President Obama has ordered the transfer of Ali Saleh Al-Marri from indefinite solitary confinement to the U.S. criminal justice system. Held without charge for 5 years and 8 months, Al-Marri’s case was yet another example of BushAdmin overreach of executive power and subversion of civil liberties. So we should all cheer Obama’s move, right? His [...]

[Read more →]

Click the image to read the cartoon at full size. It will make you a better person.

[Read more →]

“The hope we all had in President Obama to lead us on a different path has not turned out as we’d hoped,” said Tina Monshipour Foster, a human rights attorney representing a detainee at the Bagram Airfield. “We all expected better.” From the AP story reporting that the ObamAdmin will continue the BushAdmin policy of [...]

[Read more →]

My friend Allie pointed out that the Senate Judicial committee hearing of Eric Holder’s nomination to be the first African-American Attorney General took place on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Another milestone, quietly noted. The biggest news coming out of the hearing is that Holder acknowledges that “waterboarding is torture.” We’ll hold him to that. Jonathan [...]

[Read more →]

From a Washington Post story on a Pew Center of the States study on the U.S. prison population: With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a [...]

[Read more →]