays These Idiots? (Matt Yglesias)

2.) Iowa Moves to Equalize Crack and Powder Cocaine Sentences (TalkLeft)

3.) lynch law (tacitus)

Anyone think they have the correct answer?

Israeli leaders have indicated they will back a U.S. plan for peace in the Middle East that includes the recognition of a Palestinian state-- with conditions.

The road map, drafted by the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations, calls for an immediate cease-fire, followed by a series of simultaneous confidence-building steps by the two sides, including the disarming and dismantling of Palestinian militant groups, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a freeze on Jewish settlement expansion and the immediate dismantling of small settlement outposts established in the past two years. The plan calls for the creation of a "provisional" Palestinian state by the end of this year and a fully independent and sovereign state by 2005.

The "conditions" Israel are seeking include the relinquishment by Palestinians of the right to return to parts of Israel:

Most significantly, the cabinet members said that before the creation of a Palestinian state, Palestinian refugees had to give up their claim to a "right of return" to areas in Israel that they left during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. The road map does not specifically refer to the right of return but calls for a realistic solution to the refugee issue.

Apparently, the Palestinians refuse to acknowledge the condition.

A senior Palestinian official said that in the interest of pushing the road map forward, his government would simply ignore the Israeli conditions. "The Israeli cabinet wanted to make themselves feel better about the road map, so they decided they were going to accept the road map as they define it, which includes this condition that Palestinians have to give up the right to return," he said. "We are ignoring that condition because it is irrelevant, and it's not part of the road map, nor will it ever be."

It doesn't sound to us like there is a meeting of the minds here.

We have received a few e-mails from readers who advise they cannot post comments. All use aol (as do we). We have found that if we access the site through Internet Explorer while on aol, there is no problem.

Also, posting comments is sometimes slow. You only need to click once. We tend to block urls that post the same comment three or more times. If you have been blocked and your multiple posting of comments was an accident, email us the name you used when posting the comment and we'll unblock your url.

We started a new category tonight at the request of a reader, Foreign Affairs, to address issues in the middle east. We are not particularly knowledgeable in this area, so we expect most of our posts will consist of news rather than commentary, but you are all free to add your thoughts. Only anti-semitic and nasty comments will be deleted.

On the injustice front today, Reuters reports on the upcoming military tribunals and asks, Fair Trial or Kangaroo Courts?

Donald Rehkopf, co-chair of the military committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, called the planned military commissions ``an embarrassment to democracy.''

``This is a show. It's a kangaroo court of the worst sort,'' he said, describing the rules as crafted to guarantee convictions, compel guilty pleas and make it as easy as possible to get the death penalty.

``I was actually shocked at how one-sided these rules were,'' said Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. ``Even a military tribunal I don't think has to be this biased and unfair toward the defendant.''

NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg has accepted blame for the death of a woman who died when the police raided her apartment by mistake and set off a flash grenade. The family has filed a $500 million lawsuit against the city.

In an interview outside the church before the funeral began, Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York, who did not address the congregation, said that Ms. Spruill's death was part of a pattern of violence by police officers against members of minority groups. "This community sees far too many grenade-type incidents," Mr. Rangel said. "Grenades are not made for Harlem."