Russ McBee

Salim Hamdan was convicted today of providing material support to terrorists in a sham kangaroo court convened at Guantanamo. His ''trial'' included the admission of inflammatory, irrelevant evidence such as the 1998 African embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks, neither of which he was accused of knowing about. Evidence derived through torture ...

David Neiwert, who has written extensively about eliminationist rhetoric from the right wing against liberals, had this to say about Sunday's tragedy in Knoxville: In reality, of course, rhetoric like this has historically played a critical role in some of the ugliest episodes in American history, as well as thousands of little acts of ...

Yesterday, a senseless act of non-random violence struck this city. A man, mad at the world and blaming liberals for his personal ills, targeted the innocent congregants of a progressive church in Knoxville, killing two and wounding seven. Like everyone else in Knoxville, I've spent the last couple of days in a state of shock over this. Described ...

This morning, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Boumediene v. Bush, holding that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention in US civilian courts. As SCOTUSblog said: The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so ...

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 first story takes place at the state level, where we find this: Intelligence centers run by ...

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, the torture-derived evidence, the trials, the rules of procedure, the judge, the jury, the ...

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 look at the politically charged case. Mukasey, in a 41-minute briefing with reporters, ...

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 was entirely accurate, the relative comparison between the two did highlight stark differences ...

This week, the UN's Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (the ''Third Committee'') approved a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty; the resolution will go to the full General Assembly for consideration, possibly as soon as next month. Of course, the United States voted with the medieval contingent: The ...

Michael Mukasey proved on Thursday that he is unfit to serve as Attorney General of the United States: President Bush's choice for attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey, embraced some of the administration's most controversial legal positions yesterday, suggesting that Bush could ignore surveillance statutes in wartime and avoiding a declaration ...