A Greenpeace magazine says that they heard from an inside source that the anthrax attacks were probably perpetrated by someone inside the US biological warfare program in order to increase the budget for biowar research.

I’ve created a short report on the performance of Congress in handling judicial nominations, in response to Mike’s criticism. The report is entitled Assessing Judicial Vacancies. Now, let’s look at Mike’s criticism:

Wouldn’t that mean, that at least in this instance, that Rush is right and you are flat-out wrong?

Well, let’s look at what Rush said:

Leahy, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has succeeded in some packing of his own — filling the federal judiciary with left-of-center judges.

Leahy doesn’t make Judicial nominations, so it seems impossible for him to pack the court with judges of any sort. Then Rush says:

By blocking confirmation of scores of Bush’s nominees, he has ensured that an ever larger percentage of legal disputes come before judges who share his party’s judicial philosophy.

President Bush has nominated 63 people to the federal bench. None of them have been rejected, and 15 of them have been confirmed. That means that Bush has 48 nominations pending. For Leahy to be blocking “scores” of those nominees, he’d have to be actively preventing the confirmation of at least 40 of them. Given the standard length of time it takes to confirm nominees, that’s just ludicrous. Heck, twenty of the 48 were nominated since September, and Congress has been kind of busy since then. Now more:

Today, nearly half of all active federal judges were appointed by Bill Clinton. There are more than 100 federal judicial vacancies, 38 of which have been classified as “emergencies” by the U.S. Judicial Conference. Only about one in four of Bush’s nominees has been given a hearing and a vote. Four of 12 seats remain vacant on the D.C. Court of Appeals, which will have primary jurisdiction over legal challenges to the anti-terrorism bill recently passed by Congress.

This is all true, but as you can see from my report, rarely are judicial nominations from the opposite party considered in a fashion that could be termed rapid. This has also been a particularly busy year. Limbaugh’s complaints about the four empty seats on the DC Court of Appeals are laughable — Clinton made four nominations to that court in 1999, none of which were acted upon by Congress. Those same four seats remain open today.

So will I admit that I was flat out wrong? No, I won’t, because I wasn’t.

The great thing about book reviews in the NYRB is that they’re gold mines of information in and of themselves. For example, Matthew Meselson’s article in the current NYRB is ostensibly a review of Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War, by Judith Miller, Steven Engelberg, and William Broad. However, in reality it’s so much more. Meselson reviews the 20th century history of biological weapons, and discusses ways to enforce the Biological Weapons Convention which bars the creation of biological weapons in countries that have signed it. The article is chock full of so many interesting tidbits of information that I’m not going to talk about any of them specifically — read the whole thing.

The human rights community is quite astir about the deaths of the Taliban prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif. It’s an accepted fact that the Taliban prisoners smuggled grenades into their prison, attacked their captors, siezed weapons, and fought for three days — after they had supposedly surrendered. Despite that, human rights groups are concerned that the US air raids on the fortress and Northern Alliance attacks on the prisoners that resulted in the deaths of all of them were not proportional. Frankly, I’m glad that the human rights groups are looking into this. If they accept our word at face value, they also have to accept the word of every tinpot warlord in the world when they claim that they didn’t kidnap and kill dissidents or raze villages or slaughter innocent civilians.

The main concerns center around the fact that we don’t know how many of the Taliban were armed and that some of them were tied up. It will be interesting to see what the investigations turn up. Given the information that I’ve seen, I don’t see how the prisoners could be brought under control without using the force that was used.

“Note that the number of required characters changes from 17,145 to 18,770 with the installation of SP1.” Here’s the full story.

There seem to be growing reports that Osama bin Laden is hiding in a cave complex southwest of Jalalabad called Tora Bora. Supposedly, Arabs holed up there are sending Afghans who work for them down to Jalalabad for supplies periodically. If we can confirm that bin Laden is really hiding out in a cave at 13,000 feet, we’re basically done with him. Even if the caves are truly impregnable (as is claimed), we’re in the catbird’s seat. All we have to do is watch and wait. He has no real way of communicating from the caves, and his supplies won’t last forever.

A response to Rush Limbaugh …
Guess who has an op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post defending the use of military tribunals in criminal cases? None other than Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh is a lazy thinker or a liar and card cheat, decide for yourself which one you think he is.

The crux of Limbaugh’s piece seems to be that if Bush is bad, then FDR is worse, and that since Democrats love FDR, they ought to shut the hell up. No, really. I don’t normally do this, but let’s take on some of the assertions in Limbaugh’s piece. (Limbaugh’s quotes are in italics.)

One of the issues that has Leahy out of sorts is the administration’s detention of 1,000 or so aliens.

… and, as it turns out, US citizens. Not all of the detainees are aliens.

Bush’s order applies to any individual who “is or was a member of the organization known as al Qaeda; has engaged in, aided or abetted, or conspired to commit acts of international terrorism, or acts in preparation therefore, that have caused, threaten to cause or have as their aim to cause, injury to or adverse effects on the United States, its citizens, national security, foreign policy, or economy; has knowingly harbored one or more individuals described” herein. U.S. citizens — as well as aliens not associated with al Qaeda — are in no way covered by the president’s order.

At this point, I had to question Limbaugh’s basic reading comprehension. Reading that sentence alone, it looks to me like the order applies to Al Qaeda members or other terrorists, not Al Qaeda members who also happen to be aliens and who also happen to be terrorists. If it just applied to Al Qaeda members, what’s the purpose of all of the rest of that text? If it just applies to terrorists, what’s the point of mentioning Al Qaeda? It reads like Bush wanted the order to apply to both all members of Al Qaeda (whether they’ve committed terrorist acts against the US or not), and all terrorists who have committed acts against the United States.

In 1942 the Supreme Court ruled that Roosevelt’s military commissions were constitutional when used to try eight Nazi saboteurs for violating the laws of war, spying and conspiracy. The lawyers who drafted Bush’s order no doubt relied on FDR’s court victory in that case — an irony obviously lost on Bush’s critics.

I don’t need to tell readers of this site that this decision was widely seen as regrettable, and was reached under different circumstances than Bush’s executive order. As a refresher, the tribunals for the eight Nazi saboteurs were held during a state of declared war, and the order was written specifically for the 8 saboteurs in question, not for any old saboteur we might possibly catch in the future.

Furthermore, the military tribunals ordered by FDR are nothing to look back on with pride. It’s widely understood now that the tribunals were held in order to avoid embarrassment for Hoover’s FBI. The saboteurs were caught because one of the eight turned them in as soon as he arrived in the United States. The embarrassment stemmed from the fact that the first time the saboteur attempted to turn himself (and the others) in, he was dismissed as a crank. Only on his second contact with the FBI did they actually investigate the case and apprehend the saboteurs.

After making specious arguments that the military tribunals do not violate the Bill of Rights, he goes into the problems with trying terrorists in criminal courts, ignoring the fact that we successfully tried the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center the first time, the terrorists who blew up the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the terrorists who blew up US embasses in Africa in 1998 in civil courts without issue.

Among other things, people in and around courtrooms, including judges, juries and court employees, would have every reason to fear for their safety.

Here, Limbaugh flat out ignores that we’ve tried not only terrorists, but Al Qaeda terrorists, in civilian criminal courts without reprisal in the past. Furthermore, we’ve been trying members of the Mafia and drug kingpins in US criminal courts for ages despite the danger to judges, juries, and other officers of the court. If we decide to throw out criminal courts any time people involved might face danger from the defendants, we may as well get rid of every court but traffic court.

The enormous resources needed to protect potentially hundreds if not thousands of these terrorists would strain an overloaded justice system.

As of 1998, we had 1.7 million people incarcerated in the United States. Can anyone seriously argue that we can’t handle the trials of a few hundred or thousand more cases? This is perhaps the weakest excuse for military tribunals in Limbaugh’s entire piece. We should trash the procedures laid out in the Constitution because they’re just too much work. That’s pathetic.

The government would be required to reveal secret intelligence information and techniques in open court, and our courtrooms would most likely be turned into forums for propagandizing and encouraging further terrorist acts.

Oh, wait, this is the lamest excuse of all. Limbaugh acts as if we’ve never had trials in this country that required testimony involving secret information. Guess what, those sorts of trials are handled all the time. How else does Limbaugh think we try people like captured spies? And is the fact that defendants in criminal trials may say things that we don’t want to hear really an excuse not to provide them with fair, open trials? I hope I never hear of Rush Limbaugh trying to defend anything on constitutional grounds again.

In the end, we get to the best part of the whole column. Limbaugh actually makes this accusation, which made me laugh out loud:

Leahy, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has succeeded in some packing of his own — filling the federal judiciary with left-of-center judges. By blocking confirmation of scores of Bush’s nominees, he has ensured that an ever larger percentage of legal disputes come before judges who share his party’s judicial philosophy.

Is a Republican accusing a Democrat of blocking federal court appointments? Could this be possible? The Senate Judiciary Committee was famous for blocking Clinton judiciary appointments throughout Clinton’s Presidency. In fact, the degree to which Clinton’s appointments were stonewalled was legendary. Limbaugh points out that nearly half of the judges currently on the federal bench were appointed by Clinton — Clinton was President for the past 8 years! Where’s the context for this factoid? The year after Reagan left office, how many of the spots in the judiciary were Reagan appointments? Leahy hasn’t even been the chair of the Judiciary Committee for 6 months. The fact that the federal bench has so many empty seats falls squarely at the feet of the Republicans who refused to consider Clinton’s appointments by either delaying their consideration or rejecting the appointees before they came to a vote.

The sad thing is that many people will read Limbaugh’s op-ed piece and believe it, because they actually put enough stock in what he says not to think about how hollow his “reasoning” really is. Samuel Johnson said, “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Limbaugh certainly proves that to be the case.

Note: I posted a report substantiating my claims about Republicans being at fault for stalling judiciary appointments here. I also posted a rebuttal to some criticism of this piece.

Everybody already knew that John Ashcroft was a fascist — as it turns out, some former FBI agents believe he’s incompetent as well. Not only are the pinkos opposed to Ashcroft’s jackbooted approach to fighting terrorism, but so are several big name former FBI agents. The WaPo has an interview with 8 ex-FBI agents who call into question not only the legality of Ashcroft’s new approach to terrorism, but also its effectiveness. Surprisingly, simply rounding up all the Arabs we can find and putting them in jail until we find something to charge them with probably won’t foil many terrorist conspiracies. Who’d have guessed? (One thing to correct for when reading this article is the “that’s not how we did it” factor that comes with interviewing people who used to have the job that somebody else is doing now.)

Another blip on the radar screen: the new anti-terrorism laws grant the US the right to prosecute computer criminals if their packets travel though computers in the US, regardless of where they and the systems they crack reside.

Declan McCullagh has a Wired News story on Network Associates’ denial that they’re collaborating with the government to include back doors for FBI spyware in their security products.