Pre-Crime Detention, Deportation

A friend sent me a story from today's NYT about a teenaged immigrant girl who has been deported because she visited an internet chat room. Based on this visit, the FBI has decided that she and another girl, presented "an imminent threat to the security of the United States based upon evidence that they plan to be suicide bombers." The document [provided to the New York Times] cited no evidence. And in background interviews, federal officials were quick to play down the case as soon as reporters called, characterizing the investigation as a pre-emptive move against potential candidates for recruitment, not the disruption of a plot.
The young woman interviewed by the Times also wears a veil, and says that she sees an Islamic state as ideal because in it "you don't pay for water...you don't pay for transport." This should be a clear example of how privatization has contributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Regardless of the girl's politics and beliefs, this case is an example of the increasing adoption of the "legal" theories of Carl Schmidt, who said that preventive arrest was legitimate. No... he wasn't a character in Phillip K. Dick's "The Minority Report," in which people are arrested for "future crimes," but the legal bulwark of the Third Reich.
And...Good news. The AP covered the Downing Street Memo hearings and they're in today's Chicago Tribune, The so-called liberal New York Times also covered the DSM hearings, though they refer to John Conyers, a senior membeer of the house judiciary committee as an "anti-war group." in their headline. The Times story also makes it sound as if the document, which is the minutes from a meeting between Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence agency M1-6 and the Prime Minister, is somehow second-hand, reporting thatThe memo said Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, had said in the meeting that Mr. Bush had already decided on war, "but the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."...... and say that "Activists have accused mainstream news organizations of playing down the document's significance, even as antiwar bloggers have seized upon it as evidence."
But as we know, it's not the "memo" written by some outside person which "says" anything about Richard Dearlove and Tony Blair. The memo is a set of minutes of a meeting between them. Argggh!
There's an interesting story about the DSM from the Fort Wayne Gazette, which discusses the criticisms made of the mainstream media by activists who have demanded that the story be covered, and in the story, the response is exactly what Ray McGovern noted in the hearings yesterday. There are two responses: "it's not true" and "we already knew that." Nowhere in the story does it explain why the people on the left say it's a smoking gun...nowhere in the story is the memo itself printed. It's enough to make you think that there must be very severe pressure being brought by the whitehouse to keep the memo from being printed in full.