Sheridan: Con-Law

THE WHOLE TRUTH AND NOTHIN' BUT DA TRUTH

Evasions.

I love them.

Hate them actually, but here's an example that has the merit of humor and wit, since it concerns someone else:

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June 29, 2009

Op-Ed Contributor

My Trip

By JOHN KENNEY

The governor is hiking along the Appalachian Trail.

— Gov. Mark Sanford’s office, June 22

I’M going to tell you where I was. Because it’s a funny story. I think it’s funny. My wife doesn’t think it’s that funny. Nor does her legal team.

I was ... well ... I’m getting ahead of myself. Work had been brutal — brutal — that week and I was really looking forward to the weekend. Father’s Day weekend, I might add. One of my favorites. I also like Halloween, as you get to dress up in silly costumes. Last year I went as “Despair.” Anyway. I was really looking forward to the weekend. I thought I’d play some golf, which I don’t get to do much, what with Janie, our precocious, sometimes (mostly?) super-difficult 7-year-old, and the twins (age 3). Life’s very different now. But do I miss the single life? Let me answer that in three words. Not. This. Guy.

So I decided to go to Cape Cod with my wife, Ellen, and the kids. A kind of surprise. Only I didn’t take Ellen or the kids. Or go to Cape Cod. But I did mention, during the first few days while they were searching for me, that I was on Cape Cod in a Facebook posting. Though to this day I don’t know why I wrote that, nor do I have a memory of making that posting. Or of driving to Teterboro airport. But I’m jumping ahead again.

So it was a tough week and I was looking forward to relaxing and also I’d been laid off that Friday. Which was a surprise and disappointing. And yet as I sat in the office parking lot reviewing my two-day severance package, I found myself chuckling. Also sweating. This was in large part (I later learned from the police and paramedics) due to the Vicodin, which is a new kind of cold medicine, according to my former colleague, Frank.

So I was chuckling, but also sweating quite a lot, when I decided to call Ellen. Only I misdialed and called “Escort,” which is, I think, an honest mistake anyone could make, and to my surprise I was met in a room at the Pierre by Ilyana instead of my wife. Which is why I immediately left six hours later.

Where did I go from there? I went to my gym. So how did I end up in Marrakesh? Blame the A train to J.F.K. and my crazy passion for Berber history. Ask anyone who knows me, though it’s unlikely you’ll get a call back from most of those people right now.

So I sent Ellen — along with my credit card companies — an e-mail message saying I was detained on business in Morocco. A slight exaggeration, as I was not on business, and, coincidentally, not in Morocco. I was in La Paz. Turns out I got on the wrong plane. Which I tried to explain to Ellen, though the woman who happened to be standing next to me in the airport when my phone rang accidentally answered because we have the same ring tone. Of course, we weren’t actually in the airport, we were in a rental car, just leaving McCarran International, which, as it turns out, is not in Bolivia, it’s in Las Vegas. Well, you can imagine Ellen’s response, especially when Babette, my airplane friend who was coincidentally going in the exact direction I was and needed a ride, kept giggling. Who wouldn’t have been suspicious?

But I’m here now. Home. Well, not home home. Not where I used to live. But a different place. Far away. Honest.

John Kenney is a writer.

***

The notion of telling tall tales to persuade reminds me of the time a prospective client came into the office in San Francisco seeking to have me take what he said was some sort of a large personal injury, emotional damages, case that he said arose while on a trip to Hawaii.  Maybe the airline lost his luggage or the hotel turned him away, I forget the crime.

I was skeptical, at best, and my lack of enthusiasm at going on a treasure hunt for a non-existent pot-of-gold at the end of the vivid rainbow he was trying to paint must have been visible to his no-doubt practiced eye.

He says, "So, Mr. Sheridan, the reason I'm putting all this money on your desk (moving his arms grandly over the desk-pad is because I've heard such wonderful things about you as an attorney."

This made me feel good.

For a moment.

I still remember the grand gesture because I certainly didn't see a pile of gold on my desk. 

Or green. 

Nor even a retainer check. 

Just this grand sweeping of hands and arms, a gesture that appeared like that of a magician. 

"So, Mr. Sheridan, the reason I'm putting all this money on your desk...," indicating, as the court reporters like to say...

What money?

I didn't see no stinkin' money.

I saw an empty desktop on which there happened to be at the moment not a solitary dime.

But the gesture was so grand that I've never forgotten it, and it's been decades.

Look, Reader, the reason I'm giving you all this money is because (hands and arms gesturing grandly over your monitor)...

Spend it at your peril.

***

And speaking of evasions, I see that Bernie Madoff got 150 years.

His lawyer asked for 12.

The prosecutors asked for the 150.

Thirty years is what you get if the amount you steal is over a few million.

Bernie disappeared something like $50 Billion, by his own estimate.

Twelve years is a joke.

He wiped out a lot of people who now have to go back to the salt mines.  His wife got to keep $2.5 million so she doesn't have to go back to the mines, however.

But Bernie, he stays in durance vile for the duration, I'm afraid, and it couldn't happen to a nicer guy.  I hope Ruth will put a few bucks on the books for the canteen so he can buy a safety-razor that doesn't scratch.

It's those damned little evasions that will get you every time.

As in, "The reason I'm putting all this money on your desk [wave arms grandly over desk] is because I've heard such good things about you, Mr. Investor..."

When you can see the rainbow is a good time to walk away from the deal.

Deals aren't supposed to be rainbows and there are no pots of gold, anywhere, so far as I've ever been able to see.

But you might see things differently.

Good luck.

***

Bragging a bit:

I had a client who was facing 468 years on some horrible charges if I didn't get him off.

I can get you 250, I cautiously counseled.  He didn't think it all that funny.  Maybe I only thought that and didn't actually say the words.

I did try his case, however, hung the jury, and negotiated a dismissal of all 61 felony counts of these horrible crimes.

Turned down an offer to plead guilty one count for straight probation, to boot.

Client said that if he took that deal, he'd never see his daughter again.

He never did.

The deal was that the court would appoint a psychiatrist to evaluate him, the ex-wife, her lawyer boyfriend, later husband, and the daughter, an infant of three at the time of the alleged crime.

The court expert studied the case for three-years while the daughter lived with mom and lawyer-daddy.

The charges were false, the psychiatrist reported, the product of a vengeful mother seeking to alienate the daughter from her father.  Father ought now to have visitation resumed.

No, said the judge, the child has come to a position of rest with the mom and lawyer daddy, so it would hurt the child to force her to visit the man she believes molested her.

But, but, but...your honor...

So his parental rights are ordered terminated, said the judge.

Yes, I know, the father could've appealed.

But by this time he was broke, had met a new wife, and started a new family.  So he had no money to appeal.

I still see this client and have done other things for his new family.

Not a day goes by that he doesn't think of the daughter who was judicially kidnapped from him as the result of the mother's manipulations assisted by lawyer-boyfriend-daddy, a psychologist who didn't know better, and a legal system gone haywire.

This is the case that introduced me to Salem, 1692.

There's a lot you can learn about life today from reading about our Puritan forbears, even if you don't trace your own particular ancestry back to those English Protestants.  Our society still behaves in largely the same way, alas.  When you see a headline noting the release from prison of someone falsely convicted of the most heinous of crimes, rape or child-murder, you can thank Salem for the false conviction and the release.

THEOCRACY: A MATTER OF INTERPRETATION

Iran may have an elected president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, at present, but his survival depends on more than the voters as he has a challenger who received a lot of votes in the recent election.  Ahmedinejad depends of the support of the clerics, the mullahs, the imams, and the ayatollahs who constitute the ruling power of Iran.  With God on your side, how can you lose? 

Well, the opposition has God on his side, too, as well as some number of voters.

How can God be on both sides in the same election?

The same way he could be on both sides during World War Two.  He was on our side, obviously (we won), but he was also on the side of the Nazi German enemy, not to mention the Shinto inspired Japanese Empire.  German soldiers' belt buckles were embossed with "Gott Mitt Uns," God is with us.

Okay, so anyone can claim that God is on his side.  The prisons are full of people wearing crosses.  Prison ministries hand them out.  Churches are hospitals for sinners, not resorts for saints, as someone once pointed out, Ann Landers, perhaps.  Prisons must be the ICU.  For sinners.

The problem with building an organization on God, or belief in God, is that in order for it to work, God must be talking to someone leading the church, or country based on God.

The problem here is that no one has a monopoly on the word of God, as no one knows whether it's God inspiring the leader or the Devil.  That's the thing about believing that God only does good.  Someone or something else must be responsible for all that goes wrong, you know, the evil stuff that most societies try to organize themselves to resist.

If only there were one true religion, you might say, then everyone would march in the same direction to the beat of the same Drummer.

Nice if it worked that way, maybe, but it doesn't. 

There's always another drummer and drums are a dime a dozen.

Take a look at Christianity.  One religion?  Or dozens?  Why is that?  Why so may subdivisions?

Perhaps it's because the earlier editions proved unsatisfactory, having too many drawbacks and unanswered questions.

I mean there's a reason that Jesus supplanted his father, the old Yahweh, an angry, unforgiving, smiting sort of a Lord.  And why so many venerate his mother, Mary, praying for her intercession, on the theory, no doubt that even Jesus's writ runs too far. 

Sometimes you need a blind eye or a substantial dose of mercy when you've really screwed up. 

So the early Christian church split into East and West.  The western division, or Orthodox, headquartered in Constantinople, today's Istanbul, and called the Greek Orthodox rite, split further into other, more nation-based units such as Russian Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox and perhaps others as well.

The western division of Christianity divided over not only the question of abuses by clergy but doctrine following Martin Luther in Germany and John Calvin who fled France to Switzerland where he followed Zwingli in promulgating a new rite called Protestantism for the generality of all the new sects that it in turn subdivided into:

Lutheran
Moravian
Baptist
Anabaptist
Presbyterian
Dutch Reformed
Quaker
Wesleyan
Methodist

and many more.

Why so many?

Because once a leader says that God has told him to go a different way, he (or she, see Anne Hutchinson of Boston/Rhode Island) either s/he splits, meaning leaves along with any followers, or is driven out.  Ostracism and death seem to be the favored means of keeping one's sect purged of dissent.

When I enter a church, I don't expect to see a section of pews reserved for dissenters.  Maybe this is an idea, I don't know, not having run many churches.

The article on the turmoil in Iran, where the two leading contenders for president  each enjoy clerical backing is below.

Iran regime faces public anger: will it survive?

By SALLY BUZBEE, Associated Press Writer

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

(06-16) 12:41 PDT CAIRO, Egypt (AP) --

Iran's Islamic regime has survived a devastating war with Iraq, strong American sanctions and international isolation in its 30 years of power. It has seen reformist and hard-line presidents come and go, with barely a flinch.

But now, public anger over the disputed election has given Iran's ruling elite a challenge of a new and unsettling kind: A growing opposition movement with apparent broad backing, headed by a leader who is one of their own — and doesn't seem intimidated.

Iran's clergy-guided system does not appear in immediate danger. But the ruling clerics are paying close attention to the street anger — the same popular unrest they harnessed themselves three decades ago to bring down the shah in their 1979 revolution.

There is a chance — just a chance — that the recent protests could transform into a serious, credible movement similar to an opposition party in another country, fundamentally changing a system now ruled by an all-powerful and untouchable theocracy.

There is also a chance, more likely, that to avoid such an outcome, the clerics will either jettison, or at minimum rein in and weaken, the president they have supported until now, hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

For that to happen, the protests would almost certainly need to be sustained, spread to other cities and most importantly, attract enough clerical support to create high-level rifts.

"No one is very sure where it will go next," said Suzanne Maloney, an Iran expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy in Washington. But she says: "They have forced the regime to take a step back."

Despite that, the likelihood that Iran's clergy-ruled system will undergo a radical change remains dim.

Many Iranians feel strong kinship with the revolution, its heirs and the system they created, and are reluctant to do anything that would trigger bloody upheaval again. Ahmadinejad has broad support among the poor and pious, who also venerate the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Yet Ahmadinejad's hard-line jousts with the West, his mishandling of the economy and, in particular, what many view as a blatant theft of the election, seem to be turning off growing segments of the middle class.

The recent protests are different from the country's last unrest, student-led protests in 1999 that fizzled. In particular, this go-round has attracted some of Iran's middle class, the same group that changed a religious movement in 1979 into a strong revolutionary force.

The leader of the street protesters this time, rival presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, is also different from the reformist student leaders of 1999. He is no sideline player or amateur but an experienced politician who was prime minister in the 1980s during Iran's tough war with Iraq, when Khamenei was president.

Mousavi does not appear intimidated by the supreme leader or his inner circle. Indeed, he can take his complaints right to them, and he can make their life rough if he begins to criticize the clerical system as complicit in protecting Ahmadinejad.

There's no way to know if Mousavi will challenge, or would even want to challenge, the Islamic system itself. He is a product of the revolution, never known as a reformer in the past. Yet he has already gone further than many expected.

The country's clerics may hold the final word.

Iran's power structure has always been opaque. Essentially it consists of a broad base of clerics supporting a ruling elite of high-level clerics, who have the power through various institutions to overturn the decisions any president makes.

At their top is the country's supreme leader — Khamenei, who controls the armed forces, other security forces and the nuclear program. He serves as final arbiter.

But even Khamenei must be careful lest he lose the support of the clerics who empower him. A rift in the high levels of the clerical structure could endanger even him, the supremacy of his position and the clerical system itself.

Some clerics in key institutions like the Guardian Council — which vets the election — are lockstep backers of Khamenei. But others, such as former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a fierce critic of both Khamenei and Ahmadinejad, are wild cards.

The concessions that have already come from the clerics, especially the announcement to re-examine the vote tally, show that at least some clerics want to keep the protests from escalating.

So far, Mousavi has made no direct threat to the Islamic system.

But he hinted at it during a massive rally of supporters Monday, telling them to stand up to "this astonishing charade ... Otherwise, nothing will remain of people's trust in the government and the ruling system."

In Iran's post-revolutionary history, protesters have almost never crossed that red line and demonstrated against the ruling clerics themselves.

If they do, it would leave the clerics in a difficult spot: Choosing between making political concessions to reformists, or watching the unrest grow to ever-more dangerous levels.

Revolutionary change like that is still far away and may never come. But the possible contours of the once-unthinkable are now taking shape.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Sally Buzbee is the Mideast Editor for The Associated Press based in Cairo. Associated Press writer Brian Murphy contributed to this report.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/06/16/international/i121015D77.DTL

© 2009 Hearst Communications Inc. |

FEAR OF REDS, JAPS

I grew up in a time of fear.

World War Two was raging.  I recall accompanying my father into the basement where he'd flatten empty food cans with a heavy ball-peen hammer.  Toss them into the cardboard box.  To recycle.  Metal was scarce and had to be reworked into guns and tanks.  Today we call it recycling.  Don't think the word had been coined yet.

Blackout curtains went on the windows.  German U-boats were sinking too many of the Liberty Ships my father was building in the Bethlehem Steel Shipyard on Staten Island, N.Y., our home. Before the coastal lights were doused, the submarine commanders could lie offshore and watch the ships exiting N.Y. Harbor heading south towards the convoy rendezvous point near Philadelphia, for example.  At night, when the subs couldn't be seen, the ships could, as silhouettes against the shore-lights, blinking on and off as the ships silently passed.  Boom!  Down they'd go, before their first voyage got very far underway.  Adm. King took awhile to tumble to this trick but finally got the picture and the curtains went up.

We were afraid we would lose the war and be taken over by Japanese under Tojo or the wicked Emperor, Hirohito, or Germans, Hitler's Nazis.  It's hard to believe that Hirohito was allowed to thrive after the war after all he did and all that was done in his name to make American's lives miserable.  We lost a lot of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines to Hirohito.  Hundreds of thousands.  He killed millions of more civilians, worldwide.

After the shooting War was the Cold War.  We were afraid that the world would go Communist, and the country, as well.

There was reason for the fear, just as there was reason to fear the West Coast Japanese, or Americans of Japanese ancestry.  Yesterday I was in the mall at Tanforan in San Bruno.  Previously it had been an airfield, a horse racetrack, and the relocation center for the temporary holding of thousands of AJAs pending transfer on trains to concentration camps in the interior.

We were afraid of the Japanese.  We meaning mainstream whites, the people in control of the levers of power of government.  Paranoia ran deep.  What if one of those strange Japanese got it into his head to be loyal to his ancestral homeland, the Empire of Japan, Hirohito, and spied against us, or worse yet, signaled lurking Japanese submarines that the coast was clear to invade?  After all, our fleet of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers was lying on the bottom after the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor during peacetime.  Anyone who could do that could do anything, right?  Right.  Round 'em up and the Constitution be damned.

That's the way it works.

The first casualty in war, they say, is the truth.

The second is the Constitution.

Why?

Because fear, paranoia, the instinct to imagine that if the worst-case scenario could happen, it will, is alive and well within us.  It's how we protect ourselves some of the time but ruin ourselves in the long run if we give in to it.  This is a hard lesson to learn and harder to teach.  Telling someone who is afraid not to be afraid just doesn't work.  Panic can be relieved but it takes a great deal of individual effort that is not necessarily available on a broad scale.  Good political leadership can help, but when the political leaders are as paranoid as their followers, the people who put them where they have a chance to lead, and they don't, we can go to hell in a handbasket.  The leading Japanese Internment case, Korematsu, stands for the proposition that it can happen again.  Justice Jackson called it a loaded gun, just waiting to be picked up when circumstances warrant.

Below is an article on teachers in New York, victimized by the Red Scare of the early 'Fifties.  Of course many had been card-carrying Reds back in the 'Thirties, when it wasn't political death to join the Communist party.  It was one of the few promising something different that might work, while the other two, Democrats and Republicans, were riding the economy down the drain into the toilet.  The Reds, meanwhile, promised the moon, to be paid for by the supporters of the other two.

Stalin controlled Russia and the Soviet Union, our former ally during the war who stole our nuclear secrets from the Manhattan Project at Alamagordo and Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Then the Reds exploded an A-bomb, then an H-bomb, after us, showing they were on our tail.

Then Mao beat our man in China, Chiang Kai-shek, who fled to Formosa, renamed Taiwan.  Then Mao exploded an A-bomb.  Not only did we lose China but the Chinese had the bomb.

Then the Communist North Koreans invaded our ally, South Korea and we went into a shooting war on the mainland of Asia, contrary to all advise and a lot of good sense where we didn't make out too well.  Previous wars we won:  WWI, WWII, the Civil War, the 1812 War against the British, and the Revolutionary War, also against the British.  We could never lose a war, we though; never did, never would.

Then came Korea.

Then along came Vietnam.

Suddenly we were losing, to Communists.

We were unable to get rid of Castro, the Communist in charge of Cuba, 90 miles off-shore of Florida.  Khruschev planted nuclear-warhead missiles in Cuba.  We nearly went to war over that, under Kennedy, when I was in law school.  I thought we'd had it and we almost did.  I knew damn well every day of my adult life before the fall of the Soviet Union that death would come by frying in a nuclear blast.  Staten Island was ground zero for a nuclear attack on New York because that's where the oil tank farms were located across the Kill Van Kull from New Jersey where the refineries were all located on the East Coast.

It's a wonder that the Supreme Court didn't cave into the anti-Red hysteria, which is the acting out product of the rampant paranoia going around.  To this day I won't sign a petition on the street out of concern that it will wind up in some FBI file and I'll be marked for future destruction when push comes to shove.  This is a product of Cold War thinking, where everything favored by Mao and Stalin was wrong or bad and everything believed in by us was right and good.

It is very hard to be self-critical of one's own country, and back then I wasn't; I was a believer; still am as to back then.  I grew up in that sea and couldn't see the water in which I swam.  As a lifeguard in filthy Lower Bay water, Raritan Bay area of the South Shore of StatNisland, I was used to swimming in dirty water anyway; you took the bad with the good.  Life isn't perfect and ideal cleanliness is too much to hope for, realistically, isn't it?

"These colors don't run," was the slogan arising out of the ashes of the World Trade Center, which had yet to be built when I was growing up.  My dad, a construction worker, a crane operator, operating engineer, formerly of the shipyard, later of construction sites, ran the hoist on the WTC.  That's the outside elevator used to haul construction material and men up the building side as it was being made tall.

This made him a hard-hat, after the head-protecting helmet for construction site workers, a relatively new idea back then, just as in baseball the batters didn't yet wear helmets despite 90-MPH fastballs whizzing inches past instant death.

The problem in Constitutional Law is not knowing the law, it's in applying it's protections of the individual when all the rest of the individuals are experiencing the periodic paranoia and hysteria that attend periods of stress.  The only cure, I suspect, is clear information and exemplary political leadership, both hard to find during a crisis, such as the World Trade Center, 9-11-01.

Below is an article from today, looking back on almost 60 years ago, when fear ran deep.

How would you like to see our president lead during our next crisis?  For there will always be another crisis.   That's why we band together in a nation under a government of our own devising, to protect us not only from outside threats but from ourselves when we're panicking and casting about hysterically to stamp out the alleged threat.

Do we want him, or her, to abandon the Constitution? 

Or use it as one of our best means of protecting ourselves from ourselves as well as others?

This is the lesson of Constitutional Law and History.

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June 16, 2009

When Suspicion of Teachers Ran Unchecked

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Fifty-seven years later, Irving Adler still remembers the day he went from teacher to ex-teacher at Straubenmuller Textile High School on West 18th Street.

It was the height of the Red Scare, and the nation was gripped by hysteria over loyalty and subversion. New York City’s temples of learning, bursting with postwar immigrants and the first crop of baby boomers, rang with denunciations by interrogators and spies.

Subpoenaed in 1952 to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee investigating Communist influence in schools, Mr. Adler, the math department chairman and a member of the executive board of the embattled Teachers Union, refused to answer questions, citing his constitutional right.

The end came quickly, recalled Mr. Adler, 96, who later acknowledged membership in the Communist Party: “I was teaching a class when the principal sent up a letter he had just received from the superintendent announcing my suspension, as of the close of day.”

Mr. Adler, who has written 56 books, was one of 378 New York City teachers ousted by dismissal, resignation or early retirement in the anti-Communist furor of the cold war, when invoking the Fifth Amendment became automatic grounds for termination. These painful stories may have been buried to history, if not for a coming documentary and a lawsuit seeking to reopen 150,000 documents on more than 1,150 teachers who were investigated and on the informers who turned them in. Among the questions, all these years later, is whether their names can be published, and whether there is still a stigma in being named, or having named, a Communist.

The Board of Education’s purges came to be widely condemned as the city’s own witch hunt, repudiated decades later by subsequent administrations that reinstated dozens of dismissed teachers.

“None of those teachers were ever found negligent in the classroom,” said Clarence Taylor, a professor of history at Baruch College who has written a study of the Teachers Union and the ideological strife that destroyed it. “They went after them for affiliation with the Communist Party.”

Teacher interrogations also occurred in Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo, among other cities. In hearings of the security subcommittee, about 1,500 of the country’s one million teachers were said to be “card-carrying Communists,” with two-thirds of the accused residing in New York City.

The plaintiff in the lawsuit, Lisa Harbatkin, a freelance writer, applied in 2007 to see the files on her deceased parents, Sidney and Margaret Harbatkin, and other teachers summoned for questioning in the 1950s by the city’s powerful assistant corporation counsel, Saul Moskoff, assigned to the Board of Education as chief prosecutor.

As next of kin, she got access to files showing that informants had named her parents as Communists, and that her father had surrendered his license rather than be interrogated while her mother escaped retribution. But files on other teachers and suspected informants were withheld.

Under privacy rules adopted last year by the Municipal Archives, researchers without permission from the subjects or their heirs can review files only upon agreeing to seek city approval before quoting material or publishing identifying personal information about the subjects (except for accounts from already-public sources like newspapers).

Ms. Harbatkin sued, gaining free representation from the Albany firm of Hiscock & Barclay. “The city’s offer imposes restrictions on her freedom of speech that are unconstitutional,” said her lead lawyer, Michael Grygiel. The legal brief calls it “more than a little ironic” that the city sought “to prohibit Ms. Harbatkin from ‘naming names’ in writing about this period of history.”

A lawyer for the city, Marilyn Richter, said that a 1980 court ruling allowed the archives to redact some names before releasing files. But the same ruling noted that the city had sealed the files only until 2000.

“The courts previously determined that the individuals named in these records have a right of privacy not to have their identity revealed,” said Ms. Richter. She said the offer to allow Ms. Harbatkin to review unredacted copies of the documents, “if she agrees not to reveal identifying information, actually provides her greater access to the records than the law requires.”

Ms. Harbatkin said her aim was to write about cases she found compelling but not to expose every name in the files. “The fear increases directly proportional to how closed off everything is,” she said. The city, she said, had no right “to tell you what you can see.”

Files already released to Ms. Harbatkin recount a battle of wills in 1956 between her mother and Mr. Moskoff, the inquisitor who became the fearsome face of the crusade to ferret out subversion in the schools. In her interrogation, Margaret Harbatkin acknowledged joining a Communist Party cell under a pseudonym but said she later withdrew.

Then, directed by Mr. Moskoff “to identify those people who were members of this group,” she replied: “I don’t remember any. I’ve known teachers at so many different schools. As a substitute I went from — I don’t even remember all the different schools I worked at, Mr. Moskoff, and that’s the truth.”

The files contain reports by informants who have never been publicly identified. But one operative known as “Blondie” and “Operator 51” was later revealed as Mildred V. Blauvelt, a police detective who went undercover for the Board of Education in 1953 and was credited with exposing 50 Communist teachers. Later, in a series of newspaper reminiscences, she said her hardest moments came when, posing as a Communist hard-liner, she had to argue disaffected fellow travelers out of quitting the party.

Other material was collected for a documentary, “Dreamers and Fighters: The NYC Teacher Purges,” begun in 1995 by a social worker and artist, Sophie-Louise Ullman. She died in 2005, but the project, accompanied by a Web site, dreamersandfighters.com, has been continued by her cousin Lori Styler. The unfinished work is narrated by the actor Eli Wallach, whose brother, Samuel, was president of the Teachers Union from 1945 to 1948 and was fired from his teaching job for refusing to answer questions before the superintendent of schools, Dr. William Jansen. Samuel Wallach died at 91 in 2001.

“They called everybody a Communist then,” growled Eli Wallach, 93, in a telephone interview, still bridling over the way his brother was treated.

The Teachers Union, which was expelled from the American Federation of Teachers in 1941 before disbanding in 1964 and being succeeded by the United Federation of Teachers, maintained that “no teacher should be disqualified for his opinions or beliefs or his political associations.” State and city authorities countered that Communists were unfit to teach because they were bound to the dictates of the party.

When asked by Mr. Moskoff, “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?” many teachers refused to answer. They were then charged with insubordination and subject to dismissal.

In his case, said Mr. Adler, the math teacher, it worked out happily. In response to his challenge of the state’s Feinberg Law, which made it illegal for teachers to advocate the overthrow of the government by force, the United States Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional.

He went on to a successful career as a writer of math and science books, settling in North Bennington, Vt. But although he renounced communism after the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, he said, the F.B.I. in 1965 listed him as “a potentially dangerous individual who should be placed on the Security Index” — subject to detention in the event of a national emergency. Another teacher, Minnie Gutride, 40, killed herself with oven gas in 1948 after being called out of her classroom to be questioned about Communist activities.

Outside the written record, Ms. Harbatkin did discover unexpected moments of humanity. The Board of Education was often reluctant to oust a husband and wife when both were teachers, and her mother, who died in 2003, confided to her that after she told Mr. Moskoff she would never sleep again if she provided or verified the names of fellow teachers, he turned off his tape recorder “and told her to keep saying she didn’t remember the names.”

She was not charged and continued teaching into the 1970s.

MARKETING DISEASE & DEATH VS. FREE SPEECH

Smoking kills.  Lung cancer.  It's also an industry that generates rivers of cash.  Even better, nicotine is more addictive than heroin.  Heroin possession is a felony in any jurisdiction in the U.S. outside the Tenderloin, where it is mandatory.  You don't see heroin advertised by drug dealers on TV, for some strange reason.  Not that they wouldn't have a free speech right to do so, mind you.

The federal government has known for decades that smoking kills.  That's why the FCC bans tobacco advertising aimed at young people.  Addict them when they're young, is the industry goal, and they'll stay customers for life, a pack a day at $5/per over even a truncated (from the emphysema) lifespan is a valuable rivulet which, multiplied by millions of users, becomes a mighty Mississippi of death.

The government wants to stamp it out.

Tobacco growers, states that produce tobacco (Virginia was founded on tobacco, as followed the nation).  We have a nasty habit of encouraging the marketing of products that kill us.  See guns, but I digress; we're focusing on killer tobacco.  I used to enjoy a pipe or a cigar but always felt I was pretending to look like someone in a movie.  I cut it out.  No one likes to think he's pretending he's someone else, does he.   I threw out a bunch of expensive pipes.  Nothing else to do with them.  What was I going to do, pass them on to someone who wanted to kill himself?  Nah.

Congress has passed a law restricting free speech, tobacco style, which the president is expected to sign.  Obama is having his problems quitting smoking.  He does it in private while keeping a straight face condemning it in public.  Poor guy.  He's trying.

Does Congress have the power to do this, pass such a law?

Constitutional law is about power and nothing but power. The government or a government has been granted power by the people to pass laws to protect the people.  That's the theory, imperfect as it may be in application.  If the people's representatives say that you cannot speak on certain topics, is that legal?  Does the Congress have the power to regulate low-value speech?

Here's where it gets interesting.

Outlawed by general consensus and the Supreme Court are defamatory speech, obscene expression, fighting words, and calls for violence happening right now.  Oh, yes:  kiddie porn, to protect children in the process of making the product, say a film or video.

It has been terribly difficult to clean up the political process of lobbyists' corrupting influence because lobbying is, at bottom, speaking to government, protected by the speech, press, and assembly clauses.  You just can't shut the people up when they want to talk.  We can't regulate the spending of money on ads because that's speech; so we try to regulate the raising of funds through normal channels but there are too many ways around the obstacles to be at all effective.

So now we're (I use 'we' to mean the government or Congress a lot; it's a convenient figure of speech that saves words) taking another crack at Congress.

Tobacco advertisers say that all they want to do is to speak to adults about choices among brands, since the adults seem already to have chosen to use tobacco.  As long as you want to kill yourself, use out six-shooter; it makes less of a mess.

Great, say lawmakers, do it in black and white, amidst a world of color; speak unattractively.

Expect the inevitable lawsuit.  You can buy a lawyer, indeed a whole law firm, for a couple of million bucks to handle the suit. 

When billions are at stake, millions are peanuts. 

The article is below:

---

June 16, 2009

Tobacco Regulation Is Expected to Face a Free-Speech Challenge

By DUFF WILSON

The marketing and advertising restrictions in the tobacco law that Congress passed last week are likely to be challenged in court on free-speech grounds. But supporters of the legislation say they drafted the law carefully to comply with the First Amendment.

The law’s ban on outdoor advertising within 1,000 feet of schools and playgrounds would effectively outlaw legal advertising in many cities, critics of the prohibition said. And restricting stores and many forms of print advertising to black-and-white text, as the law specifies, would interfere with legitimate communication to adults, tobacco companies and advertising groups said in letters to Congress and interviews over the last week.

The controversy, legal experts say, involves tension between the right of tobacco companies to communicate with adult smokers and the public interest in preventing young people from smoking.

Opponents of the new strictures, including the Association of National Advertisers and the American Civil Liberties Union, predict that federal courts will throw out the new marketing restrictions. They say, for example, a 2001 Supreme Court decision struck down a Massachusetts rule that had imposed a similar ban on advertising within 1,000 feet of schools.

“Anybody looking at this in a fair way would say the effort here is not just to protect kids, which is a substantial interest of the country, but to make it virtually impossible to communicate with anybody,” Daniel L. Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers, said in an interview Monday. “We think this creates very serious problems for the First Amendment.”

His group represents 340 companies spending more than $100 billion a year on marketing and ads.

But supporters of the law say studies conducted since 2001 provide evidence that young people respond to cigarette marketing even when it is aimed at adults, showing that new restrictions are needed to curb illegal, as well as highly addictive and harmful, under-age smoking.

“The bill has been carefully drafted, and I am confident that the provisions will be upheld,” Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and prime sponsor in the House of the legislation, said in a statement Monday.

Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, an advocacy group that was a leader in pushing for the law, said: “Frankly, the tobacco industry and the advertising industry have never heard of an advertising restriction that they thought was constitutional. In this case, great care was taken to permit black-and-white text advertising that permits them to communicate whatever truthful information they have.”

President Obama announced last week that he would sign the legislation. A signing ceremony has not yet been scheduled, a White House spokesman said Monday. The ad restrictions would go into effect about a year after the legislation becomes law.

Commercial free speech is not an absolute right, legal experts say. There are clear limits, for instance, on false advertising and on promotion of illegal activity. The issue grows more complicated if the advertising is both truthful and concerns a legal activity, like smoking by adults.

The Supreme Court in 1980 said such speech can be restricted only if it would directly advance a “substantial government interest” and the regulation was “narrowly tailored” to fit the interest. In the case of the new tobacco law, Congress specifically defined the government interest as a reduction in youth smoking.

But the tobacco industry denies that any of its advertising is aimed at young people.

The new restrictions, based on regulations the Food and Drug Administration tried to issue in 1996, would be broad and deep. There is the 1,000-foot ad-free radius around schools. The black-and-white ad strictures apply to stores and to print ads except in publications with an adult readership of 85 percent or more.

Tobacco companies would also be prohibited from sponsoring sporting or cultural events or giving away T-shirts or caps. Any form of audio advertising would be limited to words without music. (Radio and television ads of tobacco products have been banned since 1971.)

The A.C.L.U. wrote a letter to senators on June 1 arguing that the legislation’s limits on commercial speech were broader than needed to accomplish the goal of reducing under-age smoking. The group suggested stronger enforcement of false-advertising laws and continuing efforts to warn the public, including young people, of the harms of tobacco products.

“The answer here is to provide countervailing messages,” Michael Macleod-Ball, chief legislative and policy counsel for the A.C.L.U. in Washington, said Monday. “Discourage smoking, rather than restricting this form of speech that has not been shown to have a sufficiently close nexus with youth smoking.”

As for the tobacco companies, it was unclear which would initiate a lawsuit. “We are examining all of our options at this point,” said Michael W. Robinson, spokesman for Lorillard Tobacco, which brought the Massachusetts suit. “Stay tuned.”

R.J. Reynolds has not decided on legal challenges, spokeswoman Maura Payne said.

Altria Group, which owns Phillip Morris, the nation’s largest cigarette company, and was the only major tobacco company to endorse the legislation, said in a statement last week that it believed some of the marketing restrictions were illegal.

David Sylvia, an Altria spokesman, said Monday in an e-mail message, “Given that the bill has not yet been signed, and given that the legislation would require regulation writing on this issue, it is too early for us to be commenting on the constitutionality of the advertising related regulations.”

In the 2001 case, the Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts ban on tobacco ads, including outdoor billboards and signs that could be seen within 1,000 feet of any public playground and elementary or secondary school. That ban, which would have eliminated tobacco advertising in about 89 percent of Boston, is virtually identical to one standard in the new federal law.

The Supreme Court found it to be an unconstitutional limit of the First Amendment right to free speech in part because it was simply too broad. The effect “will vary based on whether a locale is rural, suburban, or urban,” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote for the majority. “The uniformly broad sweep of the geographical limitation demonstrates a lack of tailoring.”

Kathleen Dachille, a University of Maryland law professor and director of the Legal Resource Center for Tobacco Regulation, Litigation and Advocacy, said the Massachusetts case turned on a lack of evidence linking youth smoking, which is illegal, to tobacco marketing ostensibly aimed at adults. She said the link has been reinforced in recent years by reports of the Institute of Medicine, the National Cancer Institute, a federal appeals court ruling on a tobacco-company fraud case, and at least a dozen peer-reviewed studies.

A May 28 report by the Congressional Research Service, a branch of the Library of Congress, noted the difficulty of making advertising restrictions that are broad enough to be effective, yet narrow enough to be related to the government’s stated interest.

INTERPRETING DATA TO MEET A PREDETERMINED CONCLUSION

One of my hobbies in life is to spot examples of fallacious reasoning used in other areas which are the same as the lunacy used by police, prosecutors, doctors, nurses, and social workers to prosecute some of my innocent clients.  I don't claim that all have been factually innocent, but I can point to a few whose chestnuts I had to pull from the fire.

It's one thing when I say that something is fallacious, and another when an expert in his field says the same thing.

In the example below, an item from  Snopes.com, the web site devoted to debunking the sort of fairy tales that sometimes pass for folk wisdom, U.S. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, in stepping down the ladder from the moon lander blew his prepared line, which was supposed to read: 

"That's one small step a for man; one giant leap for mankind."

What he in fact said, instead, was:

"That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind."

He left out one little word, "a," alas.

The idea, I suppose, was that he was admittedly only one small man, but his act of stepping onto the moon as the representative of a huge government project supported by the whole nation was a big step for the gummint, and by extension, all humankind, if you want to believe the propaganda put out by NASA, which of course I really do.  President John F. Kenned had proclaimed this big project to inspire the whole country in which he said that we were going to the moon by the end of the decade.  By 1969 Armstrong was doing his, and our, moonwalk.

What Aldrin said, in 1969, as he tripped off the ladder, was "One small step for man, one large step for man."

Unfortunately, Armstrong's statement, without the "a" didn't make a lot of sense.

But everyone in the world with ears heard exactly what he'd said and it was too late to change.

That didn't stop NASA from trying, however.

NASA tried to repair the blown line, by claiming that static in the transmission obscured the in fact spoken word.. NASA was lying, not that a representative of the U.S. government would ever lie, of course,..would it?

No, not us. 

We're the good guys, remember.

Torture and other bad things belongs to the other guys.

One of the efforts made to clean up the line supposedly involved a NASA audio technician playing the recording really slowly and then claiming that Armstrong really said the word so fast that most people couldn't hear it. 

Yeah, right, NASA's biggest line ever and the actor blew it, live from the moon, no less. 

NASA had green cheese on its face and was trying to clean up the record, pretend it had never been said, the line without the "a."

The story, below, has the tagline I liked in the final paragraph:

In September 2006, Peter Ford of Control Bionics announced he had analyzed the historic Apollo 11 recordings and claimed to have found a "signature for the missing 'a," (supposedly spoken by Armstrong "10 times too quickly to be heard") but the results have not been validated by other audio analysts and have been criticized as simply interpreting ambiguous data to match a predetermined conclusion.

"...simply interpreting ambiguous data to match a predetermined conclusion."

I've represented innocent people who had been jailed for a long time before I could spring them, victimized by exactly this error in reasoning. 

Cops and Child Protective Service, thinking they're protecting children by removing abusive parents from them, listen to what one parent has planted in the mind of their child to eliminate the other parent, my client.  One parent goes down, the other goes up.  Cute.

How does it happen?

CPS workers have beliefs.  They believe their own propaganda, for one.  "Always believe children who report this," proclaimed the brochure of San Francisco General Hospital's CASARC unit (Child and Adolescent Sexual Assault Resource Center).  "Children NEVER lie about this problem." 

Right.  And children have a monopoly on the truth at General Hospital.  At Juvenile Court, by contrast, minors enjoy no monopoly on credibility.  I wonder when the change sets in, with either the children or the adult listeners.

"We're the child advocates," CPS workers claim.  Right, and the rest of us are unthinking idiots who hate children.

So when a mother, typically, brings a child into the unit, the CPS place, CASARC, the juvenile detail of the police department, the ground is fertile and well plowed to receive the seeds of a thought, a very alarming thought, the notion that this child was molested by someone. 

This is the preconceived idea that circumstances are massaged, twisted, pushed and pulled to fit.

As I was growing up during the Cold War, all ideas had to fit the overarching paradigm of East versus West, Communist (bad) vs. Capitalist (good).  The worst thing anyone could say about a person or an idea was that it was Red, Pink, Communist, Socialist, Marxist, Russian, Soviet, Stalinist, etc.

Health care?  Socialist if not Communist.

Racial integration?  Movement led by communist stooges.  Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance.

Labor unions?  Communist.

The Mafia?  Not communist.

Civil rights?  See Racial integration.

We fit the circumstances to meet the myth. 

This is why myths are powerful, not because they're necessarily false, for they seem quite true to the people living under them. 

What golfer hasn't an "Oh, God, please, not in the trees," prayer as though God, Zeus, or Ralph were personally overseeing his game. 

Ralph is the one I made up, not wanting to resurrect Zeus, or God forbid, God Himself who presumably has better things to do with His time than to worry about why I'm hitting so poorly today, much less do something about it. 

Give me a decent swing, please, not just a decent shot one time.

Can you think of an accusation that turned out false where the cause was reading circumstances according to a preconceived idea?

The war in Iraq, perhaps?  Cheney and Bush had the notion that since Saddam was a bad guy with a history of using chemical and biological weapons on Iran, and did have a nuclear weapons program, that he must have weapons of mass destruction, despite monitoring by the U.N., which we didn't trust.

So we invaded Iraq looking for WMD after 9-11 gave us the fig-leaf of legitimacy.  Only we found no WMD.  Some of us can still hardly believe that there were no WMD. 

Could there possibly be an explanation for the fact that Saddam had actually used chemical and biological weapons against enemies and had a demonstrated interest in acquiring nuclear capability as well as weapons, yet there were no weapons ever found?

Yes, there was.

Saddam had enemies. 

He wanted to keep them afraid of him.

So, while complying with the demands of the West and the U.N. that he lose the WMD, he resisted inspection and played hide the ball when it came to inspections.  He acted as though he had some terrible secret to hide.

Which he did.

From his enemies.

To the effect that he had no more WMD.

Previously he did, but now he didn't.

So we invaded.

He fooled his original enemies, who refrained from attacking, because they were afraid of his non-existent WMD.

So he won, there.

And he fooled us, who did not refrain from attacking, because we were also afraid of his WMD and thought we could beat him to the punch.

Saddam lost here, when the invasion toppled him, his statue, and his regime.  He was arrested in a hole underground, a bunker, and executed after a trial by his own people, with our encouragement.

Saddam may have been a bad guy, but Bush wasn't exactly what you'd call a smart guy.  He came out so strongly for the war that all who had ears could see that war was coming no matter what.  The intelligence reporting was either fudged, or read in a slanted way to fit the paradigm that we were going to war because Saddam had WMD, or both.

There are people to this day who believe that Iraq was behind 9-11 when it had nothing to do with it.

Geographers say that geography is fate.

Thought is fate.

How you think, or don't think, determines who lives and who dies.

It's important to think about thinking.

It's important to get it right.

It's also important to swing the club properly, or you'll ruin the shot.

Same with thinking straight, or the resulting action will have killer results.

The Snopes article is below:

astronaut Neil Armstrong flubbed his historic 'one small step' remark as he became the first man to set foot on the surface of the moon.

Origins:   English has no handy term for what the French call it esprit de l'escalier, and the Germans know as treppenwitz: the "wit of the staircase," those clever remarks or cutting rejoinders that only come to mind once it's too late for us to deliver them — literally, as we're headed down the stairs and out of the house. English also lacks an expression to describe the antithesis of treppenwitz, those occasions when one has a perfect remark carefully prepared in advance but fails to deliver it properly. If English did have such an expression, we could apply it to the words of the first man on the moon, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, who had the misfortune of misspeaking his scripted line during one of the most widely-viewed live broadcasts in television history.

What Neil Armstrong meant to say as he descended from the ladder of Apollo 11's Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) and stepped onto the lunar surface, thus becoming the first person ever to set foot on the moon, was "That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind." Unfortunately, however, Armstrong flubbed his line in the excitement of the moment, omitting one

small word ("a") and delivering the line as "That's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind." The missing article made a world of difference in literal meaning, though — instead of a statement linking the small action of one man with a monumental achievement for (and by) all of humanity, Armstrong instead uttered a somewhat contradictory phrase that equated a small step by the human race with a momentous achievement by humankind ("man" and "mankind" having the same approximate meaning in English). Nonetheless, since the quote as actually spoken by Armstrong still sounded good, and most everyone understood the meaning he intended to convey, his words were widely repeated that day and have since joined the pantheon of the most well-known quotes in the English language. After the Apollo 11 astronauts returned to Earth, Armstrong corrected his mistake (stating that he had been "misquoted"), and NASA obligingly provided the cover story that "static" had obscured the missing word: Neil A. Armstrong, the Apollo 11 commander, had said that one small word was omitted in the official version of the historic utterance he made he stepped on the moon 11 days ago. When Mr. Armstrong saw the quotation — "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" — in the mission transcript after his return to earth, he said he was misquoted, it was reported yesterday. There should have been the article "a" before "man," the astronaut said. The "a" apparently went unheard and unrecorded in the transmission because of static, a spokesman for the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston said today in a telephone interview. Whatever the reason, inserting the omitted article makes a slight but significant change in the meaning of Mr. Armstrong's words, which should read: "That's one small step for a man, one giant step (sic) for ma[n]kind."1 Press reporters, however, were more skeptical about what Armstrong had actually said: On July 20, 1969, Joel Shurkin was chief of the Reuters news agency's team at Mission Control in Houston, Tex. "When Armstrong landed, we all listened to the raw air-to-ground and when he said the part about the 'small step' it was fuzzy — this was the unenhanced version, live — and it was not clear if he said 'a man' or 'man,' " he says, sharing his experience publicly for the first time. Nor were the words perfectly clear for the more than a billion people listening and watching the televised broadcast as the lunar module Eagle touched down, and Mr. Armstrong and fellow astronaut Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin stepped out into what Mr. Aldrin described as "magnificent desolation." Months after the lunar landing, in the book First on the Moon, which was billed as an "exclusive and official account . . . as seen by the men who experienced it," Mr. Armstrong recalls his famous words as: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." He notes that Mission Control missed the "a" in the first phrase, writing that "tape recorders are fallible." However, for the dozens of journalists in Houston, the uncertainty left them feeling their own version of space sickness. "It was one of the most important quotes in history and it wouldn't do to get it wrong and we didn't have time to pursue the matter," Mr. Shurkin wrote in a posting to a list-serv of the U.S. National Association of Science Writers. "Worse, it wouldn't do to have me say one thing, and the Associated Press another, or to be contradicted by The New York Times." The journalists from the major wire services and newspapers gave up watching the live broadcast and huddled in the press room debating what to do. They decided that they would agree on what they heard and all file the same quote. "We concluded that he did not say 'a man' and that's the way it went out to the world," says Mr. Shurkin, now a writer in Baltimore.2 The New York Times clearly didn't buy the "static" explanation (hence the "Whatever the reason . . ." introductory phrase in the final sentence of their article), and little detective work is necessary to reveal it as a face-saving fabrication: NASA's own recording of Armstrong's transmission from the lunar surface reveals that his words are clearly audible over the background static; that the word "man" follows immediately on the heels of "for," with no gap between them into which Armstrong could conceivably have inserted the word "a"; and that Armstrong pauses noticeably after the word "man," as he realizes he's flubbed his line and hesitates momentarily before completing it. In the years since that historic Apollo 11 mission, astronaut Armstrong has apparently reconciled himself to admitting that he did indeed misspeak his key line: Later, a representative for the Grumman company (it had built the Eagle, essentially a high-tech aluminum can) presented Mr. Armstrong with a silver plaque bearing his 11-word — now immortalized — sentence, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Mr. Armstrong insisted that they had left out an "a". Sure, he had been awake for 24 hours before his epoch-marking pronouncement, battling lunar stage fright in front of the world's largest audience ever, and was mulling over the fact that while putting on his bulky space suit he had broken the circuit breaker for the switch to start the Eagle's engine for ascent. But he knew what he said. "There must be an 'a', " Mr. Armstrong says of the event in the 1986 book Chariots for Apollo. "I rehearsed it that way. I meant it that way. And I'm sure I said it that way." Then the Grumman representative, Tommy Attridge, put on a commemorative 45-rpm recording of the flight. No matter what speed they played it at, there was no "a". According to the authors, Mr. Armstrong sighed, "Damn, I really did it. I blew the first words on the moon, didn't I?"2 Happily for Neil Armstrong, the tremendous scientific and cultural importance of his achievement dwarfed his minor verbal slip-up, and despite his failure to deliver his line as planned, it remains one of the world's most famous sentences. Update:   In September 2006, Peter Ford of Control Bionics announced he had analyzed the historic Apollo 11 recordings and claimed to have found a "signature for the missing 'a," (supposedly spoken by Armstrong "10 times too quickly to be heard") but the results have not been validated by other audio analysts and have been criticized as simply interpreting ambiguous data to match a predetermined conclusion. Additional information:       Apollo 11 transcript       Moon landing video clip Last updated:   10 October 2006 The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/quotes/onesmall.asp Urban Legends Reference Pages © 1995-2009 by Barbara and David P. Mikkelson. This material may not be reproduced without permission. snopes and the snopes.com logo are registered service marks of snopes.com.     Sources:     2.   Berkowitz, Jacob.   "Moon Landing: One Small Slipup for (a) Man."     [Toronto] Globe and Mail.   17 July 2004   (p. F9).     Boller Jr., Paul F. and John George.   They Never Said It.     New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.   ISBN 0-19-506469-0   (pp. 4-5).     Carreau, Mark.   "One Small Step for Clarity."     Houston Chronicle.   3 October 2006.     Keyes, Ralph.   Nice Guys Finish Seventh.     New York: HarperCollins, 1992.   ISBN 0-06-270020-0   (pp. 15-16).     Poundstone, William.   Big Secrets.     New York: Quill, 1983.   ISBN 0-688-04830-7   (pp. 183-184).     1.   The New York Times.   "Armstrong Adds an 'A' to Historical Quotation."     31 July 1969   (p. 20). June 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) June 13, 2009 CONLAW MONOPOLY BOARD Looks as though U.C. Berkeley (Boalt Hall) law professor John Yoo didn't quite realize the board he was playing on when he participated in a White House group plotting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Disguised as an attorney for the president, it was reported that he authored a memo condoning the harsh treatment of detainees in the global war on terror (GWOT, some call it).  Yoo denied that harsh treatment constituted clearly illegal torture by defining it narrowly to include only acts that caused organ failure, a breakdown in bodily function, or death.  That would let out waterboarding and other deprivations such being held for long periods in isolation, in dark, or in harsh light, sleep deprivation, heat and cold treatments without proper attire, etc.  In short mistreatment that was intended to break down a prisoner's mind, will, resistance, or whatever, in the hope of making him betray his secrets and fellows was not torture under the reasoning of White House counsel, since these didn't necessarily cause death or impairment of bodily functions. My guess is that at the time, Mr. Yoo was young and naive, and thrilled to be the president's man, working with the big boys, like VP Dick Cheney and his coterie of war hawks.  Give the president the cover he needs and good things may result. One of the suspected terrorists who was detained and who alleges mistreatment constituting torture has now sued Yoo.  A federal judge upheld the right to sue against defenses of privilege and immunity asserted by Yoo.  The judge is a George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench.  You're responsible for your acts, he says. To me, it appears that Yoo may have failed to realize that the board he played on has rules, just as chess, checkers and monopoly do. The rule book in ours consists of a little booklet called the Constitution, followed by treaty and statute law enacted in conformity therewith, along with interpretations by the Supreme Court.  When caught up in life activities of importance, it may be easy to lose sight of the fact that you're operating on a board defined by certain rules and other constraints, such as the existence of other nations as well as of law. It would perhaps be useful to design a graphic board game, on cardboard or computer, indicating the geography of America and overlain with the rules that apply.  We could have fun with this.  By the time one got done, one would've described the long course in Conlaw.  The rules would be summarized in the form of the Table of Contents of your favorite Conlaw casebook.  They would, nevertheless, be the Rules of the Game for White House counsel and all others, from government official to the lowliest-seeming individual, a person held as an alleged terrorist in the Global War on Terror, a person allowed to sue the president's lawyer for money damages for plotting torture.  This will teach you something about the role of law in America. The article is below: Judge: Ex-Bush lawyer can be sued over torture Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, June 13, 2009 A prisoner who says he was tortured while being held for nearly four years as a suspected terrorist can sue former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that justified his alleged treatment, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday. U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White's decision marks the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially responsible for the abuse of detainees. "Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct," White said in refusing to dismiss Jose Padilla's lawsuit against Yoo. If Padilla, now serving a 17-year prison sentence on terrorism charges, can prove his allegations, he can show that Yoo "set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla's constitutional rights," White said. White, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, noted that Padilla's lawsuit accuses Yoo of helping to design administration policy on detention and torture, and then crafting legal opinions to justify it - stepping outside the usual role of a lawyer. Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, was an attorney in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003 and wrote a series of memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers. The best-known memo, written to then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in 2002, said rough treatment of captives amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." The memo also said the president may have the constitutional power to authorize torture of enemy combatants. 'Any means necessary' A 2001 Yoo memo, made public by the Obama administration, said U.S. military forces could use "any means necessary" to seize and hold terror suspects in the United States. Yoo could not be reached at his Berkeley office Friday. A spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing him and has argued for dismissal of the suit, was unavailable for comment. Padilla's lawyers issued a statement saying they are "pleased that our client will get his day in court and the right to challenge the unconstitutional conduct to which he was subjected." Unique ruling John Eastman, law school dean at Chapman University in Orange County, where Yoo taught for the past year, said the ruling is unique - the first to hold any administration official potentially liable for alleged mistreatment of terrorist suspects. Eastman predicted that the Justice Department will file an immediate appeal, going to the Supreme Court if necessary. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and accused by the Bush administration of plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb." Declared an enemy combatant, Padilla was held in a Navy brig for three years and eight months and was denied all contact with the outside world for the first half of that period, his suit said. He was then taken out of the brig and charged with taking part in an unrelated conspiracy to provide money and supplies to Islamic extremist groups. He was convicted and has appealed. His suit against Yoo covers his time in the brig. He says he was detained illegally, held for lengthy periods in darkness and blinding light, subjected to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation, confined in painful stress positions, and threatened with death to himself, harm to his family and transfer to a nation where he would be tortured. Claims of mistreatment The suit said Yoo - who has acknowledged being a member of an administration planning group known as the "war council" - personally reviewed and approved Padilla's detention in the brig and provided the legal cover for his treatment. At a hearing in March, Justice Department lawyer Mary Mason told White that courts had no power to scrutinize high-level government decision-making, especially in wartime. But White said Friday that Padilla had a right to sue "the alleged architect of the government policy" on enemy combatants. He said an examination of Yoo's publicly disclosed writings would not damage national security, and an inquiry into "allegations of unconstitutional treatment of an American citizen on American soil" would not affect foreign relations. E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/13/MND5186KL8.DTL This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle © 2009 Hearst Communications Inc. June 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) Next » June 2009 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30         U.S. CONSTITUTION INDEX TO CONSTITUTION, AMENDMENTS CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FIRST AMENDMENT EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) FA POST-9-11 RLUIPA FA ON-LINE LEADING CASES DOCUMENT LINKS INTERNET LAW - TOM W. 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Looks as though U.C. Berkeley (Boalt Hall) law professor John Yoo didn't quite realize the board he was playing on when he participated in a White House group plotting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Disguised as an attorney for the president, it was reported that he authored a memo condoning the harsh treatment of detainees in the global war on terror (GWOT, some call it). 

Yoo denied that harsh treatment constituted clearly illegal torture by defining it narrowly to include only acts that caused organ failure, a breakdown in bodily function, or death. 

That would let out waterboarding and other deprivations such being held for long periods in isolation, in dark, or in harsh light, sleep deprivation, heat and cold treatments without proper attire, etc.  In short mistreatment that was intended to break down a prisoner's mind, will, resistance, or whatever, in the hope of making him betray his secrets and fellows was not torture under the reasoning of White House counsel, since these didn't necessarily cause death or impairment of bodily functions.

My guess is that at the time, Mr. Yoo was young and naive, and thrilled to be the president's man, working with the big boys, like VP Dick Cheney and his coterie of war hawks.  Give the president the cover he needs and good things may result.

One of the suspected terrorists who was detained and who alleges mistreatment constituting torture has now sued Yoo.  A federal judge upheld the right to sue against defenses of privilege and immunity asserted by Yoo.  The judge is a George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench.  You're responsible for your acts, he says.

To me, it appears that Yoo may have failed to realize that the board he played on has rules, just as chess, checkers and monopoly do.

The rule book in ours consists of a little booklet called the Constitution, followed by treaty and statute law enacted in conformity therewith, along with interpretations by the Supreme Court.  When caught up in life activities of importance, it may be easy to lose sight of the fact that you're operating on a board defined by certain rules and other constraints, such as the existence of other nations as well as of law.

It would perhaps be useful to design a graphic board game, on cardboard or computer, indicating the geography of America and overlain with the rules that apply.  We could have fun with this.  By the time one got done, one would've described the long course in Conlaw. 

The rules would be summarized in the form of the Table of Contents of your favorite Conlaw casebook. 

They would, nevertheless, be the Rules of the Game for White House counsel and all others, from government official to the lowliest-seeming individual, a person held as an alleged terrorist in the Global War on Terror, a person allowed to sue the president's lawyer for money damages for plotting torture. 

This will teach you something about the role of law in America.

The article is below:

Judge: Ex-Bush lawyer can be sued over torture

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, June 13, 2009

A prisoner who says he was tortured while being held for nearly four years as a suspected terrorist can sue former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that justified his alleged treatment, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White's decision marks the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially responsible for the abuse of detainees.

"Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct," White said in refusing to dismiss Jose Padilla's lawsuit against Yoo.

If Padilla, now serving a 17-year prison sentence on terrorism charges, can prove his allegations, he can show that Yoo "set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla's constitutional rights," White said.

White, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, noted that Padilla's lawsuit accuses Yoo of helping to design administration policy on detention and torture, and then crafting legal opinions to justify it - stepping outside the usual role of a lawyer.

Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, was an attorney in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003 and wrote a series of memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers.

The best-known memo, written to then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in 2002, said rough treatment of captives amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." The memo also said the president may have the constitutional power to authorize torture of enemy combatants.

'Any means necessary'

A 2001 Yoo memo, made public by the Obama administration, said U.S. military forces could use "any means necessary" to seize and hold terror suspects in the United States.

Yoo could not be reached at his Berkeley office Friday. A spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing him and has argued for dismissal of the suit, was unavailable for comment.

Padilla's lawyers issued a statement saying they are "pleased that our client will get his day in court and the right to challenge the unconstitutional conduct to which he was subjected."

Unique ruling

John Eastman, law school dean at Chapman University in Orange County, where Yoo taught for the past year, said the ruling is unique - the first to hold any administration official potentially liable for alleged mistreatment of terrorist suspects.

Eastman predicted that the Justice Department will file an immediate appeal, going to the Supreme Court if necessary. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and accused by the Bush administration of plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb."

Declared an enemy combatant, Padilla was held in a Navy brig for three years and eight months and was denied all contact with the outside world for the first half of that period, his suit said. He was then taken out of the brig and charged with taking part in an unrelated conspiracy to provide money and supplies to Islamic extremist groups. He was convicted and has appealed.

His suit against Yoo covers his time in the brig. He says he was detained illegally, held for lengthy periods in darkness and blinding light, subjected to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation, confined in painful stress positions, and threatened with death to himself, harm to his family and transfer to a nation where he would be tortured.

Claims of mistreatment

The suit said Yoo - who has acknowledged being a member of an administration planning group known as the "war council" - personally reviewed and approved Padilla's detention in the brig and provided the legal cover for his treatment.

At a hearing in March, Justice Department lawyer Mary Mason told White that courts had no power to scrutinize high-level government decision-making, especially in wartime.

But White said Friday that Padilla had a right to sue "the alleged architect of the government policy" on enemy combatants. He said an examination of Yoo's publicly disclosed writings would not damage national security, and an inquiry into "allegations of unconstitutional treatment of an American citizen on American soil" would not affect foreign relations.

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/13/MND5186KL8.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

© 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.

CONLAW MONOPOLY BOARD

Looks as though U.C. Berkeley (Boalt Hall) law professor John Yoo didn't quite realize the board he was playing on when he participated in a White House group plotting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Disguised as an attorney for the president, it was reported that he authored a memo condoning the harsh treatment of detainees in the global war on terror (GWOT, some call it). 

Yoo denied that harsh treatment constituted clearly illegal torture by defining it narrowly to include only acts that caused organ failure, a breakdown in bodily function, or death. 

That would let out waterboarding and other deprivations such being held for long periods in isolation, in dark, or in harsh light, sleep deprivation, heat and cold treatments without proper attire, etc.  In short mistreatment that was intended to break down a prisoner's mind, will, resistance, or whatever, in the hope of making him betray his secrets and fellows was not torture under the reasoning of White House counsel, since these didn't necessarily cause death or impairment of bodily functions.

My guess is that at the time, Mr. Yoo was young and naive, and thrilled to be the president's man, working with the big boys, like VP Dick Cheney and his coterie of war hawks.  Give the president the cover he needs and good things may result.

One of the suspected terrorists who was detained and who alleges mistreatment constituting torture has now sued Yoo.  A federal judge upheld the right to sue against defenses of privilege and immunity asserted by Yoo.  The judge is a George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench.  You're responsible for your acts, he says.

To me, it appears that Yoo may have failed to realize that the board he played on has rules, just as chess, checkers and monopoly do.

The rule book in ours consists of a little booklet called the Constitution, followed by treaty and statute law enacted in conformity therewith, along with interpretations by the Supreme Court.  When caught up in life activities of importance, it may be easy to lose sight of the fact that you're operating on a board defined by certain rules and other constraints, such as the existence of other nations as well as of law.

It would perhaps be useful to design a graphic board game, on cardboard or computer, indicating the geography of America and overlain with the rules that apply.  We could have fun with this.  By the time one got done, one would've described the long course in Conlaw. 

The rules would be summarized in the form of the Table of Contents of your favorite Conlaw casebook. 

They would, nevertheless, be the Rules of the Game for White House counsel and all others, from government official to the lowliest-seeming individual, a person held as an alleged terrorist in the Global War on Terror, a person allowed to sue the president's lawyer for money damages for plotting torture. 

This will teach you something about the role of law in America.

The article is below:

Judge: Ex-Bush lawyer can be sued over torture

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, June 13, 2009

A prisoner who says he was tortured while being held for nearly four years as a suspected terrorist can sue former Bush administration lawyer John Yoo for coming up with the legal theories that justified his alleged treatment, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White's decision marks the first time a government lawyer has been held potentially responsible for the abuse of detainees.

"Like any other government official, government lawyers are responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their conduct," White said in refusing to dismiss Jose Padilla's lawsuit against Yoo.

If Padilla, now serving a 17-year prison sentence on terrorism charges, can prove his allegations, he can show that Yoo "set in motion a series of events that resulted in the deprivation of Padilla's constitutional rights," White said.

White, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, noted that Padilla's lawsuit accuses Yoo of helping to design administration policy on detention and torture, and then crafting legal opinions to justify it - stepping outside the usual role of a lawyer.

Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, was an attorney in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003 and wrote a series of memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers.

The best-known memo, written to then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in 2002, said rough treatment of captives amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." The memo also said the president may have the constitutional power to authorize torture of enemy combatants.

'Any means necessary'

A 2001 Yoo memo, made public by the Obama administration, said U.S. military forces could use "any means necessary" to seize and hold terror suspects in the United States.

Yoo could not be reached at his Berkeley office Friday. A spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing him and has argued for dismissal of the suit, was unavailable for comment.

Padilla's lawyers issued a statement saying they are "pleased that our client will get his day in court and the right to challenge the unconstitutional conduct to which he was subjected."

Unique ruling

John Eastman, law school dean at Chapman University in Orange County, where Yoo taught for the past year, said the ruling is unique - the first to hold any administration official potentially liable for alleged mistreatment of terrorist suspects.

Eastman predicted that the Justice Department will file an immediate appeal, going to the Supreme Court if necessary. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was arrested in Chicago in 2002 and accused by the Bush administration of plotting with al Qaeda to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb."

Declared an enemy combatant, Padilla was held in a Navy brig for three years and eight months and was denied all contact with the outside world for the first half of that period, his suit said. He was then taken out of the brig and charged with taking part in an unrelated conspiracy to provide money and supplies to Islamic extremist groups. He was convicted and has appealed.

His suit against Yoo covers his time in the brig. He says he was detained illegally, held for lengthy periods in darkness and blinding light, subjected to temperature extremes and sleep deprivation, confined in painful stress positions, and threatened with death to himself, harm to his family and transfer to a nation where he would be tortured.

Claims of mistreatment

The suit said Yoo - who has acknowledged being a member of an administration planning group known as the "war council" - personally reviewed and approved Padilla's detention in the brig and provided the legal cover for his treatment.

At a hearing in March, Justice Department lawyer Mary Mason told White that courts had no power to scrutinize high-level government decision-making, especially in wartime.

But White said Friday that Padilla had a right to sue "the alleged architect of the government policy" on enemy combatants. He said an examination of Yoo's publicly disclosed writings would not damage national security, and an inquiry into "allegations of unconstitutional treatment of an American citizen on American soil" would not affect foreign relations.

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/13/MND5186KL8.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

© 2009 Hearst Communications Inc.