The Supreme Court will hear arguments tomorrow in Lawrence v. Texas, which experts say may be the most important case taken by the case on gay rights in the past 20 years.

The issue is whether Texas can ban same-sex sodomy between consenting adults in the privacy of their own home. Texas will argue its legislature has the authority to ban conduct it considers immoral.

The petitioners will argue that their liberty and privacy interests as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause renders the Texas law illegal.

You can read more about it in today's Texas Lawyer here.

American Lawyer Media today has three articles wrapped into one package addressing legal issues of the Administration's War With Iraq.

"International law experts are questioning the Bush administration's legal justification for entering into the war and examining whether the president can really try Iraqis who destroy their country's oil wells during the fighting. And when it's all over, will the U.N. be able to satisfy the claims for compensation from businesses, governments and individuals damaged by the conflict?"

These are not opinion pieces, they air both sides of the debates, relying on legal scholars and other experts in their analysis.

The LA Times reports that 30 captured prisoners have been flown from Afganistan to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

18 of the original detainees have been sent home. There are now 660 detainees at the Cuban naval base.

No criminal charges have been brought against any of them.

Lisl Auman was in police custody at the time of the crime, yet under the felony-murder rule she was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Last summer, she lost her bid to the Colorado Court of Appeals to reverse the conviction. Monday, the Colorado Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari and agreed to hear the case.

The issue before Colorado's high court court will be whether Lisl's arrest by police precluded her liability for felony murder.

Journalist Hunter Thompson took up Lisl's cause during her first appeal, writing about it often in his ESPN column, including here.

The New York Times shares our concerns, expressed in the comments section to this post, over pending federal efforts to pass a bill expanding Amber Alerts:

...If used correctly, such systems seem to be useful tools for law enforcement. But given the very few cases of child abduction and the potential for vigilantism, the systems must be designed to ensure that they do more good than harm.

There is nothing wrong with coordinating information about missing children. But if done badly, there is the potential of promoting vigilantism by seeming to invite help in apprehending a suspected abductor. Also, if the wrong information is put out — an incorrect license plate or a bad physical description — posses of armed citizens could descend on innocent people, with tragic results.

The Senate passed legislation earlier this year to establish a nationwide Amber Alert network and to provide federal grants for, among other things, highway notifications. On a pure cost-benefit basis, the attention and financing do not really seem warranted. There are only about 100 abductions by strangers a year, making it a lesser threat to children than choking or bicycle accidents.

If Amber Alerts are going to become more widespread, law enforcement must be careful to screen out all but the most well-verified cases and to present the information in a way that encourages members of the public to watch for missing children without taking the law into their own hands.

In an unprecedented ruling today, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered that a May 6 hearing on Zacarias Moussaoui's right to interview Al Qaeda member Ramzi Binlashibh will be closed to the public.

Is such secrecy justified when the Government publicized the case at every turn prior to its determnination that national security concerns were more important?

Larry Ottinger, senior staff attorney for the liberal People for the American Way Foundation, said he found the secrecy "very troubling. An open court system and open hearings are fundamental to the American system of justice," he said.

The trial judge had granted Moussaoui's request to interview Binalshibh because he has a right to exculpatory information, and Binalshibh could refute parts of the Government's case--specifically the allegation that Moussaoui was part of the 9/11 conspiracy. The difference between being a member of Al Qaeda and intending to commit a different terrorist act against the U.S., and intending to participate in 9/11, is significant because it could determine whether Moussaoui, if convicted, gets life or death. Supplying material aid or resources to terrorists does not carry the death penalty. Conspiring to commit the 9/11 attacks does.

It is widely expected that if the Government loses its bid to overturn the trial court's ruling that Moussaoui is entitled to interview Binalshibh, the Government will dismiss the federal case and try him in a military tribunal proceeding.

Moussaoui is the only person in America who has been charged with committing the 9/11 attacks. It is essential that his trial and all proceedings be open to the public. In the event of a guilty verdict, and particulary a death sentence, the American public has to be able to trust in the integrity of the process. As another Judge recently said in a case involving closure of deportation hearings, "Democracy dies behind closed doors."

For more on Moussaoui and the events in his case to date, go here.

Iraq's foreign minister has declared that "the teachings of Islam," and not the Geneva Convention, will be the nation's guidelines in the treatment of coalition POWs.

"First of all, we are committed to the teachings of Islam. We are faithful Muslims. We take care of our prisoners of war in accordance with our teachings of Islam," Foreign Minister Naji Sabri told a BBC radio program. According to an Agence France-Presse report, the foreign minister said, "We are committed first of all to the teachings of Islam, and second we are committed to the conventions of Geneva in dealing with the prisoners of war."

In the wake of the Supreme Court refusal to examine the FISA Review Court's approval of expanded spy powers for Ashcroft, the American Civil Liberties Union is calling upon Congress and the Courts to provide greater oversight.

The ACLU also disclosed today that, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA,) it has received documents establishing that Aschroft is bypassing the courts to exercise his authority to force banks, Internet service providers, telephone companies, and credit agencies to turn over their customers’ records.

You can read about the surveillance in the Post-Patriot Act age and the ACLU's FOIA/Patriot Act lawsuit here..

As to what you can do to stop this unwarranted, ill-advised expansion of spy power without judicial oversight, go here.

The FBI reports it has interviewed 5,000 Iraqis in the U.S. since last month. The FBI says the interviews are voluntary. 30 interviewees have been arrested and detained afterwards, although none have been charged with a crime.

Although the FBI says it is not using the interviews to arrest large numbers of Iraqis, two law enforcement officials speaking on condition of anonymity said about 30 have been detained on immigration charges since the program began last week.

Late last month, Attorney General John Ashcroft gave the FBI and U.S. marshals authority to arrest people on immigration charges.

Some of those held are people the FBI had under surveillance and decided to apprehend when hostilities with Iraq began, the officials said. None had been charged with any terrorist plot, espionage or any other criminal offenses, the officials said.

Here are the reasons that many civil liberties and immigration groups object to the singling out of Iraqis for these interviews.

Al Jazeera now has an English website. [link via Seeing the Forest]

The Washington Post has a continually updated Latest News in Iraq blog-type feed here.

As Iraq's top Olympic official, Uday Hussein is accused of the torture and murder of athletes who fail to win.

THE BUTCHER'S BOY , as he is sometimes called, is reputed to be the most brutal member of Iraq's notorious ruling family. As an infant he reportedly played with disarmed grenades. By 10 he was accompanying his father to the torture chamber at Qasr-al-Nihayyah (the Palace of the End, where many political enemies, including deposed King Faisal II, were killed) to watch Saddam deal with dissidents. By 16 he bragged of committing his first murder, telling classmates he had killed a teacher who had upbraided him in front of a girlfriend.

For nearly 20 years Uday Hussein has been the most powerful force in Iraq's athletic hierarchy. In 1984, when Uday was 20, Saddam handed his son the reins of both the country's Olympic committee and its soccer federation, hoping Uday could help rebuild the spirit of the nation's youth while also proving himself a worthy successor to his father. ...Uday's penchant for violence has long been an open secret among international athletic officials. ...

"Two stories about Uday leap to mind," the State Department official told SI. "The first is the caning of the feet -- called falaka -- of the soccer team. That form of torture is well known to be used by Saddam's forces as well. They beat the soles of the feet, which breaks a lot of the smaller bones, causes massive swelling and leaves victims unable to walk for a while. There were also reports that after a loss Uday forced the volleyball team, which was made up of taller athletes, to remain in a room he had constructed with a five-foot-high ceiling. He built the room so small that not all of them could sit at the same time. The only way they could fit was by having half of them standing and leaning over while the other half were sitting with their knees in their chests. He considered this a motivational technique. There was always a psychological element to the kind of torture Uday employed.

A human rights group has lodged a complaint with the International Olympics Committee, backed up by several affidavits of tortured athletes. There has been no investigation or action to date.

IOC president Jacques Rogge acknowledged last week that his organization received the complaint and says it is in the hands of the ethics committee. But IOC member Richard Pound says that it is "important to remember these are just allegations, and you have to make sure this is not all tied to the Iraq-U.S. dispute, that we are not being used for propaganda. You just never know."

This is disgusting, and we hope other rights groups join the effort to hold this son of Saddam accountable, assuming he wasn't killed last week. He belongs in the International Criminal Court. The court Bush refused to allow America to join. At least we can't think of any way Bush and Rumsfeld could intervene to stop any such proceedings brought against Uday.

The Nation has collected dispatches from people around the globe reporting on reaction to the Invasion of Iraq. The reports come from cities as diverse as Hanoi, Lagos, Cairo, Paris, Beijing, London and Jerusalem.

Also check out our new "warblog" blogroll on the right. These sites are updated continuously, particularly Sean-Pauls' the Agonist. Others are by Chris Allbritton, a non-embedded freelance reporter in Bagdad and Salam Pax, a resident of Bagdad who is still there.