Findlaw columnist Joanne Mariner raises an intriguing issue about the future of the Zacarias Moussaoui proceedings. If his federal case is dismissed due to the Government's refusal to comply with a court order directing it to make Ramzi Binalshibh available for an interview, he is likely to have his case transferred to a military tribunal.

Moussaoui is a french citizen. The French oppose the death penalty. When Britain complained about two of its citizens being tried by American military tribunals, Bush backed down and ordered proceedings stayed while he reconsiders. But Britain was our ally in the Iraq war. France is not. Do you think Bush will accord French citizens the same respect?

While the decision to reconsider the proceedings is good news for the British and Australians, its message to the rest of the world is provocatively clear. Military commissions are not fit for our own people; they may not be suitable for our close allies; but they're good enough for everybody else.

...To the extent that a defendant's nationality now determines the quality of justice due him, Moussaoui - citizen of a country that, notoriously, did not support the U.S. war on Iraq - loses out.

But in making this choice, the Administration should be aware of its ultimate consequences. If Moussaoui, without having had access to potentially exculpatory testimony, were to be sentenced to death by a military tribunal, France would not be alone in condemning the United States. The entire world would condemn the proceedings, and rightly so.

Very rightly so, thanks, Joanne.

Here we go again. First we had the Inspector General's report criticizing the military's treatment of detainees. Now there is a new Inspector General report scheduled for release this week documenting accusations of official abuse in carrying out the Patriot Act:

A report by internal investigators at the Justice Department has identified dozens of recent cases in which department employees have been accused of serious civil rights and civil liberties violations involving enforcement of the sweeping federal antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act.

The inspector general's report, which was presented to Congress last week and is awaiting public release, is likely to raise new concern among lawmakers about whether the Justice Department can police itself when its employees are accused of violating the rights of Muslim and Arab immigrants and others swept up in terrorism investigations under the 2001 law.

The report said that in the six-month period that ended on June 15, the inspector general's office had received 34 complaints of civil rights and civil liberties violations by department employees that it considered credible, including accusations that Muslim and Arab immigrants in federal detention centers had been beaten.

....The accused workers are employed in several of the agencies that make up the Justice Department, with most of them assigned to the Bureau of Prisons, which oversees federal penitentiaries and detention centers. The report said that credible accusations were also made against employees of the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Immigration and Naturalization Service; most of the immigration agency was consolidated earlier this year into the Department of Homeland Security.

Michigan Congressman John Conyers had this response to the report:

This report shows that we have only begun to scratch the surface with respect to the Justice Department's disregard of constitutional rights and civil liberties," Mr. Conyers said in a statement. "I commend the inspector general for having the courage and independence to highlight the degree to which the administration's war on terror has misfired and harmed innocent victims with no ties to terror whatsoever."

We wrote last week about a Vermont newspaper editorial critical of Howard Dean's view of indigent defense and criminal defendants while he was Governor of Vermont. We were hoping he would address this on his blog and debunk the charge. We haven't seen any response. But we did receive this from a lawyer whose integrity we trust and who was a former public defender in Vermont.

I was a public defender in Vermont during part of Dean's tenure. He was openly hostile to the defense function. He once addressed a meeting of defense attorneys by stating that "my job is to make your job as difficult as possible." He is a man of his word, at least on this campaign promise. He did not want to fund public defense.

To his credit he appointed Robert Appel to the post of Defender General (Public Defender in charge of the state system.) Then he refused to reappoint Appel apparently because Robert was most effective on the shoestring budget he was given.

Dean, despite his present self proclaimed environmental advocate status, was fairly hostile to environmental concerns while Governor. Dean repeatedly appointed pro business, non environmentally sensitive people to the Environmental Board. In Dean's logic, any business that would provide a half dozen minimal wage jobs could do what they wanted to the environment. When I returned to New Jersey, I could observe that the only real difference between N.J. and VT environmentally (at least under Dean) was that VT had 7.5 million less residents.

Of course in a battle between Dean and Bush ....

When I asked this attorney if I could print his comments, he agreed, but asked to be referred to simply as a "former Vermont public defender." We are honoring his request. In his reply, he added,

Inasmuch as I fear Bush more than I distrust Dean, I would still probably vote for Dean if it came to a showdown. By the way, [one of my clients was accused] of arson murder. When my statewide boss said he didn't have the money for experts, I moved to dismiss arguing that it matters little which arm of the state was denying my client due process and effective assistance. The trial court ordered the experts, my boss appealed. The VT supremes ordered my boss to give me what I needed and to essentially rob peter to pay paul with his budget. My client was acquitted after an hour and one half of deliberation.

We are not trying to diss Dr. Dean. If he gets the nomination, he'll be our new best friend and we'll actively seek his election. But indigent defense is an issue near and dear to us, and we'd like to know if he thinks the criticism leveled at him is unfair, or if he thinks it was fair at the time but he's had a change of heart, or if it was fair then and remains fair today.

Instapundit responds to our response to his MSNBC column with advice for the Democrats in which he suggested Democrats could gain younger voters by lowering the legal drinking age. We agreed, and suggested another means of garnering votes would be for the Democrats to move to restore voting rights to felons in states that have disenfranchised them. He picks up where we left off:

I have an elaboration on that: don't have so many felonies. The justification for depriving felons of civil rights, like voting or owning guns, was originally that felonies were such serious crimes that the felon's life was ordinarily forfeit anyway. But now felonies are designated very promiscuously -- downloading files from the Internet? Filling in a pothole in your driveway that turns out to be a "wetland?"

Those things shouldn't be felonies. To my mind, imposing civil rights deprivations for such minor, mala prohibita matters is a due process violation. Adopt that approach, and you don't have to worry about felons being deprived of voting rights unless they're murderers, robbers, rapists, etc. You know: real criminals.

We agree with Glenn completely about reducing the number of felonies. It's a great idea and one that would solve a lot of problems in the justice system. But, we still think, whatever the crime, if they've done the time, they should get their right to vote back. And a very large portion of them would vote Democratic.

Excellent article about race and death penalty-qualified juries in today's New York Times, Facing a Jury of (Some of) One's Peers. We learned a new phrase from it--"bleaching of the jury"--

About the death penalty trial Ashcroft is forcing in Puerto Rico, 2 significant facts:

1. People who are not fluent in English are excluded from serving on federal juries/ In Puerto Rico, this means 1/2 to 2/3 of the country's residents are ineligible to serve.

2. Since capital jurors must be "death qualified", or willing to impose the death penalty in an appropriate case, death penalty opponents are not allowed to serve. Puerto Rico doesn't have a death penalty, it's against the Consitution there. At least another 11 to 17% of residents will be disqualified on this ground.

So what's wrong with death-qualified juries?

The case of Turkman v. Ashcroft should be getting more attention. It involves a class action lawsuit against many federal officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller, over the mistreatment of post-9/11 detainees in Brooklyn. The suit was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights , a group promoting "creative lawyering for social justice." Here are the basics:

CCR filed a class-action lawsuit in United States District Court in Brooklyn against a wide range of defendants including Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert Mueller, over the imprisonment and harsh treatment of the non-citizen immigrants jailed after the Sept. 11 attacks. The lawsuit alleges violations of the U.S. Constitution and international human rights and treaty law. The suit charges that the U.S. government used ethnic and religious profiling with respect to the round-up and detention of hundreds of people.

Plaintiffs are muslim from Pakistan and Turkey. Although the government never asserted that there was evidence that any of the plaintiffs had links to terrorist groups and never charged them with commission of any crime, they were detained for over six months in tiny, windowless cells and were beaten and abused, solely because of their country of origin and their faith. Despite the fact that the plaintiffs were neither accused nor convicted of any criminal offense, they have nonetheless been subject to the severest degrading conditions, including being subjected to body cavity strip-searches and manacled and shackled whenever they were taken from their cells. The suit alleges that the government made efforts to keep the plaintiffs from being able to practice their religion during their detention.

After the suit was filed, the Inspector General released its 198 page report on the treatment and mistreatment of the detainees in area prisons. The CCR has amended it's complaint, and the Justice Department is putting up a fight.

Chisum Lee, of the Village Voice, has the latest details and thinks this this case could bring Ashcroft's day of reckoning.

The military has confirmed it is investigating 7 soldier suicides that have occurred between the period of one week before the Iraq war began in March through the present time. All were deployed for the war. Five were in the army and one or two were in the Marines.

...the Army and the Marines have stressed suicide prevention in the past year after increases in suicides that may have been at least partially attributable to lengthy deployments and other strains following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington and the ensuing war in Afghanistan.

Overall, the military has not released an official count of possible suicides under investigation, and the total could be higher than seven, given a number of unexplained deaths included in the Pentagon's casualty statistics. The military has reported nine cases of accidental death that could include suicides, most of which were from "noncombat weapons discharges." In 12 other cases, the cause of death has been officially listed as "other" and described only as "noncombat injuries."

Don't miss the concurring opinion of Judge Bright in United States v. Flores, decided by the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals on July 18, 2003. Disseminate it widely. While the court approved an upward departure, Judge Bright wrote separately about judicial discretion, and about the unfairness of the sentencing guidelines. He concluded with a plea to his colleagues:

I want to conclude by making a plea to the district judges of this country who feel that they should have some say and some discretion in sentencing. Let your opinions disclose your views about the injustice in the sentencing decision or decisions you are obligated to impose by Congressional mandate and/or the Sentencing Guidelines.

Let me say further that judges generally do not object to appropriate guidelines for sentencing decisions but the time has come for major reform in the system. I say in this concurring opinion, as I have said in other sentencing opinions that I have written, "Is anyone out there listening?" United States v. Alatorre , 207 F.3d 1078, 1080 (8th Cir. 2000) (Bright, J., concurring)."

(Received via e-mail from Neal Sonnett, Esq., Miami)

The Bush Wars has taken Howard Dean's 16 Questions for Bush and researched and presents the sources and their accompanying links.

Nice job.

The FBI's highest ranking Arab-American agent has accused the FBI of bias:

The F.B.I.'s highest-ranking Arab-American agent has filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against the bureau, charging that he was kept out of the investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings because of his ancestry.

The agent, Bassem Youssef, filed the lawsuit on Friday in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia. Mr. Youssef, a naturalized American citizen born in Egypt, said in his complaint that "no other non-Arab F.B.I. employee with similar background and experience was willfully blocked from working 9/11-related matters."

Lisa English of Ruminate This says " Welcome to the GOP Police State."

Wampum covers Democratic hopeful John Edwards.

Liberal Oasis has the latest Bush poll results in one place.

Kevin Drum at Calpundit has a uranium wrapup.

Hessiod at Counterspin tells what Ashcroft has in common with the Communist Vietnamese Government.

Matt Yglesias is back from Italy, and apparently well-rested, as he's blogging up a storm.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden at Making Light has this astute observation:

At what point did the Bush administration know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? When Rumsfeld started cutting troop allocations from the war plan. The administration may have known earlier, but they surely knew by then.

Cutting the troop allocations was crazy enough if Rumsfeld assumed US troops would be going up against conventional weapons; but even he wouldn’t have done that if he honestly thought they’d face WMDs.

Max Sawicky writes Congressman John Conyers about his insane plan to make downloading a single file from the internet a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

More to come tomorrow, we've been very negligent in writing about what other bloggers are covering the past few weeks as crime news and issues have been flying so fast and furious. But as Skippy points out on the Kobe Bryant case (not too delicately, either) there's a lot more going on in the world.

27 detainees were released from Guantanamo this week, 16 of them to Afganistan. Three were interviewed by the media upon arrival in Afganistan. Two of them alleged substantial abuse by their captors. One said the abuse included beatings.

"Who says we were not punished? It's not true," said Abdul Rehman, 29, from Faryab province in northeastern Afghanistan. "They pushed us all over, treated us very badly. They put 24 of us in a small congested room. They also put us into cold rooms."

Rehman said he had been "badly punished 107 times," speaking in an interview with Associated Press Television News at Kabul Central Jail shortly before he and the others were released to the international Red Cross in preparation for their return home.

He alleged that during his 20 months at Guantanamo, his captors chained his hands and feet and beat him with a metal rod on his legs and back, but he refused to show scars that may have resulted from any abuse.

Zabet Ullah, 32, of Kandahar, told The Associated Press while walking to the Red Cross bus, "There was very bad treatment of the prisoners in Guantanamo. It was against the human rights of the Geneva Conventions."

The third interviewed detainee had no complaints about his treatment. There are still 660 detainees at Guantanamo, eight of whom just arrived this week from Afganistan.