From Amnesty International:

Troy Davis was sentenced to death for the murder of Police Officer Mark Allen McPhail at a Burger King in Savannah, Georgia; a murder he maintains he did not commit. There was no physical evidence against him and the weapon used in the crime was never found. The case against him consisted entirely of witness testimony which contained inconsistencies even at the time of the trial. Since then, all but two of the state's non-police witnesses from the trial have recanted or contradicted their testimony. Many of these witnesses have stated in sworn affidavits that they were pressured or coerced by police into testifying or signing statements against Troy Davis.

One of the two witnesses who has not recanted his testimony is Sylvester "Red" Coles – the principle alternative suspect, according to the defense, against whom there is new evidence implicating him as the gunman. Nine individuals have signed affidavits implicating Sylvester Coles.

Restrictions on Federal appeals have prevented Troy Anthony Davis from having a hearing in federal court on the reliability of the witness testimony used against him, despite the fact that most of the witnesses have since recanted, many alleging they were pressured or coerced by police. Troy Davis remains on Georgia death row, and may be scheduled for execution in the near future.

Link (via Michael Bishop). If this sounds to you like a severe miscarriage of justice (as it does to me), click here to sign a petition and show your support.

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders on his change of heart about gay marriage.

In yesterday's New York Times: "What A Terrorist Incident in Ancient Rome Can Teach Us."

What Scalzi said.

And The Rude Pundit.

Ben reports that Congress is in the middle of debating whether to get rid of habeas corpus. From Wikipedia:

Known as the "Great Writ", the writ of habeas corpus ad subjiciendum is a legal proceeding in which an individual held in custody can challenge the propriety of that custody under the law. The prisoner, or some other person on his behalf (for example, where the prisoner is being held incommunicado), may petition the court or an individual judge for a writ of habeas corpus.

Although the form of the writ of habeas corpus implies that the prisoner is brought to the court in order for the legality of the imprisonment to be examined, modern practice is to have a hearing with both parties present on whether the writ should issue, rather than issuing the writ immediately and waiting for the return of the writ by the addressee before the legality of the detention is examined. The prisoner can then be released or *bailed* by order of the court without having to be produced before it.

The right of habeas corpus -- the right to file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus -- has long been celebrated as the most efficient safeguard of the liberty of the subject. Dicey wrote that the Habeas Corpus Acts "declare no principle and define no rights, but they are for practical purposes worth a hundred constitutional articles guaranteeing individual liberty." In most countries, however, the procedure of habeas corpus can be suspended in time of national emergency. In most civil law jurisdictions, comparable provisions exist, but they are generally not called "habeas corpus."

The Bush administration is already stomping all over this right, but if it goes away completely, not one citizen in this country will be able to challenge the legality of their imprisonment if those in power decide to lock you up for reasons only they can fathom.

Please call your senators and sign this petition. As Ben says, "I'm kind of partial to the rule of law. Would it be too much trouble to refrain from locking people up indefinitely with no access to a court?"

Edward Champion, blogger for Return of the Reluctant and podcaster for The Bat Segundo Show, was arrested last night by the San Francisco Police Department with no probable cause, not read his Miranda rights, and only later cited with drunk and disorderly behavior, a charge that he vehemently disputes:

Tonight, while mixing audio for the next podcast, I made an unfortunate decision. I decided to smoke again. Never mind that I had quit. Never mind that I promised myself that I wouldn't smoke again. I went outside for a smoke break. As it turned out, this was perhaps the worst mistake I could have made.

As I was smoking, a light from a police car in the street shined on me. As I put my cigarette out and was prepared to dispose of it, one of the officers cried, "Hey!"

I answered, "Is there a problem, officer?"

Because the light from the black-and-white was shining into my face, I couldn't see the officer particularly well. And one of the officers, apparently the guy who had shouted "Hey," came up to me and cited me for littering. I told the officer that I was in the process of disposing of the cigarette butt, which I truthfully was. But this wasn't quick enough for him. He put his cuffs on me.

Perhaps it wasn't a wise idea to respond, "What the fuck is the problem?" But understand that when a police officer puts his cuffs painfullly around your wrists without citing you, tact isn't exactly the thing that comes to mind. I was bemused and enraged more than anything else. And while the f-bomb isn't exactly an inroads to diplomacy, I happen to know that even a misdemeanor is accorded the Miranda rights. But I didn't get any of this, nor was I able to ascertain a specific code section that I had violated. And I certainly didn't get an answer from them for what I was charged for.

The two cops pushed me to a car and manacled my ass, as if I was the local heroin dealer or some PCP addict. I asked them repeatedly what I was charged for. They claimed littering. But the report, as I have specified above, states otherwise.

It all happened extraordinarily fast. They took all the contents of my pockets, including my wallet and my keys. These two cops pushed me into the back of the car and, even while they were driving me to the local hold tank, they still wouldn't answer what specific charges I was cited with – despite repeated requests on my part.

This is just one side to the story, but having read Ed's blog and listened to his podcast, he seems like a pretty trustworthy guy. It sounds like a blatant abuse of police power, locking someone away without informing them of what they're charged with, and then only later creating an offense to justify the action. And this occured in San Francisco, a city where you wouldn't expect this to happen.

Is this yet another instance of the moral corruption at the very top of our government filtering down to local levels? The arrest isn't nearly as disturbing as the instances of abuse at Abu Graib or Guantanamo Bay, but it reeks of the same disregard for civil liberties or simple human decency. Did the cops think Ed was acting like a terrorist because he was putting out a cigarette? Were they just itching to get someone in the back of their squad car? Had they not filled their quota for the night? We can speculate on the answers, but really, there's no way to know unless the SFPD do some kind of internal investigation into this, and, with this being such a minor incident (he was only in jail for a few hours), it's doubtful that will happen.

I find it very disturbing that something even so minor as this has happened. As Ed says, he will not now be able to run for public office in the future because of a misdemeanor on his record. And this could hurt him in other ways as well. All over a stubbed out cigarette that he was in the process of disposing.

I don't mean to harp on this, but I'm about two-thirds of the way through Parable of the Talents, and therefore extremely sensitive to intolerance and abuses of power. (The novel is making me so angry at intolerant fundamentalist Christianity right now, even though it's a fictional form of it.) I worry that things like this may become commonplace, that our country will devolve into the economic disaster that Butler describes, that lawlessness will reign supreme, and those who use tactics of fear and intimidation will win the day. Which I why I will stay vigilant, and maybe start buying foreign currency.

I don't know how to end this entry, so I'll just end it here.

It was just a matter of time:

Bush Tags Bloggers As Terrorists

While not a surprise, given all that has transpired in Bush's term, it still was a shocker to read that bloggers are now "terrorists." The nature of blogger terrorist acts should be a concern for both liberal and conservative bloggers: "Deliberate misinformation campaigns" may well describe actions taken by right-wingers and "activist calls" describes actions by bloggers regardless of political affiliation.

Homeland Security completed its "Cyber Storm" wargame to test how our government "would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers." Given that homeland security ran the "wargame," one may infer that the nature of the attacks by bloggers must be national security related. And, given that the major national security fear of our government is terrorists, then it looks like bloggers have made our government's hit list of potential terrorists. But, what is the nature of this "terrorist crime" that was the subject of these wargames?

"Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose 'Web logs' include political rantings and musings about current events."

There are other indications that the Bush administration deems bloggers well within the reach of any definition of terrorist, if for no other reason than the crime of dissent and criticism. There are also indicators that relevant parties would be somewhat prepared to assist in the nabbing of terrorist bloggers:

(1) In what may have been a precursor to US bloggers, the US military and government apparently were not offended (at least did not take any publicly disclosed action to free the blogger) when an Iraqi blogger was arrested, interrogated and imprisoned for the crime of reading comments on another blogger's website at a public café.

(2) US plans to data mine blogs for stated purpose of finding terrorist information to connect the dots to prevent a terrorist attack:

"The U.S. government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity."

(3) "The CIA is quietly funding federal research into surveillance of Internet chat rooms as part of an effort to identify possible terrorists, newly released documents reveal."

(4) American Internet providers have assisted foreign countries to jail bloggers for substantive content posted on their blogs:

"Last December, Microsoft shut down the Web site of a dissident Chinese blogger. A few months earlier, Yahoo gave Beijing the name of a dissident Chinese journalist. He got ten years in jail for his Web postings. Ironically, Google's Chinese kowtow comes as the company is resisting efforts by the U.S. government for access to its records."

(5) Indymedia was a subject of a secret, international terrorism investigation in which US government seized its hard drives. A Texas Internet company turned over hard drives pursuant to a court order under an international treaty governing crimes of terrorism, kidnapping and money laundering.

(6) The MSM has shown its willingness to paint bloggers and any lefty journalists as the domestic evil axis of treasonists so that the American people will understand the need to arrest bloggers to make this country safe from terrorists.

(7) The CIA now has its own bloggers and a government website that are part of a revised CIA office for monitoring, translating and analyzing publicly available information. It is good news that the CIA is evaluating publicly available information in the fight against terrorism. The problem is we now know that when our government says "monitoring," it's not just al-Qaeda.

(8) The Bush administration refused to turn over control of the Internet to an international body, preferring to maintain unilateral control over the Internet. The fear is that "policy decisions could at a stroke make all Web sites ending in a specific suffix essentially unreachable."

It should be noted that some of these indicators on their face are equivocal, but perhaps should be considered in the context of actions and policies of this administration. In this context, the Bush wagons are circling bloggers. And, once the perception is created that bloggers are a danger to national security, that perception is hard to unravel. The danger is that the American people will continue to follow Bush's lead like sheep frightened by the terrorist wolf.

From Wikipedia:

Sedition refers to a legal designation of non-overt conduct that is deemed by a legal authority as being acts of treason, and hence deserving of legal punishment. The term is deprecated in most countries, though equivalent language may still be in use in totalitarian and fascist jurisdictions.

Critical speech, political organization, and mere association between individuals may be considered as "sedition." And though such behaviours may be common in a free society, in societies where sedition laws exist the acts and behaviours which qualify are highly subjective, and typically left to the whims of state agents. Legal definitons of sedition often include subversion of a constitution, or incitement to rebellion or insurrection toward the lawful authority. Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws.

Because "sedition" is typically considered the subvert act, the overt acts that may be prosecutable under "sedition" laws vary from one legal code to another. Where those legal codes have a traceable history, there is also a record of the change of definition for what constituted sedition at certain points in history. This overview has served to develop a sociological definition of sedition as well, within study of persecution.

The legal difference between sedition and treason consists primarily in the subjective ultimate object of the violation to the public peace. Sedition does not consist of "levying war" against a government nor of "adhering to [its] enemies, giving them aid and comfort" (Article Three, U.S. Constitution). Nor does it consist, in most representative democracies, of peaceful, non-violent protest against a government, nor of attempting to change the government by democratic means (such as direct democracy or constitutional convention).

The Progressive reported on Wednesday that Laura Berg, a clinical nurse specialist at the VA Medical Center in Albuquerque, is being investigated for "sedition" because of a letter she wrote to a weekly newspaper which criticized the Bush administration's handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Her computer was seized and her job at the VA Hospital is now in jeopardy. The text of her letter was as follows:

"I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government," it began. "The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes!" She mentioned that she was "a VA nurse" working with returning vets. "The public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder," she wrote, and she worried about the hundreds of thousands of additional cases that might result from Katrina and the Iraq War.

"Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence," she wrote. "This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil . . . We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.

Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times."

Okay, yes, she was pissed off and upset and probably should not have mentioned the whole forced removal of our government leaders, but come on, sedition? Is she really inciting a rebellion here, or blowing off some steam about the ineptitude of our current administration? The ACLU of New Mexico is currently working in Berg’s behalf, and I hope that things are settled soon with the case. This is very clearly a first amendment case, and I just hope it can be shown legally that her statements were not an incitement for revolution.

Meanwhile, in China, that bastion for free speech (yes, my sarcasm dial is somewhere around eleven), three Buddhist nuns and two monks have been imprisoned in Tibet for protesting the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and calling for Tibetan independence.

The Tibet research organization, Tibet Watch, obtained new information that the monks and nuns in the ethnically-Tibetan West of Gansu Province, Western China were arrested in May 2005 for involvement in the distribution and pasting of protest letters at a monastery and other public areas. The letters reportedly called for the independence of Tibet, for the Chinese authorities to enter into negotiations with the Dalai Lama, and that China should not host the 2008 Olympics until the Tibet question is peacefully resolved.

Two of the nuns, Tadrin Tsomo and Choekyi Drolma, and one of the monks, Dargye Gyatso, have been sentenced to three years imprisonment. The third nun, Yonten Drolma, and second monk, Jamyang Samdrub, have both been sentenced to one and a half years imprisonment.

"The IOC's Olympic Truce speaks of sport as a way to bridge the gap between peoples and to build peace. But by ignoring Beijing's abuses, the IOC is not living up to the most basic principles of the Olympic movement. Tibetans cannot accept that the IOC is silently passing the Olympic flame to one of the world's most repressive regimes when simply expressing your opinion is punished so harshly inside Tibet," said Ms Tsering Jampa, Executive Director of the International Campaign for Tibet in Europe.

Students for a Free Tibet have set up an email page where people can send a message to China's Minister of Justice, Zhang Fusen, calling for the monks and nuns' unconditional release. I don't know how much good it will do, but it may put some pressure on the Chinese government and on the IOC. It's a small thing, but it may help.

Yesterday, we celebrated the birthday of one of this nation's greatest civil rights leaders and proponents of nonviolent civil disobedience. (Links to the text and video of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech can be found at Crooks and Liars.)

For me, it meant a day off, since my desk job is at one college and my teaching job is at another. I spent the day doing writing-related things, getting two stories ready to send off and emailing another, working on the academic article, writing in the novel, re-recording two audio stories, and buying paper and printer ink.

For Ray Nagin, it meant going a bit nuts. Poppy Z. Brite responds at her blog.

For Al Gore, it meant a thoughtful speech reminding American citizens of the values this country was founded on (including the three co-equal branches of government), and calling on Congress to resume its oversight responsibilities. (Video highlights here.)

For BBC Radio 4, it meant running a half-hour special on Philip K. Dick, in which Brian Aldiss calls George W. Bush a Dickian construct.

For John Scalzi, it meant blogging about taking the big chances in life.

For The Independent, it meant running a story about how we are environmentally screwed.

I finished the third of three syllabi for my classes last night (ENGL132, ENGL233, ENGL290), and will be meeting with my afternoon class today at 4 p.m. (Right now, 6 people are registered for it, but I'm curious if any of them will show up.) And if anyone is curious as to why I'm teaching 1984 in my Comp II class, I shall point you to this report (via marrael).

So now, according to this new provision to the PATRIOT Act, you don't actually have to be a disruptive influence to be labelled a "disruptor," you just have to be perceived as such, and the Secret Service has full authority to boot you out of, or deny you access to, public events, including political conventions and the bloody Olympics. Penalties for such violations would increase from six months to a year in prison. If you have any involvement or association whatsoever with organizations like the ACLU, United for Peace and Justice, or Greenpeace, you are considered a threat to the propaganda machine. Just wonderful.

Like Janet says, with the number of bumper stickers on my car opposing Bush and supporting the ACLU, Amnesty International, and the World Wildlife Fund, we're probably both on the FBI's "disruptor" blacklist.

Excellent news for lovers of civil liberties everywhere: from DailyKos, it appears Senator Russ Feingold now has enough votes to stop renewal of the PATRIOT Act! The entire Associated Press story is up at Yahoo! News.

Tachyon Publications is having an amazing holiday sale, where all hardcovers are 40% off and trade paperbacks are 25% off. Tachyon have been putting out an increasing amount of really cool books, including Jim Kelly's short novel Burn (podcasted here for free). Go check out their selection.

And finally, the Internet Anagram Server, linked by Teresa Nielsen Hayden today at Making Light, where she talks about the illogic in The Da Vinci Code when a French scholar encodes a message to his granddaughter, only the anagram is in English. (The title of this post, "Lung Sabre Odin Jerk," is an anagram of my full name.)

Via Boing Boing, "Next, MPAA Will Pass Stamp Act, Establish Discriminatory Levy on Tea":

General search warrants are part of what caused the American Revolution. Now it's the legal tool of choice for the movie industry in its war against copyright infringement -- or at least, the tool of choice in Delhi, India.

According to this press release (.doc) from the international arm of the more familiar Motion Picture Association of America, the MPA "has obtained a general search and seizure warrants order covering the entire city. The order permits police to search any premises suspected of containing pirated products, and permits officers to open locked premises without delay."

These kinds of warrants are ripe for abuse. That's why they're prohibited in this country under the Fourth Amendment, which was prompted by British abuses of power during colonial times. The MPA has the right to go after those suspected of infringment all around the globe, but it should be ashamed of using tactics that ignore basic civil liberties.

Dance party broken up by police in Utah, USA

Police raided a legal rave without a warrant on August 20 just outside of Salt Lake City, beating up some of the attendees, kicking others in the stomach and/or ribs, siccing attack dogs on others, confiscating then destroying video cameras, threatening people with assault rifles, and then for good measure launched tear gas into the crowd.

The promoters have six lawsuits ready to file with their lawyers and the ACLU is already involved.

This was a legal and peaceful gathering on private property, where any drugs or alcohol were confiscated by security guards before people could enter; these security guards were later arrested for possession of the confiscated drugs.

One person managed to escape the event with video footage intact; go take a look before it gets wiped from teh internets.

And please spread the word about this. Most likely, the conventional news sources won't cover this story because it involves a younger crowd, so the best way to get the word out is to spread it like a virus over the blogosphere.

(via marrael and Boing Boing)