Monthly Archives: June 2002

General Chaos

This just in:

Don't get on Ashcroft's bad side

Combatants Lack Rights, US Argues (Washinton Post)
An excerpt:
“There is no right under the laws and customs of war for an enemy combatant to meet with counsel concerning his detention, much less to meet with counsel in private, without military authorities present,” the Justice Department wrote. “The court may not second-guess the military's enemy combatant determination. Going beyond that determination would require the courts to enter an area in which they have no competence…[and could] possibly create 'a conflict between judicial and military opinion highly comforting to enemies of the United States,' ” the brief said, citing a 1950 Supreme Court ruling…

“This is really an astounding assertion of authority,” said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor. “It's not just that you have no right to a lawyer, it's that you have no right to even have a hearing. . . . If that is true, then there is really no limit to the president's power to label U.S. citizens as bad people and then have them held in military custody indefinitely.”

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Administrivia

Occasionally, when you do impartial journalism, somebody gets upset. Recently, I managed to get some folks at Toyota Motor Sales a little torqued–enough that a source got in hot water, and a PR person called me to ask if the story could be pulled off the web. Not because the story was wrong, or the details were off–they were dead on. That was the problem-there was a little too much detail.

Now, I didn't get everything directly from the source who found himself in trouble. One word: Google. And nothing we had discussed was “off the record”. But the guy didn't have a PR person with him during the interview, and he may have said more than he should have.

No matter; I would have gotten a good piece of what got him in trouble (some information about a corporate gaffe) without it coming up in the interview.

We obviously didn't pull the story off the Web. I did what I promised: I told my boss they had asked for that. But the genie was out of the bottle.

As it turns out, things have (apparently) calmed down a bit for the guy at Toyota–. And he's learned, as he put it to the PR person, some “hard, fast lessons” about what his company's policies on talking to the press are.

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