Rudy Giuliani makes it clear in this Daily Show video that in 2006 he was all for trying terrorists in New York City, gracefully speaking up for our country, our effective legal system and it being the ethical, moral and right thing to do. Three years later a full 180 that trying terrorists within our failed legal system is beyond abhorrent. What happened?

"Judge Stanwood R. Duval, Jr awarded over $719,000 to four different sets of plaintiffs who alleged that the MRGO, a 76-mile manmade waterway that allowed vessels to quickly get from the Gulf of Mexico to the Industrial Canal, exasperated the conditions that led to flooding in the St. Bernard area. The ruling could set a precedent for over 400,000 other residents who have filed damage claims against the government(.)"

Republicans in Congress are gearing up to fight a new White House effort to relocate detainees at Guantanamo Bay to a prison facility in Illinois. But on Sunday, a group of highly respected conservative figures lent their support to the transfer, calling it necessary to "preserve national security" while simultaneously avoiding "sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition."

If you hire a lawyer, the chances are you won't be sentenced to death in Houston. University of Denver Criminologist Scott Phillips reviewed 504 capital indictments over three decades in Harris County, Texas, and found that defendants who hired lawyers for the entire trial were never sentenced to death -- and were more likely to be acquitted. The results of his study, published over the summer in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, are truly stunning. Since nearly all defendants facing the death penalty in Harris County were poor, Phillips argues that his results further demonstrate the arbitrariness of capital punishment.

Media commentary on the upcoming 9/11 trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has raised concern that state secrets may be divulged, including details about how the Bush administration used torture to extract evidence about al-Qaeda. But what the Fawning Corporate Media (or FCM) have so far neglected is the likelihood that the testimony will be so public that they will have to break their studied silence about why Sheikh Mohammed and his associates say they orchestrated the attacks of 9/11. For reasons that are painfully obvious, the FCM have done their best to ignore or bury the role that Israel’s repression of the Palestinians has played in motivating the 9/11 attacks and other anti-Western terrorism.

Some critics say a civilian trial -- instead of a military tribunal -- for self-proclaimed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his accomplices could end up targeting the Bush administration and its anti-terror policies.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday that some top al-Qaeda 9/11 conspirators will be tried by jury in New York not far from the scenes of devastation that they had wrought. Predictably, Republican critics vowed to fight the decision, since they much prefer to hold people forever without trial while torturing them, sort of the way some English kings did in North America before there was that pesky American constitution. In fact, on a whole range of issues, the contemporary Republican Party is a party of medieval romanticism. Its disquisitions on when the human person begins are theological in character and rooted in assumptions even a lot of medievals would have questioned. Its faith that bankers would never steal from us and so do not need to be regulated is a form of mysticism that medievals would have applied to saints. And its fascination with arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and with torture more recalls the star chambers of yore than the deliberations at Philadelphia over 200 years ago.

Obama's announcement to try 9/11 defendants would be commendable if it applied to all, rather than some, detainees.

"There is no firm national count of the number of untested rape kits. But last March, Human Rights Watch found more than 12,500 untested rape kits in the Los Angeles area alone. The Houston Police Department recently found at least 4,000 untested rape kits in storage. Detroit’s backlog may be as high as 10,000 untested kits."

Let's be clear on one thing: since the 1970s, the federal grand jury system where the prosecutor reigns supreme, has been an instrument wielded by the secret state to target dissent and to ensnare left-wing government critics in open-ended "investigations" whose sole purpose is to harass if not prosecute alleged "troublemakers." -- Today, with antiwar groups, anarchists, socialists, animal rights and environmental activists clearly focused in the secret state's cross hairs, one can speculate that the DOJ's reticence to reveal what "crime" they were allegedly investigating in all probability related to information surreptitiously obtained by a paid informant or provocateur. --- --- The lesson here? -- When the state comes knocking, the first and best line of defense is to seek competent legal advice from the relevant civil liberties' organization. - Handing over information that the government is not legally entitled to, or indeed, answering questions posed by federal investigators trained in subtle interview techniques without an attorney present can -- and has -- resulted in "obstruction of justice" or a "lying to federal government agents" indictment, a crime under Title 18, United States Code, § 1001. Silence is always an option. A good place to start learning how to fight back against electronic spying practices is a working familiarity with EFF's excellent handbook "Surveillance Self-Defense."

Now let’s see what went into this legislative sausage. (a) Everyone agrees that the unregulated “dark markets” of Wall Street’s trading in over-the-counter derivatives such as credit default swaps moved the financial crisis from major problem to total disaster. Currently, most trades in these “products” are privately negotiated on the phone, dealer to dealer. It’s appallingly risky – that’s why we have a multi-trillion dollar bailout. But because the dealers at major banks can quote different prices to different customers, with huge spreads between buy and sell quotes, the banks are making huge profits and want to keep it that way. So while congress is busy working on reform legislation, Wall Street’s lawyer-lobbyists in Washington are working hard to neutralize such efforts.

Congress took a reasonable step in 1994 when it required states receiving federal education money to expel students who brought guns onto school property, but states and localities overreacted, as they so often do. They enacted “zero tolerance” policies under which children are sometimes arrested for profanity, talking back, shoving matches and other behavior that would once have been resolved with detention or meetings with the students’ parents. This arrest-first policy has been disastrous for young people, who are significantly more likely to drop out and experience long-term problems once they become entangled in the juvenile justice system. It has led to egregious racial profiling, with black and Hispanic students being shipped off to court at a higher rate than white students. And it has been a waste of time for the police to haul off children to the courts when they should be protecting the public from real criminals.

Two courts, one in Italy and one in the United States, ruled recently on the Bush administration’s practice of extraordinary rendition, which is the kidnapping of people and sending them to other countries for interrogation — and torture. The Italian court got it right. The American court got it miserably wrong.

“The United States needs stronger privacy institutions to protect us at a time when new technology and new government powers are threatening our privacy in truly unprecedented ways,” said Michael Macleod-Ball, Acting Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “The history of abuse during the civil rights era, the Cold War and, of course, during the Bush administration, underlines the need for a vigorous system of checks and balances as envisioned by our nation’s founders. The Obama administration and the 111th Congress have the opportunity to enter a new era of accountability and ensure that these abuses don’t happen on their watch.”

The future of the Internet in Canada may have been decided in Seoul, Korea, this past week. But it's hard to be sure, since the latest negotiations for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement were held in secret, as they have been in the past, and the only details came to the public through leaks, says Michael Geist, a law professor and Star columnist, who himself posted a leaked chapter on the agreement's Internet Policy on his personal website.

A poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org finds that most people in 17 of 21 nations surveyed say their government should abide by international law and reject the view that governments are not obliged to follow such laws when they conflict with the national interest. Most respondents in two out of three nations polled are also confident that the International Court of Justice, also known as the World Court, would treat their country fairly and impartially, the WPO poll shows. The poll, conducted in 21 nations from around the world asked respondents which of two statements is closest to their own view. The first statement said, "Our nation should consistently follow international laws. It is wrong to violate international laws, just as it is wrong to violate laws within a country": the second said, "If our government thinks it is not in our nation's interest, it should not feel obliged to abide by international laws." On average, across all nations polled, 57% said that their country should put a higher priority on international law than national interest. WorldPublicOpinion.org conducted the poll of 20,202 respondents in 21 nations that comprise 64 percent of the world's population.

The Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), José Miguel Insulza, on Friday deplored the disruption to the process of implementation of the Agreement reached in Tegucigalpa on October 30. “The measures approved in the Agreement are clear and were signed by the parties of their own free will. I hope they will be met without further subterfuges to reestablish democracy, institutional legitimacy and peace among Hondurans,”... the formation of a Government of Unity and National Reconciliation should, naturally, be presided by he who legitimately holds the office of President of the Honduran nation.

"There's a very important editorial in The Nation this week that I hope everyone will take the time to read. It's about the wrongful conviction of Anthony McKinney, who's been in prison for thirty-one years for a murder he did not commit." NOTE: The entire editorial is here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091123/editors

A federal judge in Kentucky has rejected a motion by tobacco companies to block key provisions of the new law giving the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the power to regulate tobacco products.

The United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a report, which accuses Israel of war crimes as well as crimes against humanity during the weeks-long onslaught on the Gaza Strip. 114 states endorsed a resolution supporting the report by a Human Rights Council panel led by the South African judge Richard Goldstone in Thursday's UN vote while only 18 states including the US objected to the report's adoption. Forty-four countries also abstained including France, Britain and Russia. The assembly's resolution demands that both the Israelis and the Palestinians carry out investigations within three months. It also pushes for Security Council attention.