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The kangaroo courts begin to collapse

Tuesday, May 13, 2008 9:30 PM
The sham "trials" of detainees at Guantanamo have always been legally and Constitutionally invalid, but they were continuing anyway. Now, the process of these show trials has met some blowback from within the Pentagon (in contrast to civilian trials,
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Another Yoo torture memo

Thursday, May 08, 2008 11:40 PM
In August 2002, John Yoo wrote an infamous memo on behalf of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel which attempted to justify the use of torture by the CIA. The memo has since been released ( PDF here ), widely circulated, and then disavowed
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Bizarre story of FBI abusing its power

Tuesday, April 15, 2008 10:04 PM
The FBI has always had the ability to obtain evidence through subpoenas issued by judges. In a case tangentially related to the 2005 London bombings, an FBI agent lawfully obtained a subpoena for the seizure of certain records from a suspect at North
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The distraction du jour: Obama's comments on alienation

Saturday, April 12, 2008 9:25 PM
Barack Obama said this yesterday : "In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. ... The jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through
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Two howlers on domestic surveillance

Wednesday, April 02, 2008 9:34 PM
Two stories came out today on the deepening problem of unwarranted and unconstrained domestic surveillance in the ongoing War On Your Liberty; each of the two stories contains assurances by government officials that don't even pass the snicker test. The
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Tactical foot-dragging by the Bush gang

Saturday, March 29, 2008 8:15 PM
Two stories from yesterday illustrate the Bush administration's use of foot-dragging as a tactical maneuver in their war against the proper role of government. First, the EPA is refusing to comply in a timely manner with a Supreme Court decision from
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Watchlist purgatory

Sunday, March 23, 2008 8:45 PM
I missed a couple of stories this week on the shoddy, ineffective, and inaccurate compilation of federal "terrorism" watch lists, and the consequences of unfettered government surveillance without appropriate oversight. First, this story details two reports
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Trampling the First Amendment

Monday, March 17, 2008 10:36 PM
A federal judge in DC is holding a reporter for USA Today in contempt of court for refusing to divulge her sources for a series of stories she wrote on the unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks . Toni Locy wrote a series of articles for her paper that were skeptical
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NSA involvement in domestic spying greater than previously thought

Tuesday, March 11, 2008 10:34 PM
According to this Wall Street Journal article , the NSA's involvement in warrantless spying on Americans is even greater than previously disclosed: According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records
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Some clarity on GOP scare tactics

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 10:20 PM
Senators Jay Rockefeller and Patrick Leahy and Congressmen Silvestre Reyes and John Conyers have an op-ed piece in tomorrow's Christian Science Monitor that calls out the White House on its fear-mongering tactics regarding warrantless surveillance : Our
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McCain's hypocrisy on torture

Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:15 PM
On the subject of waterboarding, here's John McCain, who was tortured by the North Vietnamese, last October : Waterboarding is a form of torture no matter how it is done and should be a prohibited among U.S. military interrogation practices, Republican
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The continuing crisis

Tuesday, February 12, 2008 9:33 PM
Today's updates on the continuing decline: The six Guantanamo detainees who are slated to be tried by the Bush administration's kangaroo courts are now facing the death penalty; if that's their sentence, they'll be executed at Guantanamo . The charges,
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Another ruling against kangaroo courts

Friday, February 01, 2008 9:03 PM
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has dealt a blow (although a minor one) to the Bush administration's attempts to gut Constitutionally protected rights of habeas corpus review : A federal appeals court Friday let stand its ruling
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No telecom immunity just yet

Monday, January 28, 2008 9:20 PM
As I mentioned the other day , Senate Majority "Leader" Harry Reid allowed a bill to come to the floor which would have included immunity for the phone companies that participated in Bush's illegal warrantless wiretapping program. The bill came to a vote
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Mukasey dances with the one that brung him

Friday, January 25, 2008 7:39 PM
Gosh, what a surprise : Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Friday he doesn't plan for a special prosecutor to investigate whether the CIA broke the law when it destroyed videotapes of terror interrogations, defying some in Congress who want an independent
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Congressional Dems cave to Bush twice in one day

Thursday, January 24, 2008 8:30 PM
The spineless Democratic leadership of Congress has outdone itself; Pelosi and Reid caved to the Bush White House twice in one day. On the proposed emergency stimulus package, House Dems caved to the White House and struck provisions which would have
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The topsy-turvy state of human rights

Friday, January 11, 2008 9:55 PM
Throughout the Cold War, propagandists in this country consistently painted the US as the world's champion of human rights and the rule of law, while the Soviet Union and its member states were cast as paragons of evil. Although neither characterization
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FBI wiretaps canceled for not paying the phone bill

Thursday, January 10, 2008 6:10 PM
This is just too funny : Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time. [...] In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence
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Some thoughts on Edwards

Friday, January 04, 2008 12:07 PM
After John Edwards's strong second-place finish in last night's Iowa caucus, he had this to say : [C]orporate greed has got a stranglehold on America. And unless and until we have a president in the proud tradition of Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt,
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Integrity, principle, and decency

Monday, December 31, 2007 5:35 PM
Those three words are among the traits sadly lacking in the Bush White House; today's New York Times editorial holds nothing back in speaking the truth so many Americans refuse to hear: There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our
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