Around Blogtopia*

Happy blogiversary to Maru and all the crankpots at WTF is it now?!?

From Crooks & Liars we find out that

Pentagon balked at pleas from officers in field for safer vehicles
Iraqi troops got MRAPs; Americans waited
[...]
The MRAP was not new to the Pentagon. The technology had been developed in South Africa and Rhodesia in the 1970s, making it older than Kincaid and most of the other troops killed by homemade bombs. The Pentagon had tested MRAPs in 2000, purchased fewer than two dozen and sent some to Iraq. They were used primarily to protect explosive ordnance disposal teams, not to transport troops or to chase Iraqi insurgents.

Even as the Pentagon balked at buying MRAPs for U.S. troops, USA TODAY found that the military pushed to buy them for a different fighting force: the Iraqi army.
[...]

So the Pentagon has known since at least 2000 about these vehicles, refused to buy them for US troops, and one version costs about as much as an 'up-armored' humvee. Tell me again how bush et al support the troops?


VIA Talking Points Memo we learn that a US court shut down a whole website with a permanent injunction. Here's Wired's article about it:

Cayman Islands Bank Gets Wikileaks Taken Offline in U.S.

Wikileaks, the whistleblower site that recently leaked documents related to prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, was taken offline last week by its U.S. host after posting documents that implicate a Cayman Islands bank in money laundering and tax evasion activities.

In a pretty extraordinary ex-parte move, the Julius Baer Bank and Trust got Dynadot, the U.S. hosting company for Wikileaks, to agree not only to take down the Wikileaks site but also to "lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar." A judge in the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on the stipulation between the two parties last week without giving Wikileaks a chance to address the issue in court.

Why would a US judge, (Jeffrey Steven White) rule for a Swiss company operating in the Caymans and order a US ISP to scrub their Domain Name Server(s) of the existence of this website?

And the judge, (Jeffrey Steven White), didn't rule that only the offending documents should be removed, he didn't say it was TRO while he resolved the litigation, he told the ISP to scrub their entire DNS as if the site had never existed.

Yeah Judge, good luck with that. Maybe next you can rule that the pee be taken out of a swimming pool.

But the scariest part is that Judge Jeffrey Steven White ordered the site to maintain records of anyone who had ever accessed the site.

You can still access the site thru their IP# and they also have mirrors worldwide.

Not to mention the 3rd party sites that have mirrored the Wikileaks site.

Here are some lowlights of the court's ruling.

The whole ruling can be viewed here (warning PDF.)

BTW, guess who appointed Judge Jeffrey S. White to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California?

Yep, that would be Bush.



SteveAudio: I agree with Happy Blogiversary to the crew at WTF is it now, great stuff!


*(y, wksctp!)



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak