We always praise weblogs that do ORIGINAL reporting and try to feature some of them prominently here so readers can check out the NEW information presented in some of these weblogs (most blog posts including on this one are basically extended op-ed pieces versus original reporting).
A MUST READ can be found HERE today via The Talking Dog which has an interview with Andrew Patel, one of the lawyers for Jose Padilla. Padilla who was recently the subject of a Supreme Court decision. We’ll give you part of the set up by TTD himself but won’t quote from it since in this case we’d take the interview out of context:
Mr. Padilla (prounounced as Pa- dill-a), as you will recall, was arrested in 2002, and Attorney General Ashcroft triumphantly announced (from Moscow no less, missing the irony of his doing so, from there) that the Government had captured Mr. Padilla and thereby thwarted a purported “dirty bomb” plot against the United States by Al Qaeda. The President declared Mr. Padilla an enemy combatant, placed him in the custody of the military, and he was placed in detention in a brig in South Carolina, without charge, trial, or (until just before the Supreme Court agreed to take review of an earlier habeas corpus petition brought in New York, after nearly two years in confinement) access to his own counsel. Brooklyn born Mr. Padilla thus remains the first and only American picked up on American soil and held as a purported “enemy combatant”.
The Talking Dog, who is an attorney (so you will note his highly informed versus Larry King style softball questions) previously interviewed one of Padilla’s other lawyers.
Read the entire original interview for its content on the subject at hand but also because it again shows you the potential for weblogs to truly be a new infoform that can offer NEW INFORMATION to readers versus partisan rants or op-ed pieces.
FOOTNOTE: If you haven’t checked out The Talking Dog blog you need to do so. He always offers an original take on things. Although TTD is considered a liberal blog it often takes highly independent stands (for instance, he was absolutely brutal on the subject of John Kerry) and offers highly independent analyses, often quite witty, and minus much of the “blogspeak” that has infected many sites in Blogtopia.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.