From Paris to Scooter

After wading through the Hilton's hoo-hah, here's what interests me:

Ms. Hilton was not the only high-profile defendant whose celebrity prompted a raised eyebrow from a judge this week. Also on Friday, the judge who sentenced I. Lewis Libby Jr. to prison this week issued an order dripping with sarcasm after receiving a supporting brief from a dozen prominent legal scholars, including Alan M. Dershowitz of Harvard and Robert H. Bork, the former Supreme Court nominee.

The judge, Reggie B. Walton of Federal District Court in Washington, said he would be pleased to see similar efforts for defendants less famous than Mr. Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.

“The court trusts,” Judge Walton wrote, in a footnote longer than the order itself, that the brief for Mr. Libby “is a reflection of these eminent academics’ willingness in the future to step up to the plate and provide like assistance in cases involving any of the numerous litigants, both in this court and throughout the courts of our nation, who lack the financial means to fully and properly articulate the merits of their legal positions.”

“The court,” he added, “will certainly not hesitate to call for such assistance from these luminaries.”

Scooter Libby gets 30 months

Paging Fox News.

After the news broke, Fox News devoted just nine consecutive minutes to the story up to 1 p.m. Between noon and 1 p.m. ET, Fox News did not interview any legal or political experts and not return to the story after its original report.

Instead, between noon and 1 p.m., here is a list of some of the more pressing news stories that Fox News opted to cover instead of Libby's sentencing:

The abduction of a Kansas City teenager outside a Target discount store. (Fox News returned to this story several times within the hour.)
A plane crash into Lake Michigan.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) recent comments about faith in her life.
Casinos giving away gasoline in order to entice visitors.
Record producer Phil Spector's murder trial in Los Angeles.
Lightning striking a house in Oregon.
A tornado warning issued for western Connecticut.
News that the father of JonBenet Ramsey is dating the mother of missing teen Natalee Holloway.
R&B singer R. Kelly's legal woes.
An update on the JFK Airport terror plot.
Cuba state-run television airing a new interview with Fidel Castro.
Foreign policy tension between Russia and the United States.
At the top of the 3 p.m. ET hour, Libby's sentencing was slotted as the day's fourth most important story on Fox News' Studio B with Shepard Smith.

...from Media Matters.

The cost of Iraq

On torture

Michael Froomkin gets it when he says:

I think the most compelling arguments against torture are its fundamental immorality, what it does to this country;s moral standing, what it does to this country’s legal standing, and that it doesn’t work real well, in that order. But I’m willing to add what it does to the torturers to the end of the list.

He reposts this from a coming book:

Lagouranis’s tools included stress positions, a staged execution and hypothermia so extreme the detainees’ lips turned purple. He has written an account of his experiences in a book, “Fear Up Harsh,” which has been read by the Pentagon and will be published this week. Stephen Lewis, an interrogator who was deployed with Lagouranis, confirmed the account, and Staff Sgt. Shawn Campbell, who was Lagouranis’s team leader and direct supervisor, said Lagouranis’s assertions were “as true as true can get. It’s all verifiable.” John Sifton, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said the group investigated many of Lagouranis’s claims about abuses and independently corroborated them.

“At every point, there was part of me resisting, part of me enjoying,” Lagouranis said. “Using dogs on someone, there was a tingling throughout my body. If you saw the reaction in the prisoner, it’s thrilling.”

In Mosul, he took detainees outside the prison gate to a metal shipping container they called “the disco,” with blaring music and lights. Before and after questioning, military police officers stripped them and checked for injuries, noting cuts and bumps “like a car inspection at a parking garage.” Once a week, an Iraqi councilman and an American colonel visited. “We had to hide the tortured guys,” Lagouranis said.

Then a soldier’s aunt sent over several copies of Viktor E. Frankel’s Holocaust memoir, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Lagouranis found himself trying to pick up tips from the Nazis. He realized he had gone too far.

Is there a case for conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the Iraq war?

from MSNBC/Newsweek

About 10 minutes into the ultra-low-budget documentary “Loose Change,” now making its way around the Internet, that late, great genius of addled truth-telling, Hunter S. Thompson, is heard giving his gonzo opinion of the way the American press behaved after 9/11. “Well, let’s see, ‘shamefully’ is the word that comes to mind,” he says.

“Fair enough,” I thought.

But then Thompson went on. “You sort of wonder when something like that happens, well, whooo [he stretched out the ‘o’] stands to benefit?” Right there and right then, I realized this would be one of those movies that reveled in conspiracy and revealed little in the way of fact. But I went on watching, because this fantasy begun in France that the United States government actually carried out the 9/11 attacks, ugly as it is, fits neatly with the world’s image of the United States as a land that’s been run by power-mad, supersecretive, hypocritical scofflaw servants of narrow corporate interests ever since the Bush administration came to power.

Russian President Vladimir Putin played on that theme in his annual state of the union speech earlier this week, referring to the United States, none-too-obliquely, as “Comrade Wolf,” and in the same breath, announcing what could soon become a new arms race on a scale not seen since the days of the cold war.

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