There are several editorials in today's papers opposing the Graham Amendment:

• Houston Chronicle
• Boston Globe
• Denver Post
• Miami Herald
• San Francisco Chronicle
• North Jersey Record and Herald News
• Baltimore Sun

[hat tip to Neal Sonnett of Miami]

by TChris

When senators complain that "terrorists" shouldn't be entitled to habeas corpus review of their detentions, they're missing the point. It isn't enough for the administration to claim someone is a terrorist. As P. Sabin Willett makes clear, the administration doesn't always get it right.

Willett represents a client at Guantanamo named Adel.

Adel is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken.

So Adel is now a free man, right? The Bush administration's secret tribunal did justice, right? Wrong.

Of all the articles and columns I have read in recent days about the injustice of stripping the right of detainees to access to our courts to challenge the legality of their detention, this is my favorite.

It is written by two Denver civil rights lawyers with clients at Guantanamo. When reading it for quotes, I couldn't pick just a few. Every paragraph should be read.

To get the flavor, start with this:

by Last Night in Little Rock

Two defense lawyers in the Saddam Hussein trial have been murdered since the current recess to November 28th started, the first on October 20th and the second on November 8th. Iraq's Prime Minister called the murders an effort to end the trial as noted in the London Sunday Times. The defense is calling for a boycott of the trial because of security concerns, as noted here:

After the killing of the first lawyer, defence attorneys announced they would not co-operate with the court and would refuse to appear at the next session until they were satisfied with security.

Saddam and his co-defendants had 1,500 lawyers working on their behalf, in some capacity, with many in Jordan, and 1,100 of them have withdrawn from the case as noted here.

The court has said that the trial will go on without those who left, by appointing new lawyers as lead counsel. There are, after all, plenty to choose from. If the existing lawyers are willing to go on, you can be sure it will.

On Larry King Live, Judith Miller praised the Alexandria jail staff and did not disclose any gritty details of her jail conditons beyond the constant noise and discombulating effect of the everpresent glare of the lights. Any seasoned criminal defense lawyer watching the show realized there is a book worth of humiliating details she chose not to share with CNN's audience.

For whatever reason, Miller has chosen to share them with New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams. Not only are Miller's comments in quotes, meaning they are her exact words, they ring true to what defense lawyers hear from hundreds of their clients.

Murray Waas reports tonight that Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, former top Republican on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has been cleared in an ethics probe. The probe began in 2004 on a referral from the Justice Department, after it conducted its own investigation and declined to charge Shelby with a crime.

The Senate Ethics Committee inquiry commenced as a result of a referral from the Department of Justice to the committee on July 20, 2004, in which the department said that there existed what sources described as "credible and specific information" that Shelby might have leaked classified information to the press, and then possibly made false statements to federal investigators to conceal what he had done.

The Newark Ledger today has an analysis of more than 200 opinions Judge Alito authored on criminal law during his 15 years on the bench.

As senators and advocacy groups pore over legal writings by Alito, the New Jersey native nominated to the Supreme Court, they will find a by-the-book interpreter of the law whose opinions in criminal matters reflect his many years as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey and advocate for Justice Department in Washington.

If the decision is close, Alito tends to side with law enforcement and rarely treads new ground, according to interviews with legal scholars and a review of more than two dozen opinions he has written in the past 15 years....Alito seems willing to give the benefit of the doubt to law enforcement.

The article cites several examples. [Via Sentencing Law and Policy whose author, Law Prof Doug Berman, is quoted in the article.]

The Department of Justice has issued its annual death penalty statistics. There are 63 fewer people on death row in America than there were in 2003.

That's still 3,315 too many.

Texas continues to lead the country in the number of executions carried out. California has the largest death row population, followed by Texas. As for race and gender:

A woman has been arrested in the Jordan bombings. She will confess on Jordanian tv this afternoon. She was to be one of the four bombers but her equipment didn't work and her husband and co-bomber scuttled her out of the hotel ballroom right before he blew himself up, taking with him many of the wedding guests.

The woman's brother was al Zarqawi's right hand man in the Anbar province of Iraq who was killed last year.

More details here.

Update: She was just on tv confessing. She didn't say her husband pushed her out of the way, only that his belt went off and her's didn't so she fled with the others in the ballroom.

All of the bombers were Iraqi. The Jordanian Government is going out of its way to reassure the Iraqis in Jordan that they are still welcome there.

by Last Night in Little Rock

Jeremy Hinzman, a U.S. soldier who deserted and fled to Canada rather than go to Iraq accusing the U.S. of war crimes, sought and was denied asylum by the Canadian government because he was not a conscientious objector.

The Canadian Federal Court granted review of the case Friday. See articles in the National Post and Globe and Mail.

The Washington Post takes a well-deserved swipe at Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo Sunday. Tancredo is proposing that citizenship be denied to U.S. born children of undocumented residents. Apparently he has never read the 14th Amendment.

The 14th Amendment begins: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Not "all persons except children of illegal immigrants," not "all persons except those Congress exempts in moments of nativism." All persons.

Tancredo's off the wall theory is that these children are similar to diplomats in that they are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction.

In a Sunday editorial, the New York Times has some wise words for Democrats about Judge Alito.

The Alito nomination comes at a critical moment for the Democratic Party. With President Bush's poll numbers plummeting, Democrats are finding a new optimism about their chances in 2006 and 2008. But to capitalize on the Republicans' weakness, the party needs to show that it has an alternative vision for the country. As the Democrats refine their message for next year's elections, the first thing they need to be able to say to the American people is that they did not sit by idly while the far right took over the Supreme Court and began dismantling fundamental rights and freedoms.