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Ginger pointed out that I didn’t mention the violence committed by the anti-abortion crowd. She’s right; it’s another example of extremist right-wing violence that at the very least verges on terrorism. So let’s talk about that some.

Start out at Abortion Violence, a site run by anti-abortionists. (Brant, this is one of those links. You’ve been warned.) About five seconds into reading it, I realized that the tactics were incredibly familiar. It’s the same stuff I talked about in my previous post on right-wing terrorism.

They’re quick to claim that pro-choice activists are more violent, and provide charts to make the point. However, when you drill down into their state by state numbers, it becomes clear that their stats are hopelessly biased. For example, in Massachusetts, they count the following case as a pro-choice murder:

On October 31, 1999, allergist and part-time abortionist Dirk Greineder murdered his 58-year-old wife, Mabel, during a walk at a Wellesley pond after she discovered his secret life of prostitutes and pornography.

What’s the connection? Well, he performed abortions. By that standard, you have to count every murder ever committed by an anti-abortion activist, though, and they don’t. They also count deaths during abortions; they do not count (or even mention) deaths in childbirth.

The arguments are the same. “We’re not so bad when you look at *them*.” The arguments are also equally false.

The links between these terrorists and right-wing extremism have been documented for nearly a decade. Eric Rudolph is a great example. So is John Burt. So is Donald Spitz.

Note also the last paragraph in this article on Stephen Jordi — Pastor Ruckman knows what’s going on in his community. Jordi had hopes of killing Clinton and Bush. And the Patriot movement is happy to embrace Jordi as a sympathetic figure. (Scroll down, and if you thought abortionviolence.org was bad, you really don’t want to read that link. But this is what’s happening in our culture and I kind of think it’s better to know.)

It’s all part of the same fabric; it’s all part of the same culture of violence.

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Yeah, I’m feeling flamingly political this week. So: the Guardian claims that some of the Guantanamo Bay defense team was fired. If the report is accurate, and it might not be, a few of the selected defense lawyers objected to the rule that says the government can listen in on conversations between the lawyer and the defendant. They were fired immediately.

The question is obviously not whether the government can fire lawyers who aren’t willing to work under the procedures outlined. The question is whether or not the procedures are reasonable. When you pick a team of lawyers who know in advance that they’re working as part of a military tribunal, and they still object to the procedures once they see them, there is perhaps something wrong with the way you want to do things.

The BBC notes that both the Guardian and Vanity Fair are reporting this story, despite DoD denials.

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OK, now I know what that protective order was. Here’s the PDF. It’s just the procedure the parties need to use if they want to protect portions of their evidence from public view. Sony, for example, may not wish their script for ??Underworld II?? to be available just yet. Now they can introduce it into evidence without pesky people like me getting their hands on it.