Dan Gillmor

The Citizen Media Law Project has launched the first iteration of its Legal Guide, which

addresses the legal issues you may encounter as you gather information and publish your work. The guide is intended for use by citizen media creators with or without formal legal training, as well as others with an interest in these issues. You can search by keyword, browse by state, browse by section, or simply jump right in.

This is prodigious work by David Ardia, Sam Bayard and a team of interns at Harvard Law School. Congratulations to all.

BBC: Afghan senate backs death penalty. Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament has issued a statement backing a death sentence for a journalist for blasphemy in northern Afghanistan. Pervez Kambakhsh, 23, was convicted last week of downloading and distributing an article insulting Islam. He has denied the charge. The UN has criticised the sentence and said the journalist did not have legal representation during the case.

This case shocks the conscience. Journalists — all of us — should be trying hard to stop this outrage.

If Afghanistan kills this man it will lose support from people who care about liberty, and at a time when it most needs that support. Surely Americans will ask themselves why our soldiers are dying to preserve such a loathsome regime. I know I will.

Anonymous Liberal: Bill Clinton’s Selfish Myopia: I sincerely hope that Obama is able to overcome the Clintons’ cynical and destructive attempts to marginalize his impressive victory today and make this a campaign about race. If he’s not, Bill Clinton may one day have to grapple with the reality that he personally set back a lot of the goals he’d spent his life fighting for, all in a myopic attempt to get his wife elected president.

The panic that has hit world financial markets created an undercurrent of worry at the DLD conference in Munich. A most telling panel featured investors, who were plainly worried. And only one of had had much good to say about the immediate future for the United States.

America has borrowed and faked its way into a huge financial hole. The so-called twin deficits of the foreign-trade current account and federal budget are only two of at least five deficits. The other obvious ones: the housing bubble’s deflation, leaving borrowers and financial institutions (and ultimately taxpayers) deeply in the hole; the credit-card crunch that is seeing a big jump in defaults and late payments; and the utter lack of savings in the U.S.

We face a generation of trouble in America. Panic is the wrong response, because it’ll only make things worse. But anyone who’s not fretting about this is oblivious to reality. It’s going to get very, very rough in the near term.

Glenn Greenwald accurately explains the grotesque result of laws that seek to curb that amorphous problem of “hate speech” — a concept that turns free speech on its head. And unlike many of his colleagues on the political left, Greenwald explains why he’s defending people whose speech frequently deserves contempt:

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing “offensive” or “insulting” or “wrong” political ideas. The mere existence of the “investigation,” interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

How many times can we say this? If you care about your own free speech rights, you must defend the rights of people whose speech makes your blood boil.

In order to vote in next month’s primary in Arizona, my new official residence, I have had to declare a party affiliation. What a travesty.

I’m independent, and have voted for people from both major parties and several minor ones. I do lean left on many issues, which tends to lead me to more Democrats — though the current Democratic Party is in many ways just a me-too version of the Republicans.

In any event, I registered as a Democrat in Arizona. As soon as the primary is finished I plan to remove that designation. In some future primary I’ll be a Republican, no doubt.

The candidates get to decide how to triangulate the voters. Why can’t we voters triangulate the candidates? Some system.

Moe Lane at Red State, a right-wing blog, gets it precisely and depressingly right in “Sweet Jeebus, is there nobody in the Democratic Party who understands national party unity?”

Let me put this in very stark terms: there is no Democratic Party in Congress. There are, instead, a bare majority of Congressmen and Senators who have banded together in order to gather power, influence, and money. Which is fine, as far as it goes – except that they are not actually using any of the resources that they are gathering to benefit the groups and causes who worked to put them in power. At best they are operating under terms of enlightened self-interest, albeit a very small-minded version of it: they are keeping their geographical constituents as sweet as is necessary to ensure re-election. And the Republicans know all of this, and will use this knowledge to pass the bills that we feel the country needs to thrive. And all of this is why 2007 was such a horrible legislative year for the progressive movement – and why 2008 will be no better for them.

There are any number of reasons for the pathetic approval ratings for Congress. This is the clearest explanation I’ve seen yet.

The Democrats not only have no collective spine (nor, obviously, much in the way of individual courage), but they have no serious principles for governing. I now suspect they will lose their majority next year.

Why? Because the Democrats’ utter failure to do their job is going to spur more third-party efforts, especially if Hilary Clinton is nominated for president. The likes of Ralph Nader, who remains one of the principal causes of George Bush’s presidency, will have a more convincing argument than in the past that there is not sufficient different between the parties to care which governs. This is dangerous nonsense, of course, but the Democrats are asking for such treatment. Does America deserve such non-leadership? Maybe not, but that’s where we’re heading.

Glenn Greenwald: Whether it’s the war in Iraq or illegal surveillance or the abolition of habeas corpus and now the systematic use of torture, it’s the Bush administration that conceived of the policies, implemented them and presided over their corrupt application. But it’s Congressional Democrats at the leadership level who were the key allies and enablers, never getting their hands dirty with implementation — and thus feigning theatrical, impotent outrage once each abuse was publicly exposed — but nonetheless working feverishly the entire time to enable all of it every step of the way.

When the historians mark turning points in America’s decline, these deeds will be key evidence.

Also, from Andrew Sullivan:

This is not to say that there is no difference between the parties, with the GOP shamefully defending war crimes the United States once prosecuted as such. The Democrats, for the most part, have been their usual selves on this: still in a defensive crouch against any notion that they might be soft on terror, and implicitly adopting the fallacious logic that somehow opposing torture means being soft on terror. Au contraire. Torture has weakened the West’s war against barbarism by blurring the critical lines needed to win the long war, and by injecting into intelligence the falsehoods, exaggerations and lies that always come from the tortured.

And, finally, it’s worth noting that not a single U.S. newspaper that I can find is referring to what was on the tapes in accurate language. All are using the administration’s “harsh interrogation techniques” lingo or something close to that. Folks, it’s torture. Period. We prosecuted Japanese soldiers for war crimes — and got convictions — for exactly this stuff. The Independent in London is one of the non-U.S. papers telling it honestly in an article entitles, “Call for criminal inquiry as CIA destroys torture tapes” — why won’t our own press? Why won’t even one paper?

The same reason that Democrats are so spineless? Is there any other explanation?

In this New York Times story, “McCain Finds Sympathy on Torture Issue” we find the following paragraph:

Democrats are largely opposed to torture, and while the Bush administration has said it does not engage in torture, it had previously reserved the right to use aggressive interrogation techniques in questioning terrorism suspects. And the leading Republican candidates, with the exception of Mr. McCain, are refusing to rule out certain techniques that others would deem as torture.

It’s a classic example of the problem with today’s journalism. News organizations accurately quote people, but flatly decline to point out the truth — that one side is lying.

The truth in this case is that the United States, by any measure, does torture people. “Aggressive interrogation techniques” like “waterboarding” — designed in perfect Orwellian lanauge to sound like a theme park ride — are the kind of torture that was bad enough to convict Japanese soldiers of war crimes.

No one has begun to contradict the truth of what — among others — Malcolm Nance, a counterterrorism expert and former Navy instructor in how to resist interrogation, wrote here and told Congress. Here’s a lengthy quote:

1. Waterboarding is a torture technique. Period. There is no way to gloss over it or sugarcoat it. It has no justification outside of its limited role as a training demonstrator. Our service members have to learn that the will to survive requires them accept and understand that they may be subjected to torture, but that America is better than its enemies and it is one’s duty to trust in your nation and God, endure the hardships and return home with honor.

2. Waterboarding is not a simulation. Unless you have been strapped down to the board, have endured the agonizing feeling of the water overpowering your gag reflex, and then feel your throat open and allow pint after pint of water to involuntarily fill your lungs, you will not know the meaning of the word.

Waterboarding is a controlled drowning that, in the American model, occurs under the watch of a doctor, a psychologist, an interrogator and a trained strap-in/strap-out team. It does not simulate drowning, as the lungs are actually filling with water. There is no way to simulate that. The victim is drowning. How much the victim is to drown depends on the desired result (in the form of answers to questions shouted into the victim’s face) and the obstinacy of the subject. A team doctor watches the quantity of water that is ingested and for the physiological signs which show when the drowning effect goes from painful psychological experience, to horrific suffocating punishment to the final death spiral.

Waterboarding is slow motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of black out and expiration –usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right it is controlled death. Its lack of physical scarring allows the victim to recover and be threaten with its use again and again.

Call it “Chinese Water Torture,” “the Barrel,” or “the Waterfall,” it is all the same. Whether the victim is allowed to comply or not is usually left up to the interrogator. Many waterboard team members, even in training, enjoy the sadistic power of making the victim suffer and often ask questions as an after thought. These people are dangerous and predictable and when left unshackled, unsupervised or undetected they bring us the murderous abuses seen at Abu Ghraieb, Baghram and Guantanamo. No doubt, to avoid human factors like fear and guilt someone has created a one-button version that probably looks like an MRI machine with high intensity waterjets.

3. If you support the use of waterboarding on enemy captives, you support the use of that torture on any future American captives. The Small Wars Council had a spirited discussion about this earlier in the year, especially when former Marine Generals Krulak and Hoar rejected all arguments for torture.

Yet the New York Times can’t bring itself to simply explain the reality. It does stenography, repeating the lies from one side.

So disappointing. Yet also so standard for the Paper of Record.

Clark Hoyt, the paper’s public editor, notes the NY Times’ continuing publication of pieces by Henry Blodget, one of the Internet bubble’s most notorious characters. In “Taint by Association” Hoyt asks two key questions:

One is whether The Times properly identifies Blodget when he writes for the paper. I don’t think so. His name was big in financial news at one time, but many readers do not know him.

The bigger question is whether The Times should be publishing him at all. Like Nocera, I believe in second chances, and Blodget seems to be doing fine establishing a new career. But why would The Times give a former analyst who lied to investors a platform to write about financial markets? If he wanted to write about how investors can spot phony reports by analysts, that would be one thing. But each time the newspaper uses Blodget as it has, it is conferring greater expert status on him.

These deals work two ways. The Times’s luster may help Blodget. But some of his taint rubs off on The Times.

Hoyt has it exactly right here. The newspaper is sullying its own name by lending Blodget its columns.

(Note: I own a small amount of stock in the company.)