Last September, Harvey wrote in The Free For All about Star Simpson -- the MIT student who was arrested at Logan Airport for wearing a (prank) sweatshirt displaying a working circuit board connected to a battery -- and predicted that "there is no way prosecutors can convince twelve sane jurors that a student, wearing such a sweatshirt with the flashing lights tacked onto the outside rather than hidden underneath her clothing, was actually trying to perpetrate a hoax that she was a suicide bomber."

By Harvey Silverglate

It’s unlikely that the pooh-bahs at the Bush Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) read any civil liberties column or blog, let alone The Free For All. But I can’t help but think that somehow this blog launched an idea when I suggested on February 8 that the DOJ sic its legal ethics watch-dogs from the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) on the DOJ lawyers who drafted the infamous “torture memos.

By Harvey Silverglate

Last Friday, I wrote in this space that there are ample grounds for launching ethics investigations against the Bush Administration lawyers who wrote formal opinions authorizing various “coercive interrogation” techniques that long ago overstepped the lines – a bit vague here and there, but not altogether unfathomable – the law uses to define torture.

The New York Times reported this morning that its Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, James Risen, was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury sitting in Alexandria, Virginia, which seeks the reporter’s sources for a chapter of his 2006 book, State of War. The grand jury seems most concerned about information that was in one of the book's chapters, but which had not previously been reported in the Times' earlier reporting of the super-secret NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

By Harvey Silverglate

Sometimes, as Sigmund Freud put it, a cigar is just a cigar. And, likewise, sometimes words in the Constitution actually mean what they say. Much brainpower, however, has been expended trying to argue that the First Amendment, which admonishes that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” [emphasis added], actually doesn’t mean what it appears to say.

By James F. Tierney

We wanted to post a brief follow-up on Harvey's argument about Michael Mukasey and whether waterboarding is torture (it is). MSNBC host Keith Olbermann explains that Mukasey's dissembling equivocation is a result of Bush's desire to cover his own legacy. Olbermann is right, and it does this while also serving the purpose noted by Harvey -- protecting an "advice of legal counsel" defense in the event of future prosecutions.

By Harvey Silverglate

The media has been abuzz today with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s discomfort with Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey – and his refusal to opine whether waterboarding (the interrogation technique widely reported as used by CIA interrogators to wring information out of suspected terrorists) is illegal or unconstitutional.

The Boston Globe had a well-reasoned editorial earlier this week pointing out one crucial difference between Germany’s recent detention of suspects in a terrorist bombing plot, and the “war on terror” being conducted by the Bush administration: Germany has followed a law-enforcement paradigm, not a war paradigm, and hence has been more protective of civil liberties.