Note the irony of banning people from speaking about the American founding without prior government approval.

As usual, the freedom fighters at the Institute for Justice are on the case.

Jesse Helms, unrepentant bigot.

No mourning here.

The good news is that for the first time in more than a decade, Mississippi is looking for a real state medical examiner, instead of relying on the disreputable Dr. Steven Hayne to do the state’s autopsies in criminal cases.  The following job opening recently appeared on the Mississippi State Personnel Board:

DPS-STATE MEDICAL EXAMINER
THIS IS A NON-STATE SERVICE POSITION.
Note: Must be certified in Forensic Patholgy (sic) by the
American Board of Pathology. Salary is negotiable.
You may apply electronically through this website
or mail your State of Mississippi application to the
Department of Public Safety
Attn: Human Resources
PO Box 958
Jackson MS 39205 

Unfortunately, the link to the opening takes you to a "file not found" page. 

The other problem is that the salary—$72,389.76—isn’t likely to attract many qualified candidates, particularly given the troubled history of the office, and that whoever gets the job is going to have a lot of cleaning up to do.

For comparison, the state of Alaska recently advertised for the same position with a salary and benefits package of $265,000.

The best hope for Mississippi is that an esteemed, possibly retired doctor takes the job despite the low salary solely for the good of the profession, and to put Dr. Hayne out of business. 

In the meantime, Hayne is still doing the vast majority of the state’s autopsies.

More on Dr. Hayne next week.

Woman was a designated driver. Didn’t have a drop to drink all night. She refused a roadside sobriety test because . . . well, because they’re utter bullshit (and unlike a blood or breath test, you’re allowed to refuse the roadside test). I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that her husband, who was in the car, is a DWI defense attorney, and had just beaten the cop in question in court.

In any case, after her arrest and incarceration, prosecutors were forced to quietly drop the charges when her blood test came back 0.0. Now, ask yourself how the officer writes the following about a stone sober woman:

It’s interesting to read the affidavit that Officer Gonzalez wrote that night about Heather Squires, intending to ask the Motor Vehicles Division of ADOT to yank her license. (He never mailed it — possibly because of the blood-test results.)

It describes “bloodshot and watery eyes.”

“Flushed face.”

“Strong odor of an alcoholic beverage emitting from breath.”

The New Times writer adds:

Honestly, I don’t want to believe that Officer Gonzalez sought out the lawyer who beat him in court — and then penalized his wife when she’d done nothing wrong.

But a rogue cop is almost preferable to a system that’s stacked against motorists who want nothing more than to get home at night. Those people might not be as sober as Heather Squires proved to be, but after one or two drinks, I’m willing to bet that they don’t have bloodshot eyes or reek of booze. You’re still going to read that in the police report.

This isn’t the first time pre-written, xeroxed or boilerplate DWI reports have come up. Not the first time someone’s been arrested at 0.0, either.

The Mesa Police Department is standing behind the officer.

Jack Shafer explains why the latest report on overdose deaths attributable to prescription drugs is mostly exaggerated.

We’ve seen this all before. Shafer debunks a media account of a study on prescription drug overdoses in Florida. Florida is also where the OxyContin panic started back in 2003–due in part to drug warriors and the media making the very same mistakes about a similar report from same Florida Medical Examiner’s Commission. People who died of drug overdoses with OxyContin in their systems were marked up as overdoses attributable to OxyContin. Never mind whatever they myriad other drugs that may have been present.

Because Oxy scripts had taken off at the time (do to its effectiveness, not to a glut of corrupt, drug-dealing doctors), naturally there would be an uptick in people visiting emergency rooms with OxyContin in their systems. There would also be an uptick in plumbers, city workers, and TV repairment with Oxy in their systems. Nevertheless, the narrative that emerged was that Oxy was “accidentally” addicting people, then killing them.

This led to full-blown media hysteria, a series in the Orlando Sentinel that was later retracted, legislative hearings, and all sorts of onerous legislation and investigations and regulatory and legal harassment of legitimate pain doctors and their patients. The lingering result is that it’s more difficult for pain patients to get a drug that actually works at the dosages they need.

Point being, these lazy media reports can have dramatic, real-world consequences.

June was the bloodiest month for U.S. troops since the start of the war in Afghanistan. The Taliban (remember them?) is regrouping, and apparently gaining the capacity to conduct new terror attacks. And guess what? There’s nothing we can do about it. Because we’re over-committed to the debacle in Iraq. But don’t take my word for it. As our president is fond of saying, “listen to the generals.”

The nation’s top military officer said yesterday that more U.S. troops are needed in Afghanistan to tamp down an increasingly violent insurgency, but that the Pentagon does not have sufficient forces to send because they are committed to the war in Iraq.

Navy Adm. Michael G. Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said insurgent Taliban and extremist forces in Afghanistan have become “a very complex problem,” one that is tied to the extensive drug trade, a faltering economy and the porous border with Pakistan. Violence in Afghanistan has increased markedly over recent weeks, with June the deadliest month for U.S. troops since the war began in 2001.

“I don’t have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq,” Mullen told reporters at the Pentagon. “Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there.”

I’m not really sure what to make of this.

Congrats to Sgt. Marty Browne, an NYPD cop and regular reader and commenter at this site. Browne was recently given a series of honors by the Queens community he serves.

Not the Gambinos. NYPD. 

Last year, New York police officers were seen dancing in the streets just before arresting four men in a city nightclub on charges of selling $100 worth of cocaine.  It took six months and the men’s life savings, but their names were finally cleared when prosecutors took the unusual step of announcing in court that the men had committed no crime.

That’s because club surveillance video shows that the undercover cops had no contact with the accused men in the two hours they were in the club.

Now, club owner Eduardo Espinoza says the police are retaliating against him.

Espinoza said he thinks police are retaliating against him because of a strange phone call he received shortly before the harassment began.

A man who identified himself as the officer who made the drug arrest in his club demanded to know if Espinoza had taped the events of that night.

"I said I already gave it to the defendants," Espinoza said, "He said, ‘Oh s–t.’ He hung up."

Espinoza had received just two summonses in the two-and-a-half years he owned the club prior to turning over the videotapes.  He has received more than a dozen since.

"I been harassed so much, I’m selling my business," said Espinoza, owner of Delicias de Mi Tierra on 91st Place in Elmhurst.

"Every two to three weeks, there’s cops in here, searching the bar. If there’s no violation, they’ll make it up. I lost all my clients - everybody’s scared to come in my place right now."

The officers implicated by the surveillance tapes are being investigated, but still on duty.

So fireworks are illegal in the city of Houston. But they’re legal in surrounding Harris County. The problem is, Houston has annexed several roads outside the city limits, though there are no signs to let Harris County residents know this.

So Houston police are watching as Harris County residents buy fireworks at a perfectly legal fireworks stand, then stopping and fining them when they pull onto a road the city has annexed. Fines range from $500 to $2,000.

Dan Mitchell and Richard Rahn write on the federal government’s continuing efforts to assert U.S. jurisdiction all over the world. They’ve moved beyond gambling to now pressuring Swiss bankers to break Swiss law in order to comply with U.S. law. Federal officials charge that the Swiss’ famous secrecy is helping U.S. citizens skirt federal taxes.

This is almost certainly going to backfire.

Glenn Reynolds notes that Justice John Paul Stevens made some gross factual errors in the Heller case.

He’s not the only one. Over at Obsidian Wings, Hilzoy points to a whopper by Justice Antonin Scalia in Boumediene, where Scalia cited a U.S. Senate minority report which cited a CNN reported which quoted a Pentagon spokesman as saying that 30 former Gitmo detainees “have returned to the battlefield” after being released. Sounds like a high-stakes game of telephone.

Turns out, it all depends on what you mean by “returned,” and what you mean by “battlefield.” Hillzoy explains that the Pentagon now puts the number at 12 (and had released the revised number well before Scalia released his opinion). But it’s probably closer to three. Or maybe five. At least one. And the “battlefield” may have actually mean “somewhere in Turkey.” Or Morocco. Or Russia. In one case, the Pentagon counted a former detainee writing an op/ed in the New York Times as “returning to the battlefield.” For two others, it was appearing in a documentary critical of the U.S. war on terror.

Oh, and whatever the number, none of the former detainees were released by liberal judges giving undue deference to habeas claims. All of the 445 formerly captured “worst of the worst” Gitmo detainees thus far released were released by political appointees at the DoD, for their own reasons.

USA Today reports that many states have continued selling scratch-off jackpot tickets long after the top prizes emblazoned all over the tickets have already been awarded.  A law professor in Virginia is filing a class action suit claiming the state sold more than $20 million worth of such tickets per year for at least three years.

The states claim that the practice isn’t fraudulent because smaller prizes are still available, and because lottery players can check the back of tickets (after they’ve already bought them) and websites for disclaimers and lists of prizes already claimed.  Despite that weak defense, several states, including Virginia, have since discontinued the practice.

Virginia, by the way, has killed two of its citizens in police actions aimed at protecting residents of the Old Dominion from losing their money while gambling privately.  Because those shady black market bookies might take your money under false pretenses.

…from this week (now posted at reason) is an analysis of the Heller case.

A panel from the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit looks at the evidence from the first "secret" case out of Guantánamo, and finds it lacking.

In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.

With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem "The Hunting of the Snark": "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."

"This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true," said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.

The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.

More "judicial activism" like this would be welcome.  Only about eight percent of the prisoners in Gitmo are suspected to be actual al-Qaeda fighters.  Thus far, just one of the 680 held at the facility at the height of its capacity in May 2003 has been convicted.  The Bush administration’s approach to actual evidence against the people it has been detaning has thus far amounted to little more than "just trust us."  It’s a good thing the courts are asking for a bit more than that.

Today, a news story that neatly captures the moral failings of Bush’s war on terror:

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

[...]

The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.”

The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

This actually isn’t all that new. It’s covered in Charlie Savage’s book, Takeover. The moral failing here is bad enough. But the ineptitude doesn’t end there. The whole purpose of the Air Force study was to figure out how the Chinese were able to elicit false confessions from American soldiers and pilots during the Korean War. U.S. special forces troops are put through these interrogation techniques during training so they’ll recognize them–not so they won’t give up classified information, but so they won’t submit to giving fake information for propaganda purposes, as happened in Korea.

Those techniques were then adopted at Guantanamo. Which leaves us with one of two possibilities. The first is that this administration is so incompetent that it was foolishly using techniques the military has known for decades lead to false confessions in a bumbling effort to collect real intelligence. That would be bad enough. But at least that would indicate mere incompetence. The second possibility is even scarier: The administration knew the history of these techniques but adopted them anyway, because it wanted confessions it could then trumpet to the public as successes in the war on terror–and they didn’t much care whether or not they were false.

As Savage writes in his book, high-level military interrogation experts tried to explain to political leaders in the Bush administration that they had misunderstood the origin and effect of these techniques. They were rebuffed by political appointees hellbent on expanding presidential power.

Gelles, Kleinman, and other interrogation experts tried to raise alarms internally about the dangers and ineffectiveness of the SERE-style coercive techniques, but they were ignored and threatened. Civilian decision makers inside the Bush-Cheney administration viewed such criticisms as an attack on its claims of presidential power. And they dismissed the complaints as nothing more than another example of the misguided worries of a “law enforcement” mind-set too often focused on fathering evidence that could be used in a civilian courtroom to understand that different rules apply in wartime.

Ron Suskind notes in his book The One Percent Doctrine that many of the false alarms we’ve had over impending terrorist attacks in recent years came from the use of these techniques against low-level al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah (he was basically the organization’s travel agent), who told his interrogators whatever he thought they wanted to hear to stop them from torturing him. So we got all of those false warnings about pending terrorist attacks on “shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, and water systems.”

So this administration’s stubborn, tunnel-visioned quest to expand presidential power has caused it to adopt inept interrogation methods, in part because what better way to show the Congress, the human rights groups, and the UN that they have no power to stop this White House than to adopt the most brutal techniques available? Who cares if they work! In the process, they’ve managed to elicit false information from terror suspects, leading to false panics and the waste of potentially billions of dollars in heightened security expenditures after those false alarms have gone out.

“Terrorism” by definition is an effort to use a few attacks to induce unwarranted and irrational fear across an entire population. The aim is get the terrorist’s target to alter its policies, waste its resources, and change its way of life in an irrational response to an enemy without the resources for a more traditional war.

This administration isn’t fighting terror. They’re helping perpetuate it.

From a New York Times interview with Columbia University professor of Buddhist studies (and Uma’s dad), Mark Thurman:

What do you think about when you meditate?

Usually, some form of trying to excavate any kind of negative thing cycling in the mind and turn it toward the positive. For example, when I am annoyed with Dick Cheney, I meditate on how Dick Cheney was my mother in a previous life and nursed me at his breast. 

Via Gene Healy.

A giraffe masterminds a circus animal jailbreak in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam police say 15 camels, two zebras and an undetermined number of llamas and potbellied swine briefly escaped from a traveling Dutch circus after a giraffe kicked a hole in their cage.

Police spokesman Arnout Aben says the animals wandered in a group through a nearby neighborhood for several hours after their 5:30 a.m. breakout.

[...]

“You have to imagine somebody rubbing his eyes first thing in the morning and saying, ‘Am I seeing things or is that 15 camels walking past?’”

Pixar’s negotiating with the giraffe for movie rights.