In case you didn't catch the "weekend news roundup" interview of James Fallows on NPR's All Things Considered tonight (Sept 5, 2009), here's a transcript (my own; only the audio is posted to the NPR website):

GUY RAZ: Jim, another story caught our attention this week. It has to do with former Attorney General John Ashcroft and immunity from prosecution over decisions to detain American citizens after 9-11.

JAMES FALLOWS: Yes, there's a US citizen who converted to Islam and his Islamic name became Abdullah Al-Kidd who was detained not as a suspect but as a material witness when he was trying to travel to Saudi Arabia in I believe 2003 -- detained for a number of weeks; prevented from travelling for a year or two -- and a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit of the west coast found former Attorney General Ashcroft personally liable for these decisions. And this is an open-ended case, because the decision said that no position of responsibility could exempt somebody from theoretical liability. This will certainly be appealed to the Supreme Court. But at face value, it's a quite consequential judgment.

GR: I mean, presumably there are other people from the Bush administration who will look at this decision and worry?

JF: Of course, and there's a long historical pattern this fits into. There are wars, there are disagreements, there are conflicts; one side wins, one side loses -- I was looking at Japan long ago, the way they referred to the Tokyo war crimes trials was as "victor's justice." And there is some line within our own change of administration in the US that we have to strike between finding people accountable and not having people run for cover and then be fearful about what they do when they're in power.

I suppose I don't need to point out the way that "Jim" Fallows (who seems to be a very nice guy, but a more consistent peddler of conventional wisdom would be hard to invent) turns the story from one about the abuse of power into one about insider politics and an imagined Obama vs. Bush grudge match, in spite of the rather obvious fact that Obama was in no way involved with this case, as well as the fact that the change in administration had nothing whatsoever to do with the operations of the 9th Circuit Court. Rather bizarrely, he also seems to be equating Obama's victory in the polls in 2004 with the US victory over Japan in 1945. Not sure who plays the bomb in that little allegory. But the bigger question that Fallow's reaction raises is: why would it be such an awful thing if people were "fearful" about the consequences of committing crimes "when they're in power"?

...is why we need so much crap to begin with. Instead of arguing about who creates wealth, we might want to ask ourselves what real wealth is. Or, if we go along with the common conception of wealth as having more stuff than anybody else, maybe we should ask (paraphrasing the great Edwin Starr song): "Wealth (yeah, huh, good God, y'all), what is it good for?"

Good one! I just wish your "butcher" story below was a satire, too. It reads like one.

Judging from recent reports out of London, the failure of US "intelligence" officials to understand and value the distinction between legal and illegal very nearly blew the whole case. The US (according to British intel sources) was pressuring, or "pressurising" in the British idiom, the Brits to arrest the suspects prematurely -- because US intelligence couldn't be bothered with such details as collecting legally admissible evidence. In their view, this was a war to be fought by Guantanamo rules, not a police operation to be fought within the bounds of the law. This aspect of the story has been much less reported in the US press, so here's the UPI version:

LONDON, Sept. 8 (UPI) -- British intelligence and police said the George W. Bush administration nearly blew Britain's case against alleged airline bomb plotters.

Three British Muslims were convicted Monday of plotting to blow up seven trans-Atlantic airliners in flight in a coordinated attack. However, officials said the plotters were arrested before they bought airline tickets.

Andy Hayman, the Metropolitan Police's assistant commissioner for specialist operations at the time of the plot, told The Times of London he thinks the White House was nervous as British officials reported mounting evidence of a plan to target U.S. cities.

Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28; Tanvir Hussain, 28; and Assad Sarwar, 29, were convicted of plotting to detonate homemade bombs disguised as drinks on planes over the Atlantic Ocean. Four additional suspects in the terrorism case were found innocent of conspiracy to murder charges. The men were all arrested in August 2006 and authorities accused the men of plotting to use a mixture of chemicals to bomb flights traveling from London to North America.

Another alleged plotter, Rashid Rauf, was arrested but escaped from Pakistani custody, The Times reported. He died in an airstrike in Pakistan's tribal territories, U.S. officials reported late last year.

"We believed the Americans had demanded (Rauf's) arrest and we were angry we had not been informed," Hayman told The Times in an interview published Tuesday. "The arrest hampered our evidence-gathering and placed us in Britain under intolerable pressure."

If the US pressure for premature arrest had led to mistrials or findings of innocence for all the suspects, Britain would have been faced with a Guantanamo-style dilemma: release them (even though their intelligence agency was certain they were terrorists) or detain them indefinitely and illegally.

My thoughts are with you. Tough times. I appreciate the laughs you regularly deliver, but it is just as important to feel now and then.

It's already on his Wikipedia bio...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Wilson_(U.S._politician)

How low we've sunk.