Have you read Yuval Ginbar’s book Why Not Torture Terrorists?

Trials, stripped to their essence, are about truth and justice. In the medieval age, trial was by ordeal — where a prisoner was required to undergo some painful task, like walking across burning coals or being submerged in water — to test his innocence. Centuries later at Guantánamo, the Bush administration came up with a new way of arriving at the truth: “Combatant Status Review Tribunals,” where prisoners seeking to test their detention were denied the right even to a lawyer, to see the evidence against them and summon witnesses in their favor, and to an impartial judge. The stakes could not have been more significant and the process more inferior — less [process], even, than you receive in my hometown of Brooklyn to challenge a parking ticket. The Bush administration also came up with “military commissions” — now going through their third reiteration (talk about putting lipstick on a pig) — which long allowed evidence gained by torture and other abuse and whose rules can best be described as “make them up as you go along.” The results are no less arbitrary than medieval trial by ordeal. But they are surely worse in that — now, in the twenty-first century and hundreds of years after the Enlightenment and American Revolution — we not only know better, but have the time-tested system of our ordinary criminal courts that we have shunted aside.

From a recent speech by the ACLU’s Jonathan Hafetz, posted by Andy Worthington as part of his announcement of the publication of a new book, edited by Hafetz and Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School, that presents the personal experiences of more than a hundred of the lawyers (civilian and military) who have represented those detained by the American military – mostly pro bono counsel for the citizens of more than 40 countries who have been forcibly imprisoned at the American Navy’s Guantanamo Bay base, the Air Force’s Bagram base, and at CIA “black sites” in unnamed countries abroad: The Guantánamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison, Outside the Law.

Bean salad: all cans. Green beans, yellow wax beans (Ralph’s doesn’t have them), red kidney beans, and improvising from there using water chestnuts, bamboo shoots, mushrooms, olives, baby corn …. And a good oil-and-vinegar dressing.

It was a criminal case where I made the Motion. (though I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t know the Judge – I was just goofing)

But I work in the State Courts pretty much exclusively, where there’s a little more room for screwing around.

I can count on one hand the time I’ve been in the Fed system – grand total of one trial – no jury. So I walked up to the rostrum and said – “Judge, I’m a State Court guy – I don’t know if I can work from behind this thing – would you mind if I moved arund the room a little bit?”

Luckily for me, he jus laughed and said go ahead.

I don’t make a good fit for Fed work.