EUGENE VOLOKH IS UNIMPRESSED with Stephen Reinhardt’s opinion on the Guantanamo detainees: “What Judge Reinhardt is describing and condemning in the last sentence is the standard way that enemy detainees are treated. . . . Ah, Reinhardt says, but at least we acknowledged that they’re prisoners of war. But ‘prisoner of war’ status is given only to those enemy detainees who were fighting in accordance to the laws of war.”

I stand by my earlier statement that Reinhardt’s gasbaggery here will do more to undermine the positions he supports than John Ashcroft will.

BAGHDAD-BLOGGING RICH GALEN has another post up.

BIG LOSS FOR THE RIAA in the Verizon case, as the D.C. Circuit rules that ISPs don’t have to turn over subscriber information. Dodd Harris has comments. Here’s a link to the opinion, which is a svelte 16 pages long, perhaps because the Court characterizes the RIAA’s arguments as bordering on silly.

TYLER COWEN HAS APPARENTLY DIED AND GONE TO HELL: “I’ve been spending my last four days locked in a UNESCO room debating cultural diversity with a French diplomat and a Quebecois lawyer.”

But it’s not all bad: “Everyone has been very polite and the Frenchman gave me a useful book on the great number of French cheeses and how to recognize them.”

WELL, THIS KIND OF KILLS YESTERDAY’S STORY on the 9/11 Commission:

WASHINGTON Dec. 18 — The chairman of a federal commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks said Thursday that mistakes over many years left the United States vulnerable to such an attack, but he resisted pinning blame on either of the last two presidential teams.

“We have no evidence that anybody high in the Clinton administration or the Bush administration did anything wrong,” chairman Thomas Kean said in an interview with ABC’s “Nightline” taped for airing Thursday night.

I still think that some people should have been fired, though.

In related news, authorities are reportedly looking for suicide bombers in New York City, and other major metropolitan areas. I hope that people will keep their eyes open, and not get complacent.

GOSH, IT’S LIKE THEY’RE PART OF SOME, I DON’T KNOW, AXIS OF EVIL or something:

Former FBI director Louis Freeh testified yesterday that he believed there was “overwhelming evidence” that senior Iranian government officials financed and directed the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia.

Go figure.

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT, only this time it’s in Terry McAuliffe’s America, not John Ashcroft’s. . . .

FREDERICK TURNER writes on Bush-hatred, and change:

At this time in the world’s history a great turning point is imminent. And here we begin to see why there is this strange and unholy alliance between idealistic liberalism, the vestiges of the old socialist left, traditional third world authoritarians, and the unrelenting forces of Islamic totalitarianism, theocracy, and terror. However various their ideas of what is the good, all are united in their desire for an enforced law of the good. Even elements of the human rights movement, much of the anti-globalist community, and a large swatch of the philanthropic world — the so-called NGOs — still yearn for a government that, through sumptuary laws, high taxation, political correctness, and entitlements, would force to happen what people ought to, but do not make happen of their own free will. Much philanthropy has the stated goal of eliminating itself when through its advocacy and lobbying it has given government the power to compel what was once freely given; at which time the employees of the Foundations would presumably take over the powerful role of government civil servants. If the law of right is to become the only enforceable law of the human race, all these constituencies will have suffered what will feel to them to be a mortal setback. . . .

So when the protesters in London tore down Bush’s effigy they were, unconsciously, expressing not only the opposite of the destruction of Saddam’s statue — that is, a desire to reinstate him — but also the motivations behind the smashing of the statue of liberty erected by the students in Tiananmen Square. The symbolism of the Bush fragging was not, as many commentators believed, semiotically incompetent, but strikingly accurate. And the good, pacifist destroyers of the Bush statue were unconsciously leaguing themselves with the army tanks that massacred the Chinese students and trampled their poor plaster version of Lady Liberty — and declaring war on the students themselves. Like their colleagues on this side of the Atlantic, the anti-American protesters stood in solidarity with the Confucian enforcers of the good that gave the order to clear the square of Heavenly Peace, and with seekers after the role of moral enforcer everywhere.

Read the whole thing.

MATT RUSTLER has comments on the Democrats’ Second Amendment strategy, and a copy of what he says is a Democratic memo on the subject. I can’t vouch for its authenticity, but perhaps someone else will know if it’s genuine.

EUGENE VOLOKH COMMENTS on Padilla v. Rumsfeld. He expects a reversal.

AUSTIN BAY WRITES about the “cascade effects” stemming from Saddam’s capture.

Meanwhile, here’s an email from someone who participated.

SUCCESS HAS A THOUSAND FATHERS: But who would have guessed that one of them was Robert Fisk?

It’s easy, looking at these images of Saddam’s sadism, to have expected Iraqis to be grateful to us this week. We have captured Saddam. We have destroyed the beast. The nightmare years are over.

What’s this “we” sh*t, white man? (Emphasis added.)

Here’s a slightly different take.

UPDATE: And here’s something on Fisk’s fellow-travelers at the CBC.

QUESTION: If Jose Padilla were still known as Abdullah al-Muhajir, the name he was using when he was arrested, would the decision have come out the same way?

And if it had, would it be playing the same way in the press?

And who decided which name to use in the media coverage, anyway?

PEOPLE KEEP SENDING ME THE TARGET EMAIL that says they’re anti-veteran. It’s not true. Just so you know.

I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TAKE IT A BIT EASY, as exhaustion was setting in, and in the spare time I’ve opened up I’ve been reading a complete collection of Randall Garrett’s Lord Darcy mysteries, compled and edited by Eric Flint.

I’m a fairly big fan of Flint as a science fiction writer, but he’s also done quite a service by lending his name and efforts to bringing back new editions of classic science fiction and fantasy. He’s also put together new releases of works by Murray Leinster, James Schmitz, and Keith Laumer. For an up-and-coming new writer like Flint to spend time bringing out this sort of thing seems to me like a real service, and I appreciate it.

The Lord Darcy stories — mysteries set in a world where the Plantagenets still rule Britain, and where magic works but electric lighting is a closely guarded state secret — are classics, and work quite well on many levels. If you’re into this sort of thing, and haven’t read them, you might want to check them out.

UPDATE: Reader Greg Dougherty emails:

If you’re going to include links to the books, you might want to also include links to Webscriptions, where you can get non-encrypted, non-copy-protected electronic versions of the books for at most $5 / book.

www.webscription.net/

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me, though if you print them out instead of reading them on the computer, it might be cheaper just to buy the book.

PROFESSOR BAINBRIDGE isn’t impressed with the Ninth Circuit’s opinion on Guantanamo prisoners.

Here’s a link to the 79-page Reinhardt opinion, which I have not read. Here, via Howard Bashman, is a link to a news story on the decision, which contains this unpromising bit:

The San Francisco appeals court, ruling Thursday on a petition from a relative of a Libyan the U.S. military captured in Afghanistan, said the Bush administration’s indefinite detention of the men runs contrary to American ideals.

“Even in times of national emergency – indeed, particularly in such times – it is the obligation of the Judicial Branch to ensure the preservation of our constitutional values and to prevent the Executive Branch from running roughshod over the rights of citizens and aliens alike,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for the majority.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the holding — I think the government has been slippery with regard to jurisdictional issues here — but Reinhardt, is, to put it bluntly, a gasbag whose posturing hurts his cause far more than it helps it, and this certainly suggests that the opinion will be in line with his past history.

BLOGGER BABY PICS: Dawn Olsen has posted some.

THE 9/11 COMMISSION says that the attacks were preventable. Well, yes. In fact, they might have been prevented, had dropped balls at the FBI (which led to morbid speculation by field agents that Osama had a mole at headquarters) not frustrated the Moussaoui investigation. Note that no one was fired for that. Of course, had all the 9/11 terrorists been rounded up on 9/10, many of Bush’s critics would have argued that it was a racist effort to distract people from the economy, or some such. And worries about such charges — particularly the racism part — clearly got in the way. I wonder if the Commission will look at that.

For that matter, the attacks might have been prevented if the Clinton missile attacks on Osama, delayed just a bit too long because of Clinton’s fears of causing civilian casualties, had proceeded on time.

The story linked above is right to heap scorn on Condi Rice’s statement that the attacks were unimaginable before they happened. There was plenty of reason to imagine them before they happened. That in itself doesn’t mean that they could have, or even should have, been prevented — I can imagine a lot of things that I couldn’t prevent — but Rice’s statement has always struck me as absurd to the point of being insulting.

UPDATE: Quite a few readers think this is unfair to Condi Rice. Here’s what Dennis Beezley emails:

CBS wants to make it seem that Rice claimed no one thought of planes as missiles. That is not what she said. She said no one anticipated hijacked planes as guided missiles.

These people (government people) don’t think outside the box, they’re not paid to. The thinking was that planes would be loaded with explosives, so the planes would either have to be planes controlled by AQ, like an old jet, or little planes like the one the kid flew into a building in Florida. And I assume measures were taken to prevent such an occurrence.

I also assume the reason we didn’t fear a hijacked plane being used to just smack a building is that we didn’t think anybody could get control of an airliner without a gun, which we work hard to prevent. But they did, three anyway. And they used the jet fuel as a bomb.

Now it seems pretty easy for us to think they should have thought of this. I have some friends who perished because they didn’t. But because Rice should have thought of it, or nurtured an environment where someone else should have, doesn’t mean her statement is incredible.

Well, as I said, I don’t think that imagining it is the same as preventing it. But the statement is rather bizarre, when we had blocked a plot (via the Philippines) to hijack and crash planes, when the Columbine kids actually planned to crash planes into Manhattan, and when Tom Clancy wrote a novel on this theme. You might say that it wasn’t high on the threat ladder, for whatever reason. But that’s not what Condi said, and although I’m a big fan of hers in general, that statement has always grated on me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Boy, a lot of people think I’m too hard on Condi Rice above. But on the other hand, a couple sent links to this page noting that the specific hijack-an-airplane-and-crash-it-into-a-target scenario had already been attempted: “On April 7, 1994, we came dangerously close to finding out what a DC-10 full of jet fuel and a man with nothing to lose could do to a corporate campus in Memphis. That’s the day a disgruntled employee attacked the crew of FedEx Flight 705 with the intention of crashing the airplane into company headquarters.”

MORE: Reader Kenton Bennett emails:

Regarding the Condi Rice and 9-11 Commission statements and conclusions..I would like to remind people that the terrorist leaders imagined it…the Algerian terrorists who hijacked a French Airliner in the mid nineties and attempted to fly it (by forcing the pilot) into the Eiffel Tower imagined it…..a computer programmer for Microsoft imagined it as my eight year old grandson was flying airliners into the twin towers well before 9-11 using one of there across the counter flight simulator games. Of course Al Gore didn’t Imagine it with his committee to promote airline safety ( but of course he now has all the answers)….The problem is….. No one in the high levels of government has imagination and anyone at a lower level is ignored through a sea of jealousy and bureaucracy!!!….Read the book about Pearl Harbor by G.W. Prange and you will see the disastrous similarity of attitude and politics that are shared between these two momentous events.

Reader Catherine Johnson sends this link to an article from The New Yorker:

Bodansky and others have said that U.S. intelligence has long known that countries such as Iran and independent groups have made plans for “super-terrorism” and have trained people to carry out terrorist acts..

“We’ve known since the mid-eighties, for example, that Iran was training people to fly as kamikazes on commercial planes, as bombs, into civilian targets,” Bodansky said. “The question was whether the political leaders of the sponsoring states would give the order to actually do it. From the moment a country starts risking the wrath of the civilized world to start such a training program, it must be serious about it.” Bodansky explained that Iran’s principal “school” is in Wakilabad, in the northeast part of the country, and is an entity of Iranian intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard. The school, he said, has American-made commercial jets for training its students in techniques of hijacking, sabotage, and flying into civilian targets.

Not unimaginable at all.

ARNOLD KLING ARGUES that efforts to regulate biotechnology as Leon Kass desires would necessarily lead to a worldwide totalitarian dictatorship that would be far more dystopian than the future created by not engaging in such regulation.

So far, bad philosophy has killed a lot more people than biotechnology. Perhaps we should regulate it. . . .

I GUESS IT’S NOT 1984 YET: The Second Circuit has ordered the release of Jose Padilla. Here’s a link to the opinion, but I can’t get it to open — the server seems to be saturated at the moment. Judging by the Reuters story, the court put emphasis on Padilla’s American citizenship, and on the fact that he was on American soil — both appropriate considerations in my opinion.

UPDATE: Okay, it’s opening now. Those do appear to be the considerations, based largely on lack of Congressional authorization for detention of Americans as enemy combatants on American soil. The court goes out of its way to emphasize that the government has “ample cause” to believe that Padilla was implicated in a “terrorist plot,” making clear that this decision is about the law, not the facts.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, I’ve skimmed the opinion very quickly. Based on both Constitutional analysis (the Third Amendment is even cited, a rarity) and on statute (the Non-Detention Act, 18 U.S.C. sec. 4001(a)), the President lacks inherent authority to detain American citizens as enemy combatants when seized on American soil outside a zone of actual combat. For those of you studying for Con. Law exams, the President is placed thoroughly in Jackson Category Three. The Quirin case, involving Nazi saboteurs, is distinguished.

This seems right to me, based on my rather quick read of the opinion. I think that the real danger in Presidential authority to detain terrorists comes when it’s applied to American citizens in America, since that’s where the risk of politically motivated abuse is highest. Whether Congress has the power to authorize such detention isn’t addressed in the opinion, but I would incline toward the position that it does not.

Meanwhile, here’s a link to the dissent, which argues that the President does have such inherent authority, and that it is not defeated by the Non-Detention Act.

And, by the way, they don’t have to let Padilla go — just release him from military custody. They can transfer him to civilian custody for further prosecution, and the majority, in the conclusion to the opinion also notes that he can be held as a material witness in connection with other civilian prosecutions.

MICHAEL SILENCE has an article on Iraqi bloggers that’s worth reading.

ROGER SIMON IS BACK FROM PARIS and blogging again:

[P]erhaps it was because I was there in the midst of the capture of Saddam… but the storied anti-Americanism now seemed almost the pathetic gesture of a failed state. To see the downcast newscaster on TV3 searching for something reassuringly cynical to say about the arrest of the Iraqi mass murderer was comical (she implied Saddam had been—unfairly?—impoverished and his capture didn’t mean much because he “only” had $750,000 in cash in the hole with him).

Bloggers Merde in France and the Dissident Frogman are correct (Yes, I met them and they are real—great guys!). France is in bad shape. Strange as this sounds, it reminded me in a way of some of my visits to the Soviet Union in the late eighties.

Read the whole thing.

“WITHOUT THEM, I WOULDN’T BE ALIVE:” Another pack-not-a-herd moment:

Debbie Shultz’s class had just finished a Spanish II final exam Wednesday morning when the door to their trailer burst open with a bang.

Shultz’s estranged husband stood wild-eyed in the doorway, teeth gritted, pausing almost for dramatic effect, she recalled. Then he rushed toward her, she said, raising a large knife toward her chest.

That’s when Shultz’s students, 16- and 17-year-old kids, went to her rescue. Several of the youngsters tackled the man, pinning him to the floor and wresting the knife from his hand.

Bravo. “Leaving it to the professionals” wouldn’t have been an option here, as it often isn’t. And here’s the right attitude:

Nimesh Patel, 17, was taking a nap after finishing his final when he heard screaming and the scampering of fleeing students. He saw his teacher trying to fend off her assailant.

“I froze there for a second. Me and a couple of other guys grabbed him and threw him to the ground and basically sat on him until the cops came,” he said.

Several other students helped Patel subdue the attacker. They included Austin Hutchinson, 16; John Bailey, 16; Andy Anderson, 17; Matt Battaglia, 17; and Scott Wigington, 17.

As Hutchinson saw the man pull the knife, “I thought I could run like the rest of the people or I could help,” the student said. “It’s just not right leaving her there.”

Again, bravo.

UPDATE: Reader Richard Aubrey emails:

The kids are okay, as we used to say, when it meant The Kids (aka SDS). Our current educational system–without much in the way of a reasonable alternative–keeps kids in a state of extended adolescence, which doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of being adult when the time comes.

This also happened in Washington, at Thurston High School, when that kid came in and started shooting. Some folks theorized that the heroes of that incident got short media shrift after it was disclosed that several of them were NRA members.

I don’t know, myself, but the view of the elites that the rest of us are and should remain victims isn’t exactly hidden.

I hadn’t heard that last, but I can’t say it would surprise me.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Correction — Aubrey was talking about the Springfield, Oregon school shooting, by Kip Kinkel. I didn’t catch that because he said Washington, and I didn’t recognize the name of the high school. Reader David Radulski sends a link to this story about the heroic actions of Jake Ryker, who stopped Kinkel. Key passage:

Ryker sprang into action – after being shot through the chest – and emerged a local hero in a tragedy that has captured national attention.

Seconds after the shooting started, Ryker and three other boys – altogether, two sets of brothers – tackled the suspect, Kipland Phillip Kinkel, knocked the rifle out of his hands, kept him from using two pistols and held him on the floor until teachers arrived. . . .

Officials said the boys’ courageous action kept Kinkel from reloading his rifle and probably saved many lives.

“That’s important to understand, that this shooter was under control by the time the emergency personnel began arriving at the scene,” Springfield Fire Chief Dennis Murphy said.

Given the deeply unimpressive performance of the emergency personnel at Columbine, that may be just as well. At any rate, in situations like these the police will likely arrive too late. And the NRA angle appears to be true.

LEE HARRIS OFFERS thoughts on compassion and war.

MIXED FEELINGS: The Insta-Wife’s book on violent kids is out of print, but a used copy is selling on Amazon for $99.95. She’s both pleased and appalled.