I haven't put up Links of the Week for awhile (almost a month! Crap!). I have to wade through the backlog and get them all formatted for you. I have also started adding more commentary to each link, and that's why they're taking longer now. You'll find the first batch below:

Since it's Primary/Caucus season, I have a lot of political links:

Former soldier undergoes waterboarding procedure so that you can see just how dastardly this method of extracting information is

Don't Reform the CIA, Abolish It"

Ohio Elections Official Calls Machines Flawed

Huckabee Squashed Charges Against His Son for Stoning, Hanging Dog

6 states defy law requiring ID cards. Now if the other 44 would follow suit....

Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950. I read this article, and the declassified paper it refers to, and the similarities to today's political climate are disturbingly similar. Suspending habeus corpus, imprisoning 12,000 American citizens, military tribunals that "will not by bound by the rules of evidence." President Truman saw the obvious unconstitutionality of this proposal and vetoed the McCarren Act, which was a codification of Hoover's proposal. Coungress overrode the veto and the McCarren Act became law. So Bush's power grab is not new. Unfortunately, he didn't have the same commitment to the Constitution that Truman had, however.

Five myths about torture and interrogation" - From the article "Torture's defenders insist that the rough stuff gets results, but evidence suggests it's hard to get anything under torture, true or false."

FBI to put criminals, security issues up in digital billboard lights - Here's an idea that sounds good on the surface. Everyone wants to help catch the criminals, right? But I have two problems with this: what happened to being presumed innocent until proven guilty? Having your picture on these billboards automatically brands you as a criminal in people's minds, which brings me to the second problem I have with this. What happens when the wrong picture gets associated with a criminal's name? Or what if someone accidentally puts up the wrong picture/information? And what if you were wrongly accused? "We'd like to hire you, Mr. Firth, but your picture was on that criminal billboard for grand theft auto." "They got me mixed up with the guy from the video game!" "Well, I'm sorry, but we can't be hiring guys whose pictures have been on that billboard." And that leads me to the bonus problem I have with this: this turns everyone into a spy/operative for the police force. Everyone looks at everyone else suspiciously and is afraid to say anything to each other. The ultimate FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) tool for the government!