If you focus strictly on murder you are missing a lot of the world’s really interesting crime stories.

In New Zealand someone has stolen an aluminum bridge 30 meters [about 100 feet] long. The foot bridge that gave access through a wetlands in Waihola, New Zealand is assumed to have been stolen to be sold for its scrap metal value.

You have to wonder why no one noticed trucks hauling off a bridge.

There was a major bank robbery in Belfast, North Ireland. The Northern Bank was robbed by a gang that gained entry by kidnapping the families of two executives and forcing the executives to open the vault.

The gang stole £20 million [around $40 million], but there are problems. About £17 million is in the unique currency of Northern Ireland which is not used widely outside of that area, and £12 million of that is new, uncirculated, sequentially numbered notes. So they only actually have £3 million of readily convertible cash and everyone in Europe looking for large transactions.

It will make a nice movie when they get caught.

[edited for clarity]

After thinking about it for a while, I’m beginning to believe that Alberto Gonzales may, in fact, be even worse that John Ashcroft.

John Ashcroft was an obnoxious ideologue, but he enforced the laws that were on the books, even if he was extremely selective about which laws received his attention.

As the President’s Counsel Gonzales has written options that purport to give the President powers that extend beyond the Constitution and claim that the War on Terror abrogates the need to comply with the Geneva Convention.

For those who don’t think much about law this may even seem reasonable: there’s an emergency and emergency powers are needed to deal with it.

The basic problem is that all of the powers of the government of the United States are confined by the Constitution, with all other powers reserved to the people and/or states. The government has no power that is not granted by the Constitution, for the granting and restriction of power is the underlying purpose of any constitution. The Constitution is the Law against which all other laws are judged. The Supreme Court was founded with the single purpose of judging legal cases through the filter of the Constitution.

Any actions outside the confines of the Constitution are by definition outside the Law.

The purpose of the Geneva Convention was to establish some minimum Rules of War. Claiming that the Rules of War don’t apply to a war is illogical on its face.

What Gonzales has advised the President is the equivalent of saying the police are not required to abide by the law because the criminals have already broken it. Is this the type of thinking that is appropriate for any lawyer, much less the Attorney General of the United States?