Highlights This Month
 Rigged Trials at Gitmo
Ross Tuttle, The Nation
Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.
Secret evidence. Denial of habeas corpus. Evidence obtained by waterboarding. Indefinite detention. The litany of complaints about the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay is long, disturbing and by now familiar. Nonetheless, a new wave of shock and criticism greeted the Pentagon's announcement on February 11 that it was charging six Guantánamo detainees, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with war crimes--and seeking the death penalty for all of them.
Now, as the murky, quasi-legal staging of the Bush Administration's military commissions unfolds, a key official has told The Nation that the trials have been rigged from the start. According to Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantánamo's military commissions, the process has been manipulated by Administration appointees to foreclose the possibility of acquittal.
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Wolverton
 Eliot Spitzer or the Subprime CEOs – Which Crime Should Really Call Up Outrage?
The judgement is in - neither corporate nor political power should insulate the guilty.
Nomi Prins, The WIP (Women's International Perspective)
Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Ken Mitchell
The Starbucks, sidewalk and subway comments continue to flow abundant as New Yorkers processed the country’s latest made-for-TV sex scandal. The reality that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Time Magazine’s former Crusader of the Year, the man now dubbed “George Fox” and “Client #9,” had repeatedly gotten too hot and heavy with various high-class call-girls broke in salacious bits. This is the stuff that causes political dreams in America to dissolve even faster than the seismic destruction unleashed by the subprime mortgage crisis and the economic recession that has followed it.
 The judgement is in - neither corporate nor political power should insulate the guilty. Photograph by Elaine Y.
Spitzer’s meteoric rise to heady ‘American Dream’ heights guarantees that his sudden plunge will furnish rich fodder for everything from Saturday Night Live to Hardball with Chris Matthews. The governor’s shattered dream is a bit like those of the subprime mortgage moguls who found their professional successes crumbling at a House Financial Services Committee hearing nearly a week earlier.
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What Would a McCain Supreme Court Look Like?
The man is no moderate on judges, my friends.
By Doug Kendall, Huffington Post
 A close look at John McCain's Senate voting record on judicial confirmations makes it painfully clear that progressives need to ignore the rantings of the Ann Coulter crowd and believe John McCain when he says he will listen to Sam Brownback and appoint judges like Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia. On judges, McCain's no moderate: if given the chance, he will appoint justices that move an already conservative Supreme Court sharply to the right.
Indeed, one looks in vain for a judge who is too ideologically conservative for McCain: he voted to confirm Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas and, unless I've missed something, every other Republican judicial nominee voted on in his 22 years in the Senate.
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4 deputies suspended in wheelchair dump
Hillsborough County (Tampa) deputy tips man out of wheelchair
Associated Press in floridatoday.com
Four Hillsborough County sheriff's deputies have been suspended after purposely tipping a wheelchair-bound man out of his wheelchair at a jail, authorities said Tuesday.
Orient Road Jail surveillance footage from Jan. 29 shows veteran deputy Charlette Marshall-Jones, 44, dumping Brian Sterner out of his wheelchair and searching him on the floor after he was brought in on a warrant after a traffic violation.
Sterner said when he was taken into a booking room and told to stand up, Jones grew agitated when he told her that he could not.
"She was irked that I wasn't complying to what she was telling me to do," he told The Tampa Tribune. "It didn't register with her that she was asking me to do something I can't do."
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View surveillance footage...
Resist Torture or Acquiesce? A Question for Americans
CIA chief Michael Hayden's recent admission to Congress that three "high value" terror detainees were waterboarded by US interrogators begs the question of whether American citizens will acquiesce in this state lawlessness because the torture was done by our government to foreigners considered to be leaders of our enemy, or will resist torture by pressing for the prosecution of high-level American civilians for authorizing war crimes commited against the laws of the United States...
Benjamin Davis, Jurist
General Michael Hayden publicly acknowledged this week (Feb 3-9) that the United States waterboarded three Al-Qaeda persons in the 2002-3 period. According to White House spokesman Tony Fratto, the then-US Attorney General and the President are presumed to have been the officials approving the use of such interrogation methods.
Notwithstanding the disappointing parsing previously engaged in by Attorney General Mukasey and others with regard to the point, let us be clear – waterboarding is torture in U.S. domestic law and as a matter of international law. There is no need for new law on this point as the current law is sufficient to prosecute waterboarding. There is no room for doubt except if one is trying to protect someone who did this torture. Read Evan Wallach's Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in United States Courts, 45:2 Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (2005). Also, read Jordan Paust’s Beyond the Law (Cambridge 2007) for legal analysis of the question of torture.
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Notorious Mississippi Girls' Prison Closed
Southern Poverty Law Center
The state of Mississippi has decided to close the state's notorious Columbia Training School, seven months after the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the state to stop the physical and sexual abuse of teenage girls confined there.
The SPLC suit exposed brutal conditions at the prison, including the painful shackling of girls for weeks at a time. It also sought to force the state to provide mental health and rehabilitative services to girls, many of whom suffer from emotional problems or mental illness.
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