Steven Wax, a graduate of Colgate University and Harvard University Law School, is a former assistant district attorney in Kings County (Brooklyn), New York, where, among other prosecutions, he worked on the “Son of Sam” case. Mr. Wax is currently in his seventh term as the Federal Defender for the District of Oregon. He is the author of “Kafka Comes to America: Fighting For Justice in the War on Terror, a Federal Defender’s Inside Account” documenting his work on behalf of Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield, accused of a connection to the 2004 Madrid bombings, and Adel Hamad, a Sudanese national...

And so, having been established to have committed the heinous crime of embarrassing the Bush Administration before the Supreme Court, it seems that the show-trial must go on, and Salim “OBL’s driver and auto-mechanic” Hamdan’s military commission trial has commenced at Guantanamo Bay, with a selection of military jurors. Hamdan has a fourth grade education, and basically claims he was doing a menial job for a better paycheck than he could get in Yemen. Although the rules are being made up as they go along, it seems that the current military judge, Capt. Keith Allred of the Navy, isn’t totally...

After making resisting the calls of the then newly elected Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress the signature play of the second half of his second term in office, it now seems the President is willing to accept some kind of timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, as long as the timetables are vague and are called “a general time horizon”. Call it “The Surge(TM)” has been successful, call it our efforts at belaying civil war by arming the (formerly and in the future bothersome) Baathist dead-enders cooperative Sunnis has, thus far been successful, or call it...

Al Gore gave his “energy speech” in Philadelphia yesterday, duly annotated (to account for various forms of skepticism) here. The sainted former Vice-President acknowledged the potential “exaggeration” in some of his goals… but then, if he’s right, and the survival of our nation is at stake… perhaps he has a bit of a point? Given that the sole raison d’etre of so many these days is sucking short term profit out of the system as if The Rapture really were going to come later this year… maybe someone who actually looks more than two quarters ahead is just too maddening...

Certainly, don’t tell it to me, sayeth U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson, who denied the motion of GTMO detainee and alleged “OBL driver” Salim Hamdan for a stay of his show-trial military commission hearing. Hamdan, you recall, had won a Supreme Court case challenging the earlier version of commissions, only to have Congress pass a law calling for comparably vague and arbitrary commissions… the theme remains the same, really… any procedural unfairness is o.k. as long as it leads to a finding of guilt, be it hearsay, evidence obtained by torture, or “secret” evidence not provided to the prisoner....

By a pair of 5-4 rulings, the extraordinarily conservative (for example, the late Sen. Jesse Helms singlehandedly kept most Bill Clinton appointments off it for years) 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, in the ongoing saga of Saleh al-Marri (his counsel Jonathan Hafetz is interviewed here) ruled that the Bush Adminstration (1) has the power to hold any of us– ANY. OF. US.– indefinitely, solely at the President’s whim, if he invokes the magic word “terrorist”, but (in this case, a very small but) (2) Mr. al-Marri (or whatever poor hapless bastard is involved be he named Padilla, or...

Well, the U.S. of A. has hit another great milestone… our terrorist watch list has hit one million names, and counting, according to the ACLU, which monitors government reports. This 1,000,000 number– which is actually used for the express purpose of hassling people for having the audacity to appear at airports with paid tickets expecting to go anywhere– is a far “harder” number than, say the 8,000,000 of “Main Core”— and will have much more immediate real world impact for the lucky duckies poor bastards whose names are on it… which might include you and me, for all we know...

We’re having quite a celebration of the 75th anniversary of some of the New Deal reforms that have finally, finally been dismantled after decades of fierce ideological battling (and money-grubbing… I speak of the Glass-Steagall Act‘s “wall” between investment banking and commercial banking and a separate package of savings & loans intended to engage in home loans…)… all of which have been effectively dismembered by denizens of both ideologically supportive Republicans and Democrats (yes, Joe Biden, I mean you) willing to sell out to the highest bidding banks and plutocrats as long as it meant campaign money and propped up...

I know, I know. The latest excuse for a Simon & Garfunkel title is the announcement by Treas. Sec. Paulson on the machinations of the government bailouts of the twin pillars of our housing finance system, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The details aren’t in yet, but these two private companies that everyone knows are part of the government (sort of) are going to be part of the government (really) in the form of a taxpayer-sponsored bailout, which, we are well beyond the point of arguing with, as our entire financial structure had been based on people borrowing from the...

In this op-ed called “The Real-Life “24” of Summer 2008,” the Grey Lady’s Frank Rich does a nice synthesis of what (the few remaining!) regular readers here will vaguely recognize as one of the sort of the themes of this blog (as if there were any!), to wit, the unConstitutional and unAmerican abuses and outright war crimes committed by the Bush Administration have probably not made us any safer from the threat of Islamist terrorism, as well as being unacceptable to any people who call themselves bound to the rule of law. This is not to say, of course, that...