Israel also threatened to attack UN peacekeepers if they attempted to repair bomb-damaged bridges in southern Lebanon. UN officials contacted the Israeli army to inform them that a team of Chinese military engineers attached to the UN force in Lebanon intended to repair the bridge on the Beirut to Tyre road to enable the transport of humanitarian supplies.

According to the UN, Israeli officials said the engineers would become a target if they attempted to repair the bridge.

Nice. And these are supposed to be the good guys? (From here.)

Giant Robot Imprisons Parked Cars (via Wired via BoingBoing). That settles it; from now on, we’re only parking in open source garages.

(No word yet from Sam Waterston, sadly.)

The Feds are seeking direct control of state National Guard troops, i.e. without consent of the governors in question.

In Sweden, they’re having some caterpillar trouble.

Check it:

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such “commissions” to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, would also allow the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court’s jurisdiction. . .

Um, NO. What is it about the Constitution that these clowns hate so much?

Hackers clone RFID passports.

The New York Times is running this photo comparison on its front page today:

On a related note, Slactivist had this to say.

By now we assume everyone knew that Tony “Kitchen Confidential” Bourdain was among those trapped in Beirut when Israel started bombing. He got out, and Salon ran his account last week. It’s worth reading.

A decade ago, the GOP pushed through the War Crimes Act of 1996.

That law criminalizes violations of the Geneva Conventions governing conduct in war and threatens the death penalty if U.S.-held detainees die in custody from abusive treatment.

It seems that the current, torture-lovin’, waterboardin’, enemy-combatant-designatin’ GOP has just recently remembered this law, and as a consequence Attorney General Gonzales has been stumping with Republicans in Congress about creating some sort of loophole for those in power now, since it seems likely that we’ve been gleefully violating the Geneva Conventions for years now. It was Gonzales himself who called them “quaint,” you’ll recall.

Gonzales told the lawmakers that a shield is needed for actions taken by U.S. personnel under a 2002 presidential order, which the Supreme Court declared illegal, and under Justice Department legal opinions that have been withdrawn under fire, the source said. A spokeswoman for Gonzales, Tasia Scolinos, declined to comment on Gonzales’s remarks.

The Justice Department’s top legal adviser, Steven G. Bradbury, separately testified two weeks ago that Congress must give new “definition and certainty” to captors’ risk of prosecution for coercive interrogations that fall short of outright torture.

Language in the administration’s draft, which Bradbury helped prepare in concert with civilian officials at the Defense Department, seeks to protect U.S. personnel by ruling out detainee lawsuits to enforce Geneva protections and by incorporating language making U.S. enforcement of the War Crimes Act subject to U.S. — not foreign — understandings of what the Conventions require.

The aim, Justice Department lawyers say, is also to take advantage of U.S. legal precedents that limit sanctions to conduct that “shocks the conscience.” This phrase allows some consideration by courts of the context in which abusive treatment occurs, such as an urgent need for information, the lawyers say — even though the Geneva prohibitions are absolute.

The Supreme Court, in contrast, has repeatedly said that foreign interpretations of international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions should at least be considered by U.S. courts.

Some human rights groups and independent experts say they oppose undermining the reach of the War Crimes Act, arguing that it deters government misconduct. They say any step back from the Geneva Conventions could provoke mistreatment of captured U.S. military personnel. They also contend that Bush administration anxieties about prosecutions are overblown and should not be used to gain congressional approval for rough interrogations.

“The military has lived with” the Geneva Conventions provisions “for 50 years and applied them to every conflict, even against irregular forces. Why are we suddenly afraid now about the vagueness of its terms?” asked Tom Malinowski, director of the Washington office of Human Rights Watch.

It sounds an awful lot like Alberto wants to make “just following orders” a defense. We’re pretty sure that’s a bad idea. That dog didn’t hunt 60 years ago, and it shouldn’t now.

So, a judge in Chicago dismissed the lawsuit alleging the telco had given improper access to phone records to the Feds, on the nebulous grounds of “state secrets.” Right. Majikthise summarizes:

Here we see a two-pronged attack on the separation of powers. The president claims that he is not bound to respect the laws passed by Congress (i.e., FISA), and furthermore he is the final authority on what court cases might jeopardize national security. The president’s decision is not subject to appeal. He is not accountable to Congress or to the public for his determinations. He doesn’t have to give reasons for his decisions.

The bottom line is that the president can block any court case he wants by claiming that the case might reveal state secrets. That was a nice way to shut down the Illinois citizens who wanted to sue to stop AT&T from giving their private records to the government, or anyone who might want to use the courts to challenge Bush’s authority.

Anybody else see the problem here?

(N.B. that this isn’t the EFF lawsuit, which is proceeding.)

An awful lot. Here Mr Colbert has a bit of sport with the mainstream media; as a bonus, he gives a brief rundown of the sorts of questions he’s asked versus those asked by the morning “news” shows. Enjoy.

America’s lawyers think Bush’s signing statements are bullshit and an end-run around separation of powers, to which this President is clearly hostile.

WASHINGTON, July 23 — The American Bar Association said Sunday that President Bush was flouting the Constitution and undermining the rule of law by claiming the power to disregard selected provisions of bills that he signed.

In a comprehensive report, a bipartisan 11-member panel of the bar association said Mr. Bush had used such “signing statements” far more than his predecessors, raising constitutional objections to more than 800 provisions in more than 100 laws on the ground that they infringed on his prerogatives.

These broad assertions of presidential power amount to a “line-item veto” and improperly deprive Congress of the opportunity to override the veto, the panel said.

In signing a statutory ban on torture and other national security laws, Mr. Bush reserved the right to disregard them.

The bar association panel said the use of signing statements in this way was “contrary to the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers.” From the dawn of the Republic, it said, presidents have generally understood that, in the words of George Washington, a president “must approve all the parts of a bill, or reject it in toto.”

If the president deems a bill unconstitutional, he can veto it, the panel said, but “signing statements should not be a substitute for a presidential veto.”

“Putting innocent people on the list to make your quota.”