From the front page of the New York Times, Sept. 22:

At State Deptartment, Blog Team Joins Muslim Debate
WASHINGTON — Walid Jawad was tired of all the chatter on Middle Eastern blogs and Internet forums in praise of gory attacks carried out by the "noble resistance" in Iraq.

The anarchist blog Three-Way Fight wants to know (despite leaving the question marks off their questions):

Why does the media - CNN, MSNBC, FOX, BBC, Harretz, etc - spend today going over and over again, with lots of video footage, of the bust of a supposed neo-Nazi group in Israel that beat up people and vandalized synagogues. [Sic] The group, made up of Russian emigres who had at least some direct relative who had been of Jewish religious/cultural descent, were videoed attacking people and sieg heiling in front of a German flag.

Everyone is talking about Robert Fisk's Sept. 11 column in The Independent, but nobody is noting what a cynical, disingenuous piece of self-serving propaganda it is. The most sickening thing about it is that he feels obliged to start out with a ritual put-down of the conspiracy vampires—and then goes on to legitimize their transparent claptrap. Here it is—with our corrections and deconstructions of Fisk's bunk interjected:

Osama bin Laden's last communique of January 2006 attempted to exploit the writings of leftist icon William Blum—but, as we noted, rather garbled it. Now The Guardian calls him out on similarly exploiting—and garbling—the work of one of their reporters in his latest missive. From the Sept. 11 edition:

Bin Laden takes liberties with contents of Guardian video
To the long list of crimes committed by Osama bin Laden a new one can now be added: manipulation of the media. In his latest video address, released last Friday, the al-Qaida leader refers to a film made by the Guardian in Iraq and misquotes the contents of the documentary to suit his own dramatic effect.

This Sept. 6 report from Computer World hails a victory for the privacy rights of cyberscenti, but as we have noted, this also concerns us old-school types who go to libraries and read books. (We know, how quaint.)

Judge: Court order needed before ISPs turn over user info without notification
A federal court today ruled that the FBI can't compel ISPs to turn over user records without notifying those users unless it has a court order or a grand jury subpoena. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York struck down part of the amended Patriot Act's National Security Letter (NSL) provision, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had filed a lawsuit challenging the provision.

When Pfc. Lynndie England was convicted two years ago, we called her a scapegoat. Now, a military jury at Ft. Meade has found Lt-Col. Steven Jordan—the only officer to be court-martialled over the Abu Ghraib case—guilty of disobeying an order to keep silent about the abuse investigation. But they simply reprimanded him, sparing him a prison term. A day earlier, Aug. 28, he was acquitted of failing to control lower-ranking soldiers who abused and sexually humiliated detainees at the prison near Baghdad in autumn 2003. (The Scotsman, Aug. 30) Contrast the treatment dished out to his subordinates. From AP, Aug. 29:

In a victory for the Bush administration, the full 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals will reconsider a ruling that the government should charge Ali al-Marri, a legal US resident and the only suspected "enemy combatant" on American soil, or release him from military custody. The administration had asked the full 4th Circuit to review a three-judge panel's June 11 ruling. The Justice Department had argued that national security will be threatened if the administration is not allowed to indefinitely hold "enemy combatants" within the US.

An Aug. 13 statement from the National Lawyers Guild calling for repeal of the "Protect America Act" signed into law by George Bush Aug. 6:

Congress put its stamp of approval on the unconstitutional wiretapping of Americans by amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the "Protect America Act of 2007."