Category: Uncategorized

Jan Schlichtmann, then and now

The Boston Globe’s Jonathan Saltzman reports today that Beverly lawyer Jan Schlichtmann, famous from the book and movie “A Civil Action,” is as controversial as ever.

I covered Schlichtmann off and on for 15 years. The last time I caught up with him was in 2000. He was a lot younger and less experienced in the 1980s, when he represented eight Woburn families whose children had suffered from leukemia. But I found him to be an odd mixture of charisma, fierce dedication, secretiveness (even with his own clients) and ineptitude.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”

My Fourth of July is complete. As always, I read the Declaration of Independence in the Boston Globe from start to finish. It’s a great tradition, and I hope it remains unchanged as long as the Globe is in business.

The Declaration is also a living document, and Gov. Deval Patrick and legislative leaders should ponder the meaning of this phrase long and hard:

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our People, and eat out their substance.

Happy 6.25 percent sales tax. And I hope everyone has a great Fourth.

Fighting censorship at his old school paper

A summer intern at the Cape Cod Times named Henry Rome was such an outstanding journalist at his high-school paper in Pennsylvania that he was named the National High School Journalist of the Year.

Now, before he heads off to Princeton University this fall, he’s fighting a proposal that could result in his old paper being censored by school officials before publication.

George Brennan reports.

Younger drivers are a bigger problem

We have become obsessed with elderly drivers. Today’s example: this story in the Boston Globe about an 83-year-old woman who crashed through the front of a Natick liquor store. My guess is that it wouldn’t even have made the Globe a year ago.

To be sure, there are elderly drivers who should be off the road. But it’s long been known that younger drivers are more dangerous than older ones. That perspective has been entirely lacking from recent coverage.

In 2001, for instance, the Washington Post reported that the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety had found that older drivers were involved in fewer crashes than any other age group, but that the fatality rate in those crashes was higher because the elderly drivers themselves were more likely to die of their injuries. From the Post:

The studies show that older drivers kill fewer motorists and pedestrians than any other age group and have the lowest crash rates per licensed driver….

Younger drivers aged 16 to 24 had the highest accident rate, more than double the rate for older drivers.

My 95-year-old uncle continues to drive. I know that anecdotal evidence is suspect, but I think his sense of responsibility is typical of his generation. He no longer drives at night, and he’s talked about public-transportation options for the day that he should give up his license.

More-frequent testing for older drivers is probably a good idea. But coverage has grown completely out of proportion when you consider the reality of who’s the greatest menace behind the wheel.

Loth signs off — for now

Boston Globe editorial-page editor Renée Loth marks her departure with a classy farewell. Good to see she’s going to write her new weekly column a short walk away from the Statehouse. Local politics has always been her passion, and her scrutiny will be welcome.

A few pieces of unsolicited advice for Loth: (1) start a blog; (2) use it, along with Twitter and Facebook, to converse with your readers; (3) learn how to shoot and edit Web video. Not only will such activities not detract from your column, but they’ll end up giving you more material than you’d have otherwise.

A new threat to the Internet

In my latest for the Guardian, I consider the implications of an idea put forth recently by influential U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner: making it illegal to link to copyrighted content without permission. Not only would Posner’s proposal do enormous damage to the Internet, but it would destroy the doctrine of “fair use” as well.

NPR ombudsman Shepard responds

NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard has responded to my item of last week in which I criticized her for defending NPR’s policy of refusing to refer to waterboarding as “torture.” She writes:

Yes, President Obama and AG Eric Holder have said that waterboarding was torture. I’d personally call it torture. But if you were an editor at the Globe, would you say that someone tortured another person? Or would you want to use a direct or indirect quote, i.e., “John Smith said the guard tortured him”?

I’m not trying to say what is and is not torture, but is every abuse classified as torture now or are there degrees? When a police officer throws a suspect to the ground and handcuffs them, is that torture or simply abuse?

Would it be better to, say, describe the technique and then say some call it torture? I do not think enhanced interrogation techniques is acceptable either. That’s why I come down on describing the technique and adding that some call it torture.

Shepard asks, so I’ll attempt a few answers.

I’m not sure what Shepard thinks there is to gain by skiing down the slippery slope from waterboarding to getting rough with a suspect during an arrest. In my original item, I strictly limited my remarks to waterboarding, recognized as torture by just about everyone on the planet.

The opinions of Obama and Holder are entirely unnecessary to determining whether waterboarding is torture.

As John McCain and others have pointed out, the United States executed several Japanese military officers for waterboarding American prisoners of war after World War II. And as I wrote last week, if NPR really can’t bring itself to use the T-word, perhaps it can describe waterboarding as “an interrogation technique once considered so heinous by the United States that it hanged Japanese officers for doing it to Americans.”

So yes, if I were an editor at the Boston Globe, you’re damn right I would refer to waterboarding as torture. That seems about as solid as referring to oil as a fossil fuel, or baseball as a sport. By eschewing the term “torture” to describe a practice that the entire international community regards as such, NPR is not being neutral. Rather, it is embracing a euphemism that places the network squarely on the side of the torturers and their enablers.

NPR should not use enhanced interrogation techniques on the English language.

Thursday update: I was not as precise as I wanted to be when I wrote about “everyone on the planet,” as I was in a rush and had lousy Internet access. Last week, Bob Garfield of “On the Media” interviewed Shepard and made the point I was trying to make:

The U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights says that waterboarding is torture. The International Committee of the Red Cross have called what the U.S. did “torture.” Waterboarding is unambiguously in violation of the International Convention on Torture, which has been ratified by 140-some countries.

The United States is among those 140 countries, but, as the Associated Press reported in 2002, the Bush administration sought to block enforcement of the measure when inspectors wanted to visit Guantánamo.

Torture is not only a moral problem, but it has a precise legal meaning that most definitely encompasses waterboarding.

What $10 million will buy

It wouldn’t be fair to call this a direct connection. But follow the bouncing money.

The New York Times today runs a profile of Lisa Maria Falcone, a socialite who just gave $10 million to the High Line, an elevated railway in New York that’s been turned into a garden. Falcone’s husband, Philip Falcone, is the founder of Harbinger Capital, which owns 20 percent of the New York Times Co. The Times Co. is demanding that the Boston Newspaper Guild, the Boston Globe’s largest union, deliver $10 million in concessions.

To be clear, the Falcones are not legally, fiscally or ethically responsible for either the Globe or the problems the Times Co. is having in running it. But there’s a parallel here that’s too striking to let go unmentioned.