Here's more from the New York Times on the Government's seizure of websites in connection Operation Pipedreams, and the arrest of internet drug paraphernalia sellers across the country a few weeks ago.

Two weeks ago, after the federal government shut down 11 Web sites that trafficked in drug paraphernalia like bongs, roach clips and cocaine spoons, the Internet addresses didn't simply disappear from cyberspace. Instead, visitors to sites like PipesForYou.com and aheadcase.com are likely to be routed to a message hosted by the Drug Enforcement Administration. "The Web site you are attempting to visit has been restrained," the message reads in part. The words are superimposed on an American flag. ....Web surfers heading to some of these sites will not be told that the domain name "cannot be found," as they would if the name was wiped off the Internet. Instead, they could end up on a D.E.A. server, where they'll see the message and the flag. That's raising concerns among some experts in Internet and civil-liberties law. Shutting down a Web site is nothing new. Commandeering the Web address is another thing altogether. Is the electronic flag announcement a cautionary message to visitors that they are being tracked?

This is a new frontier for the Government that will be challenged strenously in the courts. Civil libertarians, such as Marc Rotenberg of EPIC say,

ONCE the government takes control of a domain, Mr. Rotenberg explained, it has the ability to record personal information from all the visitors to the site. "It becomes like electronic flypaper," he said. "It can effectively continue to operate the business to attempt to entrap others in the future."

So is it an acceptable investigatory technique as the Government will claim, or a violation of the Fourth Amendment and privacy rights, as will be argued by defense lawyers? We say the latter. The U.S. Attorney misses the point by miles. She says,

"If you had someone who's walking down the street and looking in the window of a drug paraphernalia store at bongs, a police officer could stand on the corner taking pictures of everyone looking in the window," she said. "You'd have the same concerns."

The two situations are hardly similar. Internet users do not intend the public to know their personal identifying information electronically transmitted by their computers whether they want it to be or not. This is not just a screen name or email address that's being conveyed. That would be like photographing their face. This is like photographing them in their underwear. Thanks to Connecticut defense attorney Todd Bussert for the link]

We're shocked that this hasn't gotten more coverage. We are outraged. The CIA has acknowledged that last September, the seven and nine year old sons of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, arrested last week and alleged to be a "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks, were seized by Pakistani authorites, and that this weekend, the kids were turned over to the CIA and then flown to America so that the young boys could be interrogated in an undisclosed location about their father's activities and used to get their father to talk.

Yousef al-Khalid, 9, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, 7, were taken into custody in Pakistan in September when intelligence officers raided an apartment in Karachi where their father had been hiding.

He fled just hours before the raid, but his two young sons, along with another senior al Qaeda member, were found cowering behind a clothes closet in the apartment.

The boys have been held by the Pakistani authorities, but this weekend they were flown to America, where they will be questioned about their father.

CIA interrogators confirmed last night that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being encouraged to talk about their father's activities.... [Mohammed] has been told that his sons are being held and is being encouraged to divulge future attacks against the West and talk about the location of Osama bin Laden, officials said.

"His sons are important to him. The promise of their release and their return to Pakistan may be the psychological lever we need to break him."

First, let's translate. The operative and missing word from that last sentence is "safe." As in what Mohammed is really being told is that something awful will befall his sons if he doesn't cooperate. Legal? Probably. It's also morally bankrupt. But let's leave the father out of this for the moment. Our concern is the kids.

Isn't this kidnapping? How about a human rights violation? What kind of precedent does this set? Seven and nine years old -- has this Administration lost its mind?

We didn't realize that enemy combatant status was hereditary. A lawyer and a guardian ad litem should be appointed for these kids immediately. The kids should be returned home without delay to whatever family they have left. This is taking "sins of the father" to an unprecedented and unconscionable level.

Bump and Update:

Erdogan won the election. In a television interview today, he says he is not in a hurry for a re-vote and that the U.S. is to blame for the outcome of the last vote.

Erdogan said he wants assurances Turkey will be protected in a post-war Iraq. One of his aides said he doubts a vote will occur before March 19, two days after the U.S. deadline, unless the U.S. acts quickly to provide the assurances Turkey is seeking.

In the interview, Erdogan blamed the United States for rushing him to go to parliament last week before he had gathered enough support, and for alienating the Turkish public with statements that cast their resistance to the U.S. deployment as a bargaining ploy for more economic aid. Now, he said, the Bush administration would have to wait for these bad feelings to ease.

"I shouldn't give a definite date right now, but the U.S. has to take certain steps," he said. "As long as these steps are not taken, it is difficult for us to soften this climate in Turkey."

Erdogan named two issues he wanted the Bush administration to address. He asked for stronger guarantees that ethnic Turkmens in Iraq -- a population of 2 million to 3 million that Turkey says traces its roots to the same ancestors as the Turkish people -- would be fairly represented in a postwar Iraqi government. And he asked the United States to clarify what role Turkey would have in shaping Iraq's future, an apparent reference to Turkish concerns that an independent Kurdish state could be established in northern Iraq.

The Turkish government believes that a Kurdish state would encourage Turkey's own Kurdish population to make similar demands for autonomy, and perhaps lead to a renewal of the fighting between Kurdish separatists and the Turkish military that battered the nation for much of the past two decades.

"We talk about a political approach, so what will Turkey's role be in the end? If Turkey will not have any role, why is it sharing such a risk? This is not clear. It has to be clarified," Erdogan said.

Original Post--3/9/03 9:00 am The polls are closed in Turkey and counting of the votes has begun. It is expected that Recep Tayyip Erdogan will become the Turkish Prime Minister.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been the main power behind the scenes since his Islamic-rooted party formed a government after November elections, but he was barred from political office until a recent constitutional change. Erdogan is running for a seat in parliament in the southeastern province of Siirt. If he wins, he is expected to replace Prime Minister Abdullah Gul and form a new Cabinet within days - possibly removing ministers who have opposed the U.S. deployment."

Our prior post on Turkey and what our Turkish-American friends have told us is here.

Bob Herbert writes about Delma Banks, a likely innocent man about to be texecuted in Countdown to Execution No. 300

The war trumps all other issues, so insufficient attention will be paid to the planned demise of Delma Banks Jr., a 43-year-old man who is scheduled in about 48 hours to become the 300th person executed in Texas since the resumption of capital punishment in 1982.

Mr. Banks, a man with no prior criminal record, is most likely innocent of the charge that put him on death row. Fearing a tragic miscarriage of justice, three former federal judges (including William Sessions, a former director of the F.B.I.) have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to block Wednesday's execution.

So far, no one seems to be listening.
"The prosecutors in this case concealed important impeachment material from the defense," said Mr. Sessions and the other former judges, John J. Gibbons and Timothy K. Lewis, in an extraordinary friend-of-the court brief.

We need to make time for Mr. Banks. As Herbert concludes,

Prosecutorial misconduct. Racial bias. Drug-addicted informants. "This is one-stop shopping for what's wrong with the administration of the death penalty," said George Kendall, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund who is handling Mr. Banks's appeal. If, despite all that is known about this case, the authorities walk Mr. Banks into the execution chamber on Wednesday, and strap him to a gurney, and inject the lethal poison into his veins, we will be taking another Texas-sized step away from a reasonably fair and just society, and back toward the state-sanctioned barbarism we should be trying to flee.

Exonerated: Bernard Webster was convicted for a rape he didn't commit. In 1982, science couldn't uncover the truth DNA evidence held. Twenty years later, it could.

Via A Moveable Beast , check out the Age Gauge--we had no idea we were too old for.....or we were so young when.....

Here's another more political one, one for tv lovers and this last one for movie buffs.

From Alberta Phillips' Austin Statesman column, Seek the truth, and let it set a wronged man free:

When Ellean Banks heard the news that a federal judge overturned her son's death sentence, she danced and shouted in her home in Nash, near Texarkana. The family prayed and wept. Laughed and made plans for a home-coming for Delma Banks Jr. that seemed just around the corner. That was in 2000.

Now, Mrs. Banks, 67, is preparing for her son's execution in three days.

After nearly 23 years, she still doesn't fully comprehend how things got this far. How her son could end up on death row based on dubious testimony. There was no physical evidence — no DNA, no fingerprints, no blood and no murder weapon. Delma Banks didn't confess. In fact, he turned down a plea that would have made him eligible for 15 years ago. When a judge urged him to bargain with prosecutors, he told them he couldn't plead guilty to a crime he didn't commit. Mrs. Banks said a lawyer urged her to create an alibi for Delma, but that meant violating her Pentecostal beliefs.

What makes Delma Banks case most unusual is those who are supporting halting his execution:

Facts in the case, especially evidence uncovered by Delma Banks' appeals lawyers, are so disturbing that U.S. District Judge David Folsom overturned the death sentence in 2000. The behavior of police and prosecutors was so unconscionable, it prompted former FBI director and U.S. District Judge William Sessions (of San Antonio) to file a friend of the court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court requesting it halt Banks' execution. "The prosecutors in this case concealed important impeachment material from the defense," Sessions said in the brief, joined by two other former federal judges and a former federal prosecutor. All are staunch death penalty supporters, but even they could not stomach the apparent misconduct by police and prosecutors.

This will be the 300th Texecution since 1976. Here's more on Delma Banks and his likely innocence.

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Three New York Times Reporters, Raymond Bonner, Don Van Natta and Amy Waldman, examine Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World:

Senior American officials said physical torture would not be used against Mr. Mohammed, regarded as the operations chief of Al Qaeda and mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. They said his interrogation would rely on what they consider acceptable techniques like sleep and light deprivation and the temporary withholding of food, water, access to sunlight and medical attention.

You think that's not so bad, right? Read on:

American officials acknowledged that such techniques were recently applied as part of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking Qaeda operative in custody until the capture of Mr. Mohammed. Painkillers were withheld from Mr. Zubaydah, who was shot several times during his capture in Pakistan. Routine techniques include covering suspects' heads with black hoods for hours at a time and forcing them to stand or kneel in uncomfortable positions in extreme cold or heat, American and other officials familiar with interrogations said. Questioners may also feign friendship and respect to elicit information. In some cases, American officials said, women are used as interrogators to try to humiliate men unaccustomed to dealing with women in positions of authority.

Have you wondered where Ramzi Binalshibh was taken? Now we know. A secret CIA base in Thailand. Ouch.

Intelligence officials also acknowledged that some suspects had been turned over to security services in countries known to employ torture. There have also been isolated, if persistent, reports of beatings in some American-operated centers. American military officials in Afghanistan are investigating the deaths of two prisoners at Bagram in December.

Here are some details provided by CIA officials on the treatment of one detainee whom they thought had information.

What is known is that the questioning was prolonged, extending day and night for weeks. It is likely, experts say, that the proceedings followed a pattern, with Mr. Faruq left naked most of the time, his hands and feet bound. While international law requires prisoners to be allowed eight hours' sleep a day, interrogators do not necessarily let them sleep for eight consecutive hours.

Mr. Faruq may also have been hooked up to sensors, then asked questions to which interrogators knew the answers, so they could gauge his truthfulness, officials said.

The Western intelligence official described Mr. Faruq's interrogation as "not quite torture, but about as close as you can get." The official said that over a three-month period, the suspect was fed very little, while being subjected to sleep and light deprivation, prolonged isolation and room temperatures that varied from 100 degrees to 10 degrees. In the end he began to cooperate.

Techniques vary from country to country.

American and foreign intelligence officials have acknowledged that suspects have been sent to Jordan, Syria and Egypt. In addition, Moroccan intelligence officials have questioned suspects and shared information with their American counterparts.

In one case in Morocco, lawyers for three Saudis and seven Moroccans accused of plotting to blow up American and British ships in the Strait of Gibraltar last summer said their clients were tortured. Moroccan officials denied that physical torture was used but acknowledged using sleep and light deprivation and serial teams of interrogators until the suspects broke.

....In Cairo, leaders of several human rights organizations and attorneys who represent prisoners said torture by the Egyptian government's internal security force had become routine. They also said they believed that the United States had sent a handful of Qaeda suspects to Egypt for harsh interrogations and torture by Egyptian officials.

"In the past, the United States harshly criticized Egypt when there was human rights violations, but now, for America, it is security first — security, before human rights," said Muhammad Zarei, a lawyer who had been director of the Cairo-based Human Rights Center for the Assistance of Prisoners."

Ouch again.

Don't miss The Power of the Fourth in Sunday's New York Times Magazine about how one court, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, is moving the country rightward. Two of its judges, J. Harvie Wilkerson, III and J. Michael Luttig, are both mentioned frequently as possible nominees for the Supreme Court.

Bush's most recent appointee to the Fourth Circuit is Dennis Shed, a former chief of staff to Strom Thurmond. His pending nominee is Terrence Boyle, a former Helms aide unsuccessfully nominated by George Bush, Sr. more than 10 years ago.

Although the Fourth Circuit has the largest African-American population of any appellate jurisdiction in the country, the court did not become ethnically or racially integrated until 2001, and was the last circuit to do so.

This is a long article, but well worth reading because it shows the jeopardy befalling our judiciary on a national scale. The independence of the judicial branch in America is under attack as never before.

Legal scholars talk about the pendulum swinging from liberal to conservative, from a preoccupation with individuals' rights to a preoccupation with states' rights, and suggest that, in time, it will swing back once more. It would certainly help many Americans sustain their faith in the system if the courts could find their equilibrium, if they could become less ideological, less predictable and less political. That doesn't appear to be on the horizon, though, not in the foreseeable future. In the historic site in Richmond where the Confederacy once thrived, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is ushering in the 21st century.

Remember that federal judges serve for life. Every right-wing judge that Bush appoints is likely to stay on the bench for 20 to 30 years. What will happen to our consitutional liberties? Will they be there for your children? If you're concerned about this, bookmark People for the American Way and the American Civil Liberties Union. Read their reports on the nominees and write or fax (rather than e-mail) your Senators when hearings come up. Let them know you oppose any Bush nominees you find to be extremist and likely to be a judicial activist. And vote Bush out of office in 2004--no matter which Democrat runs against him. Please help preserve the independence and integrity of the judiciary for our children.

Maureen Dowd comes out swinging in her New York Times column today, The Xanax Cowboy.

The president wants to avenge his father, and please his base by changing the historical ellipsis on the Persian Gulf war to a period. Donald Rumsfeld wants to exorcise the post-Vietnam focus on American imperfections and limitations. Dick Cheney wants to establish America's primacy as the sole superpower. Richard Perle wants to liberate Iraq and remove a mortal threat to Israel. After Desert Storm, Paul Wolfowitz posited that containment is a relic, and that America must aggressively pre-empt nuclear threats. ....Saddam would be the squealing guinea pig proving America could impose its will on the world.

Chelsea Clinton has accepted a job with pay in the six figure range. She'll be working in the New York office of London-based McKinsey & Company as a consultant, researching topics ranging from health care to corporate finance.

We received this email today from Amy Robertson, a civil rights lawyer in Denver:

I hope you have the opportunity to read "Lost in the Jihad - the Dropped Case Against John Walker Lindh," by Jane Mayer, in the March 10 New Yorker. It includes an almost unbelievable account of Justice Department efforts to keep Lindh from having an attorney, including ignoring the advice of its own ethics office, withholding and hiding emails conveying that advice, and then persecuting the young ethics office lawyer who spoke up about her emails. What is perhaps most interesting is Mayer's point that DOJ fuck-ups ultimately made the case much harder to prosecute than it would have been if they had acted properly.

Here's what Slate (March 3) had to say about Mayer's piece:

The New Yorker, March 10 --Why didn't John Walker Lindh ever go to trial? A piece describes how the Justice Department's case against him disintegrated: The defense was prepared to argue that the FBI agent who extracted Lindh's confession ignored advice that such an interrogation would be illegal. Justice eventually dropped nine of the original 10 charges and settled for a 20-year sentence. Though it contends that Lindh could be innocent, the story is sharpest when detailing the ditherings of the criminal justice system post-9/11.

Truthout has posted an interview with Jane Mayer about her Lindh article, also appearing in the March 10 New Yorker, accessible here.