Under pressure from an impending Supreme Court case -- more than four years after 9/11 and three and a half years after his arrest, -- Jose Padilla, American citizen, (BBC profile,) has been charged with crimes by the Federal government. It’s not the ‘dirty bomb’ plot he was arrested for, either. Instead, “the Justice Department’s 31-page indictment charges Padilla with conspiracy to murder, kidnap and harm people overseas and with supporting terrorists.“ Evidence strongly suggests the Bush administration would have preferred to hold him without a trial, evidence or proof for the rest of his life, but were likely concerned that a ruling in the upcoming Supreme Court case could redefine the parameters of what constitutes a Constitutional or human rights violation.

Why is this case so important? Our government arrested and detained an American citizen without criminal charges and denied him access to lawyers until the Supreme Court ruled on his case. These are rights granted every American citizen by our Constitution. His indictment offers no evidence that he ever engaged in terrorist activity and no evidence of a dirty bomb plot or any other plot to engage in terrorism in America, the charges for which he was originally arrested. (More here, from the CATO institute.)

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Jon Stewart hit back at Bill O’Reilly last night, for using a year-old Daily Show clip to promote his war against the war against Christmas. A high-quality download of last night’s clip is available for download here :-)

Victory is Life! It Takes a Potemkin Village and the Bush victory plan that wasn’t.

An interview with Richard Dawkins. (from goddes and others)

Editorial: Pat Robertson is funding the legal battle for three pharmacists who are fighting to refuse to provide a prescribed “morning-after” pill to patients or refer them to a pharmacy that will fill the prescription.

” If it feels wrong for you to sell something from a counter - whether it’s a morning after pill or “The National Review” - it’s admirable when people want to be flexible. But when you want to make it impossible for someone to buy those things from anyone, it’s not a matter of conscience but of control.”

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The propaganda war: “Beware the Caliphate” (IHT editorial)

The meaning of (the war over) Christmas

Doonesbury: “Skippy McScapegoat and 9/11”

rfmcdpei: How to build a history

Taken from iocaste212, who got it from therblig:
From here. This is SciAm's April 2005 Letter from the Editor:

Okay, We Give Up

There’s no easy way to admit this. For years, helpful letter writers told us to stick to science. They pointed out that science and politics don’t mix. They said we should be more balanced in our presentation of such issues as creationism, missile defense and global warming. We resisted their advice and pretended not to be stung by the accusations that the magazine should be renamed Unscientific American, or Scientific Unamerican, or even Unscientific Unamerican. But spring is in the air, and all of nature is turning over a new leaf, so there’s no better time to say: you were right, and we were wrong.

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it.

Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists. Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that’s a somewhat religious idea. But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells. That’s what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn’t get bogged down in details.

Good journalism values balance above all else. We owe it to our readers to present everybody’s ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong. In that spirit, we will end the practice of expressing our own views in this space: an editorial page is no place for opinions.

Get ready for a new Scientific American. No more discussions of how science should inform policy. If the government commits blindly to building an anti-ICBM defense system that can’t work as promised, that will waste tens of billions of taxpayers’ dollars and imperil national security, you won’t hear about it from us. If studies suggest that the administration’s antipollution measures would actually increase the dangerous particulates that people breathe during the next two decades, that’s not our concern. No more discussions of how policies affect science either— so what if the budget for the National Science Foundation is slashed? This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, and not just the science that scientists say is science. And it will start on April Fools’ Day.

Okay, We Give Up

MATT COLLINS
THE EDITORS editors@sciam.com
COPYRIGHT 2005 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, INC.

Edit: If you're reading this through a link from another site, please feel free to say hello in the comments. :) ~Jon