The building with the secret room is a block from my office.
Wow, that case drew a good panel, all things considered. The lawyers don't sound like they tailored their arguments very well to the judges, though.
Lenny Bruce had a piece where he riffed on the idea of having a document from the President that said, "He can do anything, Jack".
But Lenny was one of the good guys.
"This document cannot be meaningfully described" - isn't that a self-contradiction?
4: The whole sentence in the lawyer's mind, with assumptions included, probably was:
"This document is totally non-redactable and non-segregable [or else you lose all substantive content, because the whole thing is State Secrets] and cannot even be meaningfully described [without giving away State Secrets]."
To which I would think the response is: "so?"
It's all mind-boggling stuff. I am sort of impressed by a world in which governments employ this sort of argument. The Chewbacca Defence was supposed to be a joke.
""This document cannot be meaningfully described" - isn't that a self-contradiction?"
It's almost a Godel sentence.
It does have magic powers. It makes the Constitution and 792 years of Anglo-Saxon law disappear.
5:
The whole sentence in the lawyer's mind, with assumptions included, probably was: ...
No, no, what the lawyer was thinking was
""This document is totally non-redactable and non-segregable [in the sense of physical, but not logical impossibility, that is, the document repels all black ink and cannot be cut into pieces with any scissors made by any known physical process] and cannot even be meaningfully described [in the sense of a logical impossibility, that is, the words written on this amazing piece of paper are not only meaningless, but they bear no resemblance to anything else in the universe that might be used as an analog, and cannot even have their spatial co-ordinates mapped by another system]."
I'm sure of it.
What happened to the Salon article thread? Deleting threads is Orwellian! (Well, allowing for standard internet hyperbole it is).
11 gets it right. Not even a nod toward my heroism in this new thread?
Actually it seems to still exist. Just isn't linked from the main page anymore.
It exists and will go back up in a few days, when people aren't clicking through from Salon.
11: Just isn't linked from the main page anymore.
Obviously, it couldn't be meaningfully described.
Ogged is trying to bury the Manjoo Conspiracy. Don't let him!
Linking from Salon could result in grave harm to the security of Unfogged. We have no right to ask further questions.
10: Oop, yeah, good catch.
Perhaps we can observe only its position but not its velocity? Because God knows evidence without velocity is just meaningless.
In order to keep riffraff and bandwagoneers away I recommend that this be moved to replace the current banner image at the top of the page.
The arguments are too wonky to gain much traction, but secret government, the unitary executive, the PATRIOT act and the suspension of habeas corpus, privatisation, class restratification, and the monopolar international order dominated by American preponderance are nullifying several centuries of American, English, and European liberalization and democratization. All we'll have left is the market economy.
Arguments about these things by nice people like us have been overwhelmed by realpolitik. In the American university there are many representatives of the realpolitik: the Straussians, much of International Relations, much of economics (economists loved Pinochet and Singapore's Pres. Lee), the pro-torture psychologists, and so on. None of them highlight or foreground their support for the New World Order, but plenty of them are happy with it and working for it.
My disagreement with Bob is that I don't see where the resistance would come from. I'm not sure that he does either.
the arguments clearly aren't gaining much traction, but are they so irredeemably wonky? Maybe I'm too wonky to realize it....
I met a guy at an NEH institute this summer who admitted to being a Straussian, but he refused to show me the secret handshake.
I don't think the arguments are particularly wonky, which makes it much scarier that they aren't gaining more traction.
Still, though, I think they've gained more traction among the public at large than among the elite. Which is scary in itself, since it points up how un-democratic the system is becoming. I do think we need to give things some time, though. The time from the 2008 election through about 2010 will be very telling.
19: it could be a nice change of pace to have an, ummm, "riff-raff" invasion at this site (what exactly are "riff-raff" on the net?). Trolling, hit and run comments, arguments...a flurry of that would be entertaining.
Off topic, but why has the bot post disappeared from the page? I read it in the feed reader, but now poof!
I do like it when judges get bitchy:
Judge Pregerson: "What does utmost deference mean? Bow to it?"
Oh. Thanks. I'm lazy. And a little confused.
To most people habeas corpus is wonky. Less so when you explain what it means, but even then, a lot of people are happy to grant the terrorism exception.
Most of the black helicopter people who (rightly) worried about Clinton's attitude toward civil liberties have been giving Bush a blank check. They're jumping ship now, but the issue is immigration, and what they want to do is deport the Mexicans, or put them in camps, without trial.
Most people deal piecemeal with immediate, personalized cases. Anything beyond that is wonky. (Marcus and Katherine, yeah, you are wonks. Marcus -- you're an economist-philosopher! Who's wonkier than that?
I think of "wonky" as meaning clunky, shaky, unreliable, like some poorly-constructed piece of machinery, and "wonkish" as the adjective describing the condition of being like, or suitable to, wonks. Is this me being idiosyncratic?
It's you being British-influenced, which is where your 'wonky' comes from. For most Americans, I don't think the British 'wonky' is salient enough to require disambiguation.
The arguments are only "wonky" to the extent that the feds make them so, in order to conceal the enormity of their bullshit.
As one commenter at Volokh put it:
... as a practical matter, if the government can assert state secrets here, it means that the goverment can always violate the law or the constitution, as long as it classifies the program. That can't be right ...
Not that hard for the guy on the street to follow ... if anyone were trying to get his attention. But wait! Breaking news! Charges dropped against Lindsay Lohan!
OT, the mouseover text is too long.
No it isn't. Firefox just doesn't do the right thing. You can get a plugin that fixes things.
"Last time I let you borrow my car, you drove it into a river."
"No I didn't. They put the bridge in the wrong place. You can get pontoons that will avoid that problem."
36: If Bill Gates can become a billionaire with that reasoning, then why can't the rest of us?
Hey, I yield to nobody in my wonkiness. I have no illusions about that. I even look wonky. But basically for the reasons in 33, I think these arguments are fairly straightforward. I mean, I know from wonky and these don't strike me as that much in the weeds. It's pretty basic stuff to our system of government.
The government asserts that document can't be described because every aspect of it is a secret. But once it has been seen by those whose calls were monitored, it can't really be a "secret" anymore and should be admissible.
This is the same reason why the administration wants to keep various "illegal combatants" locked up - because to release them would allow them to reveal the state secret that they were tortured.
But the government attorney goes too far - surely all words could be redacted, leaving only punctuation, without revealing the secret?
