I only intervene when the debate threatens to consume and crowd out everything else by doing nothing but re-iterating the same old arguments among the same people who are heavily invested in the arguments. - GG
[empahsis mine]

Wanting to abide by the spirit of your preference, I have put bernbart in my killfile.

Well the Taliban seem to be engaged in growing them now.

What are your thoughts, if any, on the news media as a "historical record," as it pertains to what you are discussing here (unproven government claims and anonymity), and the advent of the internet? I drew a link between the "History is Bunk" article currently on Salon, and your article here because it seems to me, they are intricately linked.

If today's news media will be the primary sources for future historians, what does that bode for the future of history? Do we even stand a chance of gaining an accurate account of today's events, or will future historians just be bogged down in 10,000 articles and interpretations per every minute historical event that transpires today?

As you know, I don't have a ban on 9/11 comments here and don't delete any discussion of 9/11 theories. I only intervene when the debate threatens to consume and crowd out everything else by doing nothing but re-iterating the same old arguments among the same people who are heavily invested in the arguments.

We are all invested in this one whether we like it or not Glenn. But that aside I was only correcting bernbert on a matter of fact. The fact that the issue related to 9/11 was really neither here nor there to me. Had she made a factual error in any other sphere in which I had happened to be reasonably briefed I would have done the same.

And the thing swings both ways of course. Were I to come out with a factual error I'd be only to grateful to be corrected and indeed thank the poster for putting me straight. No point believing in things that are factually un true.

The more a read very sincere posts trying to understand the meaning of Guantanamo, torture, ignoring court veredicts, etc the more I become convinced that they can only be understood in terms of medium to long range objectives.

Trying to put the "lawless" trend in context within current events, make a lot of this policies seem totally misguided and senseless. Claims like the current behavior of the MSM can be explained by "profit objectives", or that President Obama does not want to "antagonize" the right nuts do not make a lot of sense.

In the context of longer term neferious objectives, they have some logic. For example, establishing the right to indefinite detention totally removes the ability of the judicial system to undo Goverment abuses. Now the discussion is centered around "terrorist" (as a synonim for moslems) but there is nothing that prevents nationals to be included.

It does not take a lot of imagination to move the clock 10 years fordward a see some type of disenters being treated like that. Even if the courts find them guilty of a small offense (civil disobedience of some kind) it does not mean that they will be walking the streets in the near future. Who would dear to get involved in serious disent?

The idea that "enemies of the state" can be interrogated using certain techniques (many of them criminal) is also another thing that if you move the clock forward it becomes very disturbing since it is the goverment that decides who belongs to that category.

I sincerely hope that the posters that attribute a lot of the current movement towards goverment lawless and MSM support are right in the sense that it is not part of an ominus trend towards a bleak future.

Well the Taliban seem to be engaged in growing them now.

How the hell would you know? In fact how the bloody hell do you "know" anything? I think you just "know" things that just feel comfortable with and are in line with the way you think the world should be rather than as the world actually is.

If you had any savvy as well as courtesy you'd thank me for disabusing you of a false notion that you had been carrying around in that silly little head of yours.

I tell you, not for nothing was I in a band called the Vegetable Liberation Front. I can't stand wilfully ignorant dullards. They do too much fucking damage in this world.

Why is that the only thing eever discussed here daily is GITMO? It;s as if there is nothing else going on in the world.

I think it's hilarious when commentors complain about the subject matter of a blog. I can't estimate an actual number, but there are MILLIONS of blogs out here in cyberspace, covering a myriad of topics.

Perhaps Bernbart would prefer a pet blog.

Seriously, Bernie, there is a solution - click on the white X in the Red Square at the upper right corner of your screen.

What I find much more troubling is that we have to discuss Gitmo anymore, that we have to discuss Obama's justice department, or his rendition policy, or his complicity in secrecy and cover-ups. That's the tedious argument of insidious intent.*

* T.S. Eliot

My favorite story from September 11th is about a guy named Yuri Boykov who was at the International Workshop on Energy Minimization Methods in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (EMMCVPR'01). He gave a talk that day on Min-Cut/Max-Flow algorithms that was very good. Unfortunately, IEEE, who sponsored the conference, didn't to publish his paper with the Proceedings. Whether it was the society or the author who balked, everything had gone all patriotic by that time, and they didn't want to be associated with a picture that gave an image disparity for pattern matching between George W. Bush and a chimpanzee, especially one that seemed to match so well.

The paper was eventually published on the author's website but with notices and boldface pointing to a much better version of the paper from PAMI in 2004 (PAMI is a top IEEE journal).

Neither the old version up on the web site, nor the PAMI article, contains the compare. In fact, the internet is nearly cleansed of the paper, but it still exists here, on a site of his co-author, Vladimir Kolmogorov:

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/vnk/papers/BK-EMMCVPR01.pdf

The picture is on page 12.

Here is the cleaned article, note that the disparity image is still a comparison between George W. and the chimp.

http://www.csd.uwo.ca/~yuri/Papers/emmcvpr01.pdf

When even our pre-eminent peer-reviewed scientific journals and their authors are screening and self-censoring to please the perceived power of the War President at its greatest, this nation has a big, big problem.