From Salon: (free with a daypass)

The plastic bag is an icon of convenience culture, by some estimates the single most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, numbering in the trillions. They're made from petroleum or natural gas with all the attendant environmental impacts of harvesting fossil fuels. One recent study found that the inks and colorants used on some bags contain lead, a toxin. Every year, Americans throw away some 100 billion plastic bags after they've been used to transport a prescription home from the drugstore or a quart of milk from the grocery store. It's equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.

Only 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled worldwide -- about 2 percent in the U.S. -- and the rest, when discarded, can persist for centuries. They can spend eternity in landfills, but that's not always the case. "They're so aerodynamic that even when they're properly disposed of in a trash can they can still blow away and become litter," says Mark Murray, executive director of Californians Against Waste. It's as litter that plastic bags have the most baleful effect. And we're not talking about your everyday eyesore.

Once aloft, stray bags cartwheel down city streets, alight in trees, billow from fences like flags, clog storm drains, wash into rivers and bays and even end up in the ocean, washed out to sea. Bits of plastic bags have been found in the nests of albatrosses in the remote Midway Islands. Floating bags can look all too much like tasty jellyfish to hungry marine critters. According to the Blue Ocean Society for Marine Conservation, more than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic. The conservation group estimates that 50 percent of all marine litter is some form of plastic. There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

The New Yorker's Jane Mayer has a fascinating article on the CIA's "black" prisons, focusing on the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who confessed to beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002 and involvement in at least 30 other terrorist plots.

Or did he? How reliable is the information he provided under what appears to be the conditions of torture? An excerpt:

A complete picture of Mohammed’s time in secret detention remains elusive. But a partial narrative has emerged through interviews with European and American sources in intelligence, government, and legal circles, as well as with former detainees who have been released from C.I.A. custody. People familiar with Mohammed’s allegations about his interrogation, and interrogations of other high-value detainees, describe the accounts as remarkably consistent.

Soon after Mohammed’s arrest, sources say, his American captors told him, “We’re not going to kill you. But we’re going to take you to the very brink of your death and back.”

Here's what Mayer had to say to Democracy Now!

One of the findings that, in this story, that really stunned me was that a top CIA official, who I can’t name, but somebody who really knows a lot about this program, said to me that 90% of what they got from every kind of technique they used was bogus. So 10% of what they got was accurate. And they are arguing that that 10% certainly made it worthwhile, and they think it saved people's lives.

But I think the question, finally, that I have and that I think that Philip Zelikow asks in this story, who was the legal counselor to Condi Rice, I think is the question that the country should be asking maybe, is not “Do these techniques work?” but “Are these the only techniques that work?” And the answer, if you talk to the military and you talk to the FBI, is that there are many other ways to get more reliable information. So we may not need to go to these lengths. And I think it's certainly something that I’d like to see some public debate on.