Tuesday, February 19, 2008


Mental Notes, Come The Revolution

1) Scalia is a troll. 2) Another federal court Bush appointee has allowed a money-laundering Swiss bank to shut down the wikileaks.org site.

Scalia ignores the Constitution and stare decisis to impose his support for cruel and unusual punishment:
The National Lawyers Guild calls on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to recuse himself from any case coming before the Supreme Court involving the constitutionality of torture as an interrogation technique. In a BBC interview that aired on Tuesday, Scalia defended the use of torture to extract information from persons in custody by law enforcement officials in some cases.

Although no case involving the use of torture is currently before the Court, recent events suggest that such a case may be forthcoming.

Guild President Marjorie Cohn said: “The Guild is appalled that a sitting Justice of the United States Supreme Court has ventured in a public forum his belief that it is justifiable to attempt to extract information from persons in custody by the use of torture. A justice of the highest court in the land, sworn to uphold the Constitution, whose views so undermine the fundamental right of security of the person guaranteed by the Bill of Rights, is unfit to sit on that Court.”…read on
California District Court Judge Jeffrey White denied, without recourse or notice, a popular whistleblower site on the behalf of a foreign bank. This means war in Web-Land:
In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company and domain registrar for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to "lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." Judge Jeffrey White in the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on the stipulation between the two parties last week without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court. ...read on
This is pure First Amendment violation, not even involving security. No different from blocking a newspaper or magazine from publishing on its web site.


(via Crooks & Liars, from Common Dreams, by way of Cat in the Bag)

5 comments:

Unknown said...

If there was ever an argument for term-limiting Supreme Court Justices, this is it.

Naj said...

Worry not my friend. wikileaks lives in cyber universe!

This little creature cannot be leashed, try as they may!

You see in the 30s, people used to have their own radio stations; things were much more grass rood, mediationally. then big corporations, like radio city took over; and broadcasting became institutionalized!

Why can't the same thing happen to computers? BECAUSE there are HUGE capitalist empires BUILT on the stones of "privatized" mediation. What is dangerously emerging is google spreading its wings over people's mediation/computation realms. It looks very convenient and easy; but I see a serious point of threat here.

Anyways, just lazy ramblings. I need to ramble these things in a more scholarly way :))

Naj said...

aaaand now it's on thepiratebay.org, i.e. EFFECTIVELY protected by scandinavian's respect for human freedom and untouchable by conservative bigots ... woohoo

MarcLord said...

Bro Tim,

yes, and I did find one justice got impeached in 1906. Maybe 12 years would be enough of a term.

MarcLord said...

Naj,

well, that's getting pretty scholarly with the knowledge. One article said they also hosted in India. Oh, I know they really can't shut it down, but they it is setting an awful precedent. In a way, I'm glad the judge made the decision, and in the way he did, because it's so out of bounds.