From the Washington Post:

An internal watchdog office at the Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration lawyers violated professional standards by issuing legal opinions that authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, officials confirmed yesterday.

H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the Office of Professional Responsibility, wrote in a letter to Democratic lawmakers that his office is investigating the "circumstances surrounding" Justice opinions that established a legal basis for the CIA's interrogation program, including a now-infamous memo from August 2002 that narrowly defined torture and was later rescinded by the department.

By happenstance, there's a movie playing at the Royal Theatre this weekend called Taxi To The Dark Side, by Alex Gibney. It's up for best documentary feature at the Academy Awards this weekend.

Gibney's narrative thread is wrapped around the tragic story of Dilawal, a young Afghan cab driver who ended up in the U.S.-operated Bagram Prison and came out dead. His death certificate read "homicide."

His legs were "pulpified," according to a U.S. coroner. Had Dilawal lived, his legs would have required amputation because of the tissue damage he suffered.

Dilawal's case was investigated and prosecuted, but as with Abu Ghraib, the investigations looked down. Gibney's film looks up. W-a-a-a-a-y up.

Students from the UBC j-school worked with Mr. "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" on a doc about Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. They liked him.

Brit Martin Newland, the founding deputy editor of the National Post, is now helping start up a brand-new paper in the United Arab Emirates. Here's some of his thoughts on that process and on journalism in his former colony.

As predicted, it's out with the fundamentalist MMA and in with the secular Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. But can the Taliban and al Qaeda-led militancy in the area be rolled back?

I've been revisiting some old Larry Sanders Show episodes. There's one called What Have You Done For Me Lately?, in which talk show host Larry is asked by the network to do a live commercial to pimp the Garden Weasel.

It isn't going well.

Here's an exchange between Gary Shandling's character Larry and Hank Kingsley, played by the great Jeffrey Tambor:

From the Guardian:

For the viewers of Turkmenistan's popular nightly news programme, Vatan, it was another routine bulletin. But as the newsreader began the 9pm broadcast, viewers across the central Asian country spotted something unusual crawling across the studio table: a large brown cockroach.

The cockroach managed to complete a whole lap of the desk, apparently undetected, before disappearing. The programme, complete with cockroach, was repeated at 11pm that night.

It was only at 9am the following day that horrified officials from Turkmenistan's ministry of culture discovered the cockroach's guest appearance. And that, perhaps, should have been the end of the matter, the mildly entertaining footage being consigned to the occasional airing by the Turkmenistan equivalent of Denis Norden on a telly bloopers show.

But the consequences of this particular cockroach's impromptu five minutes of fame were immediate and severe.

The country's president, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, took news of the insect so badly that he responded by firing no fewer than 30 workers from the main state TV channel, the news website Kronika Turkmenistan reported yesterday.

The story went on to say that Berdynukhamedov isn't the only president to have fired TV people. His immediate predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov -- the Turkmenbashi, or father of all the Turkmen -- sacked a bunch after drunken technicians forgot to broadcast his New Year's Eve message one year.

Saw some guy at a bank ATM today. He lowered his face right down to the keyboard and then wrapped right arm around his head. He then snuck his left hand in to enter his PIN number.

So, anyone think this guy's learned a hard lesson about protecting one's PIN number at some point in his life? :^)

Here's the URL: http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks

Here's a NYT blog item on the controversy. An excerpt:

The records for the site’s I.P. address indicate that it is hosted by PRQ, based in Stockholm. PRQ’s home page offers clues that it’s not just another hosting company. It paraphrases a quote from Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “I worry about my children all the time. I worry that 10 years from now, they will come to me and say, ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of speech away from the Internet?’”

As it turns out, PRQ is owned by two founders of the Pirate Bay, the BitTorrent tracker site that is Hollywood’s least favorite online destination. The Pirate Bay guys have made a sport out of taunting all forms of authority, including the Swedish police, and PRQ has gone out of its way to host sites that other companies wouldn’t touch. It is perhaps the world’s least lawyer-friendly hosting company and thus a perfect home for Wikileaks, which says it is “developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis.”

You have heard, no doubt, of this morning's massive fire on Queen Street West between Bathurst and Portland on the south side (there's video galore attached to this CTV.ca story).

30 people lost their homes and seven businesses have been wiped out.

While I'm sorry for everyone's loss, my personal connections was with Suspect Video.

The loss of Suspect means this city's greatest treasure trove of Takashi Miike movies and other Japanese and Korean fare is now a glop of melted plastic on a charred floor.

Suspect was defiant and uncompromising about its misfit fare. I liked being in there because it was so anti-Blockbuster. A cathedral of the unfettered human imagination, if you will.

Suspect would have gone broke in suburbia. There just aren't enought people out there who appreciate the ouvre of auteurs like Park Chan-Yook or Max Baer.

And now, with its destruction, west downtown Toronto has become incrementally more suburban (just wait until Home Depot builds a big box store just east of the fire site).

Here's hoping Suspect and the other businesses rebuild quickly and help keep downtown T.O. urban.

This NYT look at Los Angeles Times publisher David Hiller illustrates some of the problems faced by major newspapers in today's media business climate.

From CP via CBC.ca:

The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concerns Monday about the U.S. detention of a CTV journalist who had been working in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan.

The New York-based group said Jawed Ahmad, 22, also known as Jojo Yazemi, has been detained for almost three months by the U.S. military at Bagram Air Base near Kabul, the Afghan capital.

Ahmad said he's being held because the U.S. military believes he had contacts with local Taliban leaders and had a video of Taliban materials, his brother Siddique told the journalist committee, also known as CPJ. ...

"Since his disappearance in late October, CTV News has been deeply concerned about Jojo Yazemi's whereabouts and well being," Robert Hurst, president of CTV News, told the CPJ in an e-mail message included in the news release.

"CTV News has made inquires to NATO, Canadian, and U.S. military officials. No information has been forthcoming. CTV News has also made representations to the International Committee of the Red Cross and diplomatic channels including the Canadian Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan."

Update

The U.S. military has charged Yazemi with being an unlawful enemy combatant, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

A classic hard country redneck anthem is Johnny Russell's version of Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer - number 347 on the top 500 country songs of all time, according to one dubious list I saw. :)

I've tried to adapt it to Toronto realities.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Family members describe Sayed Parwez Kaambakhsh as a frightened young man, sitting in a cramped Afghan prison cell alongside 30 hard-core criminals, hoping an apology will save him from execution for blasphemy.

But to the outside world, the 23-year-old student and journalist has become a cause: a symbol of Afghanistan's clashing constitutional commitments to freedom of expression yet also to Islamic law that allows apostasy to be punished by death. His sentence, imposed after a closed-door trial during which he was not permitted a lawyer or a hearing, has become a rallying cry for foreign critics who want Afghanistan to hew to international norms on human rights.

The question now is whether international protests will save Kaambakhsh from a firing squad, or instead stiffen the spines of religious conservatives who fear that Afghanistan's morals are being diluted by imported Western values. ...

From the Feb. 17 Observer:

Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, is refusing to remove medieval artistic depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, despite being flooded with complaints from Muslims demanding the images be deleted.

More than 180,000 worldwide have joined an online protest claiming the images, shown on European-language pages and taken from Persian and Ottoman miniatures dating from the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, are offensive to Islam, which prohibits any representation of Muhammad. But the defiant editors of the encyclopaedia insist they will not bow to pressure and say anyone objecting to the controversial images can simply adjust their computers so they do not have to look at them.

Here's the Wikipedia Depictions of Muhammad page.

Here's the discussion page.

From the BBC:

A controversial website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents has been taken offline in the US.

Wikileaks.org, as it is known, was cut off from the internet following a California court ruling, the site says.

The case was brought by a Swiss bank after "several hundred" documents were posted about its offshore activities.

Other versions of the pages, hosted in countries such as Belgium and India, can still be accessed.

However, the main site was taken offline after the court ordered that Dynadot, which controls the site's domain name, should remove all traces of wikileaks from its servers.

I wonder if anyone has tried to take down The Smoking Gun?

More from the Guardian's Charles Arthur, including this:

But fear not: Wikileaks is still publishing in Belgium and, um, Christmas Island - the latter offering its many "cover names".

From the Feb. 15 NYT:

After years of resisting the newsroom cuts that have hit most of the industry, The New York Times will bow to growing financial strain and eliminate about 100 newsroom jobs this year, the executive editor said Thursday.

The cuts will be achieved “by not filling jobs that go vacant, by offering buyouts, and if necessary by layoffs,” the executive editor, Bill Keller, said. The more people who accept buyouts, he said, “the smaller the prospect of layoffs, but we should brace ourselves for the likelihood that there will be some layoffs.”

He said, “We intend to move quickly, to get any cuts past us so that we do not spend a year bleeding slowly.”

The Times has 1,332 newsroom employees, the largest number in its history; no other American newspaper has more than about 900. There were scattered buyouts and job eliminations in the newsroom in recent years, but the overall number continued to rise, largely from the growth of its Internet operations.

By the way, the NYT's share price circa 2002? US$52. In January? About US$15.

If you dare, go to this globeinvestor page on the New York Times Co. and and look at the five-year chart of the NYT's stock compared to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. One's going up. And one's going down. :(

From the Feb. 15 NYT:

The Los Angeles Times named a new top editor on Thursday, Russ Stanton, three weeks after the previous editor, James E. O’Shea, was forced out for resisting another in a series of staff cuts.

Mr. Stanton, who has been running The Times’s Web site, will take charge of an deeply unsettled newsroom that in less than three years has lost three chief editors, all of whom publicly protested the shrinking of the news staff.

I wrote the following on Thursday:

I wonder if this is more of a real-world opportunity to test some of the U.S.'s missile-shield technology than an effort to protect the world against the ravages of hydrazine. The Pentagon says no.

And if you ever needed proof the Kremlin reads this blog, observe this AP story via CTV.ca:

Russia said Saturday that U.S. military plans to shoot down a damaged spy satellite may be a veiled test of America's missile defence system.

The Pentagon failed to provide "enough arguments'' to back its plan to smash the satellite next week with a missile, Russia's Defence Ministry said in a statement.

"There is an impression that the United States is trying to use the accident with its satellite to test its national anti-missile defence system's capability to destroy other countries' satellites,'' the ministry said.

From the Guardian:

Two-thirds of the Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan can be persuaded to abandon violence, according to a British aid worker expelled from the country for opening talks with some of those allied to the militant group.

From the BBC:

Danish MPs have cancelled a trip to Iran after Tehran demanded they apologise for the republication of cartoons deemed offensive to Islam.

Two days before the scheduled trip, Tehran demanded the MPs condemn the cartoon on their arrival in Iran. ...

A condemnation and apology would help convince the Iranian people that Denmark's authorities had distanced themselves from the action, Iran's parliament said in a letter to Danish MPs. 

"We are not the ones to apologise," said Villy Soevndal, the leader of Denmark's Socialist People's Party.

"If anyone needs to apologise for freedom of speech, human rights, imprisonments, executions and lack of democracy, it is the Iranians."

From the BBC:

The International Olympic Committee is for the first time permitting athletes to write blogs.

The IOC has set out guidelines for blogging at the Beijing Games to ensure copyright agreements are not infringed.

They include bans on posting any audio or visual material of action from the games themselves.

The move follows the increasing use of unofficial blogs by athletes in previous Games, including Athens in 2004 and the Turin Winter Games.

"It is required that, when accredited persons at the games post any Olympic content, it be confined solely to their own personal Olympic-related experience," said an IOC statement.

Check this out:

"The IOC considers blogging... as a legitimate form of personal expression and not a form of journalism," the Olympic authority said.

"Blogs should be dignified and in good taste."

Dignified?! In good taste?!?! So much for my dreams of being a blogging Olympian. :)