http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/a...cenity_appeal_3

White House - AP Cabinet & State


Gonzales Seeks to Reinstate Obscenity Case

1 hour, 10 minutes ago White House - AP Cabinet & State


By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Wednesday it would seek to reinstate an indictment against a California pornography company that was charged with violating federal obscenity laws. It was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' first public decision on a legal matter.



Billed as the government's first big obscenity case in a decade, the 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates Inc. and its owners, Robert Zicari, and his wife, Janet Romano, both of Northridge, Calif., was dismissed last month by U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster of Pittsburgh.


Lancaster ruled prosecutors overstepped their bounds while trying to block the company's hard-core movies from children and from adults who did not want to see such material.


The Justice Department (news - web sites) said it will appeal the ruling to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (news - web sites) in Philadelphia. While acknowledging the importance of the constitutional guarantee of free speech, Gonzales said selling or distributing obscene materials does not fall within First Amendment protections.


"The Department of Justice (news - web sites) remains strongly committed to the investigation and prosecution of adult obscenity cases," said Gonzales, who pledged during his confirmation hearing to pursue obscenity cases.


If allowed to stand, Lancaster's ruling would undermine obscenity laws as well as other statutes based on shared views of public morality, including laws against prostitution, bestiality and bigamy, the department said in a statement.


Zicari said he was not surprised by the decision to appeal. "They touted my case for almost a year and a half about this being an important step in kind of stamping out the adult product as we know it," he said in a telephone interview. "You'd think our government has a lot more things to worry about with the war in Iraq (news - web sites)."


Prosecutors charged Zacari and Romano and their company with distributing videos to Pittsburgh through the mail and over the Internet. Mary Beth Buchanan, the U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh, has said the case was not about banning all sexually explicit materials, just reining in obscenity. Extreme Associates' productions depict rape and murder, Buchanan said.


When she announced the indictment in August 2003, Buchanan said the lack of enforcement of obscenity laws during the mid- to late-1990s "led to a proliferation of obscenity throughout the United States."


In his opinion, Lancaster said the company can market and distribute its materials because people have a right to view them in the privacy of their own homes.


Lancaster relied in part on the Supreme Court's June 2003 ruling that struck down Texas' ban on gay sex, which it called an unconstitutional violation of privacy.

Just the thought of Gonzales, brings obsenities to my mind, so I guess it's just self defense he's going after it.

well, he can start tomorrow with this:

Impure Tactics
New reports of detainee abuse at Gitmo suggest interrogators used female sexuality as a weapon



Monday, Feb. 21, 2005


The prisoner, held at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, was believed to have taken flying lessons in Arizona before 9/11, just like one of the hijackers. The female Army interrogator repeatedly asked the shackled Saudi, "Who sent you to Arizona?" but the 21-year-old said nothing. The interrogator and the translator for the session took a break and stepped into the hall. When they returned, the interrogator shed the top of her camouflage battle-dress uniform, revealing a tight Army T shirt. The prisoner looked away. She rubbed her breasts against his back, taunting him about his erection. She stood in front of him touching her breasts. He spit in her face.

During another break, the interrogator said she wanted to shame the devout Muslim captive in order to break his connection with God, which was giving him the strength to stonewall. After asking advice from a different translator, this one a Muslim, she went into the bathroom, taking a red marker with her. When she and the first translator re-entered the interrogation booth, she told the detainee she was having her period. She stuck her hands in her pants, then withdrew a hand and showed the detainee what appeared to be blood on it. She asked again who had sent him to Arizona, and he glared at her silently. When she wiped the red ink on his face, he let out a shout, spit at her and lunged forward so forcefully that an ankle came loose from its shackle. The Saudi began sobbing uncontrollably, and the interrogator left, telling him the water in his cell had been shut off. He would not be able to wash, as Muslims are supposed to do before they pray.

Sexually loaded torment by female interrogators is the latest chapter in the prisoner-abuse scandals that will not fade away. This incident with the Saudi first came to light last month in a leak to the Associated Press of part of a draft book manuscript written by this TIME correspondent and former Army Sergeant Erik Saar, the Arabic translator for the 2003 episode. The leaked pages also described a civilian interrogator's habit of keeping a miniskirt and thong underwear hanging on the back of an office door ready to deploy in her sessions. The military has acknowledged some of this kind of abuse.

Initially, military officials tried to prevent disclosure of the Saudi's story. When Saar, who spent 61/2 months at Guantánamo as a linguist and intelligence analyst, submitted the early draft of his manuscript to the military, as the confidentiality agreement he signed requires, Guantánamo officials marked the section about the Saudi for redaction, stamping it SECRET. The account, they advised the Pentagon, revealed interrogation methods and techniques that were classified. The Pentagon wrote back that if the Guantánamo officials could not cite solid legal grounds for censoring the material, the document would be cleared. The memo from the Pentagon noted that the authors' lawyer had previously sued the Defense Department successfully over a manuscript that contained classified information and might do so again. The section was cleared for publication with very few changes. But last month the nine pages at issue were leaked, apparently by someone within the military, since the Pentagon memo, an internal document, was attached.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1027500,00.html

Is this what we've got to look forward to ?

Is this really the best he can do ?

Haven't we been down the obscenity road before... with investigations, special commissions, proseuctios, USSC rulings ?

Is this really what the DOJ needs to be spending (wasting) its time on ?

Aren't there any terrorist prosecutions to work on ?

How about drug trafficing or arms dealers or Haliburton ?


Oh forgot... the Bush administration has that IOU to he Evangelicals to pay off.