#NYC on #torture

TSA Seeks to Expand the Airport Experience Into Everyday Life » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union. The Los Angeles Times today reports on the TSA’s VIPR program, in which roving teams of security agents bring the joys of the airport security experience into bus and train stations, highways, the subway, and other transportation facilities around the country (a Daily Caller story on the program from earlier this year is here).  This program represents nothing less than a direct assault on the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. It’s also an exceedingly dumb security measure. But…

Uncle Sam Is No Imam – NYTimes.com. In each of these cases, counterterrorism has put officials on a collision course with Islamic thought and practice — and, perhaps more dangerously, with the Constitution. The First Amendment prohibits government action “respecting an establishment of religion.”

“Four American vets stood up, men from Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne who had been under fire with Tim and me many times in eastern Afghanistan. They filed out of their pew carrying two folded American flags that had been sent by Senator John McCain, himself a veteran of Vietnam. The young men presented my country’s flag to the Hetherington family and then to Idil [Hetherington’s girlfriend whose parents emigrated from Somalia]. I missed most of that beautiful moment because I was crying too hard, but later I did savor one comforting thought: this may be one of the…