As it turns out, at least five Americans still believe in the Constitution:

The Supreme Court ruled today that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the Constitution to challenge their detention in U.S. civilian courts.

In its third rebuke of the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners, the court ruled 5-4 that the government is violating the rights of prisoners being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

The fascist wing — Scalia, his mini-me, and Bush’s twins — dissented.

In late 2003, Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen, was detained in Macedonia (en route to vacation) by local officials because he has the same name as some terror watchlist person. The Macedonians eventually released him (1/2004) — at which point he was snatched off the street in Macedonia by Americans, who stripped and beat him before flying him to Baghdad and then, eventually, a CIA interrogation facility in Afghanistan where he was repeatedly beaten and interrogated. By March, he was taking part in a hunger strike to protest his detention. At some point, American officials realized that perhaps they had the wrong guy, but refused to do anything about it. Finally, in late May, they flew him to Albania and released him at night on a deserted road.

al-Masri has brought suit against the US for his kidnapping and torture, only to have the suit dismissed on national security grounds. He has now gone to court in Germany to force his government to seek the extradition of the CIA agents who kidnapped him in 2004; we hope very much he succeeds, but we’re cynical enough to know he won’t. Justice isn’t something our government is particularly interested in when it’s inconvenient.

International Herald Tribute:

On a talk show last autumn, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail Delyagin offered some tart words about Vladimir Putin. When the program was televised, Delyagin was not.

His remarks were cut and he was digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily; they left his disembodied legs in one shot.)

Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from television news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.

The stop list is, as Delyagin put it, “an excellent way to stifle dissent.”

More:

And it is not just politicians. Televizor, a rock group whose name means television set, had its booking on a St. Petersburg television station canceled in April, after its members took part in an Other Russia demonstration.

When some actors cracked a few mild jokes about Putin and Medvedev at Russia’s equivalent of the Academy Awards in March, they were expunged from the telecast.

Political humor in general has been exiled from television here. One of the nation’s most popular satirists, Viktor Shenderovich, once had a show that featured puppet caricatures of various politicians, including Putin. It was canceled in Putin’s first term and Shenderovich has been all but barred from television.

Senior government officials deny the existence of a stop list, saying that people hostile to the Kremlin do not appear on television simply because their views are not newsworthy.

In Utah, there’s a move afoot to make it a crime for a teacher to answer unapproved questions in sex ed.

There are still tribes in the Amazon with no contact with the outside world.

They’re suing Chicago little leagues for using team names in common with MLB teams. Not logos; just the names; MLB is insisting they own the idea of a baseball team named, for example, the Giants, or Tigers, and that in order to use those names the little leagues must buy their uniforms from MLB’s much more expensive provider. Gee, thanks.

Fortunately, Techdirt and Stephen Colbert are on the case.

Apparently, the oldest mamallian cell line is a transmissable canine tumor spread sexually. Yup: this means it’s an immortal, cancerous STD. Yikes.

Unlike most other contagious cancers such as cervical cancer in humans, CTVT isn’t spread by a virus but (as recently proved) by cancerous cells themselves. Genetic analysis suggests the tumor originated in an individual wolf or domesticated dog, probably in east Asia, between 200 and 2,500 years ago. This long-dead canid’s much-mutated cells are still alive and being passed along during coitus (or sometimes through casual contact) centuries later, making it the longest-lived mammalian cell line known.

The Japanese police hid a bunch of dope in some random traveler’s bags and then turned loose the dogs to train them — and then lost the hash. Score!