|
Faithful husband, soccer dad,
basset owner, and former cowboy
Return to TboggHomePage
FELLOW TRAITORS
*The Nether-Count*
100 Monkeys Typing
Ain't No Bad Dude
Alicublog
Americablog
American Leftist
Attytood (Will Bunch)
Bad Attitudes
Balloon Juice
Better Inhale Deeply
Bitch Ph.D
Bloggy
Bob Harris
Brilliant At Breakfast
BusyBusyBusy
Byzantium's Shores
Creek Running North
Crooked Timber
Crooks and Liars
Cursor
Daily Kos
Dependable Renegade
David Ehrenstein
Democratic Veteran
Dohiyi Mir
Down With Tyranny
Echidne of the Snakes
Edicts of Nancy
Elayne Riggs
Eschaton (Atrios)
Ezra Klein
Failure Is Impossible
Feministe
Feministing
Firedoglake
First Draft
Freewayblogger
The Garance
The Group News Blog
Guano Island
Hairy Fish Nuts
Hammer of the Blogs
Hullabaloo(Digby)
I Am TRex
If I Ran the Zoo
I'm Not One To Blog
Interesting Times
James Wolcott
Jesus' General
Jon Swift
Juan Cole
King of Zembla
Kung Fu Monkey
Lance Mannion
Lawyers Guns and Money
Lean Left
Liberal Oasis
Main & Central
Majikthise
Making Light (Nielsen Hayden)
Mark Kleiman
Martini Revolution
MaxSpeak
MF Blog
MyDD
Needlenose
The Next Hurrah
Nitpicker
No More Mr. Nice Blog
Norbizness
Norwegianity
Oliver Willis
One Good Move
Orcinus
Pacific Views
Pam's House Blend
Pandagon
Pharyngula
Political Animal(K.Drum)
The Poorman
Progressive Gold
Right Hand Thief
Rising Hegemon
Roger Ailes
Rude Pundit
Rumproast
Sadly, No
Seeing The Forest
Shakesville
Sisyphus Shrugged
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo
Slacktivist
SteveAudio
Suburban Guerilla
TalkLeft
The American Street
The Left Coaster
The Road To Surfdom
The Sideshow
The Talking Dog
The Talent Show
Tom Tomorrow
Tom Watson
Whiskeyfire
UggaBugga
Wampum
Wonkette
World O'Crap
TOSS ME
A BONE
Amazon Wish List
SOURCES
MSNBC
CNN
The Washington Post
Media Matters
The New York Times
The Guardian
Yahoo News
Salon
The Raw Story
Common Dreams
Media Transparency
The Nation
Alternet
Joe Conason
Talking Points Memo
THE VAST WASTELAND
Captain Corndog & Friends
Cheerleaders Gone Spazzy
80% True
Corner of Mediocrity and Banality
Village Idiots Central
Darwin's Waiting Room
News for Mouthbreathers
Mailbox
Your e-mail may be reprinted sans name and e-mail address. Think about how stupid you want to appear.
Blogroll Me!
Site Feed
|
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Plays a lawyer on the internets
Um. No thanks. I'll take my chances with the public defender 
For your reading pleasure, the brilliant legal mind of The Big Trunk:
I can't explain
One of the first fruits of the PATRIOT Act was the indictment of University of South Florida Professor of Terrorism Sami al Arian. In addition to holding down his academic post, al Arian moonlighted as the North American head of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. For ten years the government monitored his communications with his terrorist friends in Gaza, but was prohibited from sharing the intercepted communications with federal prosecutors. When the PATRIOT Act brought "the wall" down, the government brought a multi-count indictment against al Arian and several confederates based in large part on the communications.
It's hard for me to understand how a jury could have acquitted al Arian on eight counts of the indictment yesterday and deadlocked on the remaining nine that were submitted against al Arian. At Frontpage, Joe Kaufman is equally mystified, but worth reading: "Acquitting a terrorist." After putting in its case over five-and-a-half months, al Arian rested his defense without calling a single witness. Perhaps the bigger surprise is the government's previous successes in difficult terrorism cases such as the one involving the blind sheikh. The outcome of the al Arian case nevertheless represents a serious miscarriage of justice.
Lets review:
The US government builds up a huge case against al Arian (so big, in fact, that Attorney John Ashcroft goes on live TV to announce the indictments) and presents it at trial, the defense rests without calling one witness, and because the jury couldn't find it in the evidence to convict him on even one of seventeen indictments ...it's a "serious miscarriage of justice" and Johnson doesn't get it.
Which leads us to believe that:
A) The true believers at the Justice Department are so incompetent that Michael Brown will be hired to mentor them, in which case, we're all doomed.
B) There was no case to be made in the first place but al Arian was sufficiently swarthy so, what the hell.
C) Someone took Scott Johnson's bar exam for him.
D) All of the above.
|
|
