Later On

Note a very good grade:

Read more, including explanations of the grades.

Very good post by Greenwald:

Aside from the intrinsic dangers and injustices of arguing for immunity for high-level government officials who commit felonies (such as illegal eavesdropping, obstruction of justice, torture and other war crimes), it’s the total selectivity of the rationale underlying that case which makes it so corrupt.  Defenders of Bush officials sing in unison:  We shouldn’t get caught up in the past.  We shouldn’t be driven by vengeance and retribution.  We shouldn’t punish people whose motives in committing crimes weren’t really that bad.

There are countries in the world which actually embrace those premises for all of their citizens, and whose justice system consequently reflects a lenient approach to crime and punishment.  The United States is not one of those countries.  In fact, for ordinary citizens (the ones invisible and irrelevant to Ruth Marcus, Stuart Taylor, Jon Barry and David Broder), the exact opposite is true:

Homeless man gets 15 years for stealing $100

A homeless man robbed a Louisiana bank and took a $100 bill. After feeling remorseful, he surrendered to police the next day. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

Roy Brown, 54, robbed the Capital One bank in Shreveport, Louisiana in December 2007. He approached the teller with one of his hands under his jacket and told her that it was a robbery.

The teller handed Brown three stacks of bill but he only took a single $100 bill and returned the remaining money back to her. He said that he was homeless and hungry and left the bank.

The next day he surrendered to the police voluntarily and told them that his mother didn’t raise him that way.

Brown told the police he needed the money to stay at the detox center and had no other place to stay and was hungry.

In Caddo District Court, he pleaded guilty. The judge sentenced him to 15 years in prison for first degree robbery.

Under federal law, “the simple possession of just 5 grams of crack cocaine, the weight of about two sugar packets, subjects a defendant to a mandatory five-year prison term.”  In Alabama, the average sentence for marijuana possession — an offense for which most Western countries almost never imprison their citizens – is …

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Glenn Greenwald has a column today on the situation in Israel. It begins:

The Jerusalem Post today reports that, according to a newly released study by Peace Now, "the number of new structures in the West Bank settlements and outposts increased by 69 percent in 2008, compared to 2007" and "the settler population grew from 270,000 in 2007 to 285,000 in 2008."  Earlier this week, the leading candidate to be Israel’s next Prime Minister, Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu, said that while he "has no intention of building new settlements in the West Bank," he "would let Jewish settlements expand in the West Bank if he’s elected prime minister."

When it comes to explanations about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, Americans are typically inundated with reports about the indiscriminate, civilian-targeting violence engaged in by Palestinian religious fanatics and other extremists who oppose the very existence of Israel.  But they hear little about their Israeli counterparts — the religious extremists and radical nationalists who, with the tacit and sometimes active support of the Israeli Government and military (funded and armed by the U.S.), continue to take over more and more land in the West Bank, imposing ever-harsher and more oppressive conditions on West Bank Palestinians.  All of that is making a two-state solution increasingly difficult to envision, if not close to impossible.

Continuing the clear and positive trend of finally having a more balanced discussion of Israel in the U.S. media, 60 Minutes‘ Bob Simon, on Sunday night, broadcast a very good report focusing on how this settlement expansion occurs, the destructive mentality of the Israeli settlers, the devastating impact which settlement expansion has on the lives of Palestinians, and the ways in which settlement expansions — by design — are making a Palestinian state increasingly inconceivable.  It also provides a very clear sense of …

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James Fallows has a follow-up post on how we should treat China. It begins:

In talking about Timothy Geithner’s warnings on Chinese "currency manipulation" several days ago, my main criticism involved proportion.

Yes, the dollar/RMB exchange rate is one important element of US-Chinese interactions. But even if we’re talking only about economic issues, it is not (in my view) the most important among them. And as soon as we think about the vast range of political, strategic, scientific, cultural and other ways in which the two countries will affect each other, it falls far down the list. I bet that from later historians’ perspectives, whether the two countries can successfully grapple with climate/environmental/energy issues will matter most about their dealings in these next few years.

So why would the Administration choose to kick things off by talking about currency wars — and nothing else

Two positive developments today. One is …

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I’m trying to ignore the GOP as irrelevant these days, though Obama’s catering to their whims on the stimulus package makes them relevant, I suppose. Maybe he’ll get over that: for all that he did, the GOP leadership is demanding that GOP members vote against the package.

And occasionally it’s necessary to post a few facts to counter the unending stream of lies that flows from the mouths of the GOP—ignoring, for the moment, the racist comments from Juan Williams on Fox radio. So here’s Steven Benen setting the record straight once more:

… Republican Policy Committee Chairman John Ensign, the fourth-ranking Republican in the chamber, argued yesterday:

"You know, we have the second highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. Microsoft, which is a great American company, has zero exports from the United States. They have a lot of exports from Ireland, because, guess what, Ireland has a 12.5 percent corporate tax rate; we have a 35 percent corporate tax rate."

Are we back to this again? John McCain relied on this talking point quite a bit last year. In the first presidential debate, the Republican nominee said: "Right now, the United States of American business pays the second-highest business taxes in the world, 35 percent. Ireland pays 11 percent. Now, if you’re a business person, and you can locate any place in the world, then, obviously, if you go to the country where it’s 11 percent tax versus 35 percent, you’re going to be able to create jobs, increase your business, make more investment, et cetera."

I’d hoped we were past this, but so long as congressional Republicans want to re-litigate this as part of the stimulus debate, we might as well set the record straight. Igor Volsky explained that the Republican argument is "full of so many other holes, you can drain spaghetti with it."

* America’s Effective Tax Rate Is Comparable To Other G7 Nations: According to a recent U.S. Treasury report, the effective tax rate on equipment financed by equity is 24 percent, the same as the G-7 average. The rate on equipment financed by debt is minus 46 percent, meaning that the government actually subsidizes these investments rather than taxing them.

* America Is The Number One Country To Do Business: The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report for 2007-2008 concluded that the United States is most business friendly, followed by Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Finland and Singapore. Ireland came in at number 22.

* Two-Thirds Of Corporations Did Not Pay Taxes: According to last month’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, between 1998 and 2005 "about two-thirds of corporations operating in the United States did not pay taxes" because of a variety of corporate tax loopholes.

* US Raises Less Taxes From Corporations Than Ireland: In the United States, corporate revenues as a percentage of GDP was about 2.2 percent; Ireland raised close to 4 percent.

Yglesias added a while back, "Ireland really could be a model for successful reform in the United States; reform that would be aimed at growing the tax base by closing loopholes and, in exchange, lowering the rate. That would, if calibrated correctly, both boost economic growth and efficiency somewhat and also increase tax revenues. But a simple across-the-board rate cut would accomplish nothing of the sort."…

There’s more at the link. As to why the GOP continually lies: their policies and the direction they would take the country are seriously unpopular: the American people are, on the whole, progressive. So in order to get elected and stay in office, they must lie. That’s much easier than developing policies for the public good that people would support.

And life goes on as before. ThinkProgress:

Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, two of the child actors in “Slumdog Millionaire,” are still living in the slums of Mumbai, despite the film’s $14 million budget and worldwide success. Ali earned 500 British pounds ($710) for one year’s work and Ismail earned 1700 pounds ($2414), “less than many Indian domestic servants“:

Both children were found places in a local school and receive £20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.

Ismail is in fact “worse off” now, as his “family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin.” Ali lives nearby — in a “hut.” A Fox Searchlight spokesperson said he is “proud” of their treatment and boasted, “For 30 days work, the children were paid three times the average local annual adult salary.”

I don’t trust either, and here’s an example of why:

The Georgia peanut plant linked to a salmonella outbreak that has killed eight people and sickened 500 more across the country knowingly shipped out contaminated peanut butter 12 times in the past two years, federal officials said yesterday.

Officials at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which have been investigating the outbreak of salmonella illness, said yesterday that Peanut Corporation of America found salmonella in internal tests a dozen times in 2007 and 2008 but sold the products anyway, sometimes after getting a negative finding from a different laboratory.

Companies are not required to disclose their internal tests to either the FDA or state regulators, so health officials did not know of the problem.

The peanut butter and paste made at the company’s Blakely, Ga., plant are not sold directly to stores but are used by manufacturers to make crackers, cookies, energy bars, cereal, ice cream, candies and even dog biscuits. Some of the country’s biggest foodmakers, including Kellogg and McKee Foods, which produces Little Debbie brand snacks, have recalled more than 100 products made with the tainted ingredients, and the list keeps growing.

Federal investigators also said yesterday that they had found four strains of salmonella at the Georgia plant, including one in a sample taken from the floor near a washroom. Only the Typhimurium strain of Salmonella enterica has been linked to the outbreak…

Continue reading. Killed eight people. Knowingly shipped out contaminated peanut butter. Sounds like first-degree homicide to me, and I hope the president of the company, along with the chain of command of responsible managers, go to prison for life.

Many years ago, General Electric was found to have been involved in price-fixing on large generators. Several of the managers involved went to prison. To prison, I repeat. That certainly woke up managers nationwide.

This case is extremely weird. From the LA Times:

After a Lutheran school expelled two 16-year-old girls for having "a bond of intimacy" that was "characteristic of a lesbian relationship," the girls sued, contending the school had violated a state anti-discrimination law.
In response to that suit, an appeals court decided this week that the private religious school was not a business and therefore did not have to comply with a state law that prohibits businesses from discriminating. A lawyer for the girls said Tuesday that he would ask the California Supreme Court to overturn the unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the 4th District Court of Appeal.

The appeals court called its decision "narrow," but lawyers on both sides of the case said it would protect private religious schools across California from such discrimination suits.
Kirk D. Hanson, who represented the girls, said the "very troubling" ruling would permit private schools to discriminate against anyone, as long as the schools used their religious beliefs as justification.
"It is almost like it could roll back 20 to 30 years of progress we have made in this area," said the San Diego attorney. "Basically, this decision gives private schools the license to discriminate."

John McKay, who represented the Riverside County-based California Lutheran High School, said the ruling correctly acknowledged that the school’s purpose was to "teach Christian values in a Christian setting pursuant to a Christian code of conduct."

The girls were expelled in their junior year for "conducting themselves in a manner consistent with being lesbians," said McKay, who added that the girls never disclosed their sexual orientation during the litigation. Hanson said the girls had been "best friends" and, citing their privacy, declined to discuss their sexual orientation. They are now in college, he said…

Continue reading. The reason it seems so weird to me is that the religious school seems bent (if you pardon the expression) on discriminating against lesbians when, so far as I can recall, the Bible (which would seem to be the source of the discrimination) says nothing about lesbians, in the Old Testament or the New. Some remarks about male masturbation, perhaps a bit about male homosexuality, but nothing about lesbians. So on what do they base their hatred?

Some time back copious amounts of lead appeared in the water piped in homes in DC. This is an incredibly serious problems because of the association of lead with developmental problems and subsequent violence, documented in various studies blogged earlier. Now it’s known where the lead come from. Janet Raloff reports for Science News:

About seven-and-a-half years ago, the District of Columbia’s water authority switched from chlorination to an alternative water-disinfection technology: chloramination. The goal had been to reduce the potentially carcinogenic by-products of chlorination that developed in drinking water. And the substitution worked.

However, an unintended consequence of this improved disinfection technique was the sudden release of copious amounts of lead into the drinking water that serves the nation’s capital.  Until then, notes Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech, no one had realized that chlorine had been playing a role in binding substantial amounts of lead to the interior of plumbing pipes.

What resulted was a “lead crisis” that persisted for several years, until water engineers found a way to tame the chloramination process. However, despite local health officials’ claims to the contrary, District children were dosed with potentially dangerous amounts of lead, report Edwards and two colleagues from Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

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You’ll recall that John Boehner was advertising for an economist that would speak out against the stimulus plan. He got no takers. And now this:

Economists think the stimulus plan that the House of Representatives will vote on Wednesday, while far from perfect, will help stimulate the moribund U.S. economy.

There’s no panacea for what ails the economy. A stimulus plan will work only in combination with other actions, such as more aid to the banking system to spark lending and boost consumer confidence, and the implementation of any plan will be as important as what’s in it.

However, most leading economists who are experienced in public policy generally favor the stimulus plan that the House is considering because through it the government will step up spending at a time when private-sector spending has fallen off sharply.

Some economists are ideologically opposed to any such massive government plan. The Cato Institute, a libertarian research center, has organized a list of dozens of academic economists who oppose the plan, urging instead tax cuts and smaller government, in favor of free markets and lower taxes over big government activities. Cato will advertise its list in coming days. However, that isn’t where the balance of expert opinion comes down today.

The House legislation would erect four pillars of economic stimulus. It would provide income support to the poor and recently unemployed, distribute aid to state governments, seek relatively quick employment gains through public works spending and aim to spark consumer and business spending through targeted tax cuts.

"I think it’s a reasonably well-designed package," said Mark Zandi, the chief economist for forecaster Moody’s Economy.com and a former adviser to the presidential campaign of Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain.

The key to the plan’s success won’t be its design, but its implementation, he cautioned, particularly the public works spending on roads, schools, ports and military bases.

"It runs the risk …”

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This is extremely ugly and seems clearly to be a war crime as well as a moral offense:

… More than 70 members of his family crowded into one apartment for days. On Jan. 7, Abed Rabbo said, the shelling intensified, and they heard an Israeli solider calling for people to come out of their homes.

Abed Rabbo said he gathered his wife, their three daughters and his mother, Souad. Souad Abed Rabbo said that she tied a white robe around a mop handle and two of her granddaughters waved white headscarves as they walked outside.

When they opened the door, they saw an Israeli tank parked in their garden about 10 yards away.

"We were waiting for them to give us an order," Khaled said last week as he stood in the ruins of his home. "Then one came out of the tank and started to shoot."

Souad Abed Rabbo said she was shot as she pushed her son back inside and her granddaughters fell on the stairs. When the shooting was over, she said, 2-year-old Amal and 7-year-old Souad were dead.

The allegation is one of at least five such white flag incidents that human rights investigators are looking into across the Gaza Strip. It’s part of a growing pattern of alleged abuses that have raised concerns that some Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes during their 22-day military campaign in Gaza.

"The evidence we’ve gathered in two of the cases so far is exceedingly strong," said Fred Abrahams, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch working in the Gaza Strip. "All the research so far suggests they shot civilians that were leaving their homes with white flags."…

Read the entire article here. There’s also a video.

As Constant Reader surmised, the logical next fragrance would be Strawberry, and Honeybee Spa’s Juicy Strawberry has an excellent strawberry fragrance. The Rooney produced a fine and fragrant lather, and the 40′s Aristocrat with a new Arco Super Stainless blade did a good job. The finish with TOBS No. 74 Aftershave was fine.

I made this recipe for lunch, with these changes:

Added a little soy sauce and a little mirin to the chicken stock.

I put the garlic in the chicken stock, along with some thinly sliced pork, and cooked that until the pork seemed close to done. Then I added the stems and did the rest as described, except that when I added the dressing to the dish, I also added some cooked rice I had on hand.

With the added pork and rice, this dish becomes a meal in itself.

Interesting:

Why have some of our genes evolved rapidly? It is widely believed that Darwinian natural selection is responsible, but research led by a group at Uppsala University, suggests that a separate neutral (nonadaptive) process has made a significant contribution to human evolution. Their results have been published today in the journal PLoS Biology. The researchers identified fast evolving human genes by comparing our genome with those of other primates. However, surprisingly, the patterns of molecular evolution in many of the genes they found did not contain signals of natural selection. Instead, their evidence suggests that a separate process known as BGC (biased gene conversion) has speeded up the rate of evolution in certain genes. This process increases the rate at which certain mutations spread through a population, regardless of whether they are beneficial or harmful.

"The research not only increases our understanding of human evolution, but also suggests that many techniques used by evolutionary biologists to detect selection may be flawed" says Matthew Webster

BGC is thought to be strongest in regions of high recombination, and can cause harmful mutations can spread through populations. The results lead to the provocative hypothesis that, rather than being the result of Darwinian selection for new adaptations, many of the genetic changes leading to human-specific characters may be the result of the fixation of harmful mutations. This contrasts the traditional Darwinistic view that they are the result of natural selection in favour of adaptive mutations.

Source: Uppsala University

In the Scientific American:

Imagine you are serving on a jury: the defendant is charged with murder, but he also suffers from a brain tumor that causes erratic behavior. Is he to be held responsible for the crime? Now imagine you are the judge: What should the defendant’s sentence be? Does the tumor count as a mitigating circumstance?
The assignment of responsibility and the choice of an appropriate punishment lie at the heart of our justice system. At the same time, these are cognitive processes like many others—reasoning, remembering, decision-making—and as such must originate in the brain. These two facts lead to the intriguing question: How does the brain enable judges, juries, and you and me to perform these tasks? What are the neural mechanisms that let you decide whether someone is guilty or innocent?

A recent study published in the December 2008 issue of the journal Neuron, by Joshua Buckholtz and his colleagues at Vanderbilt University tackles exactly this question. Until recently, such topics would have been out of the reach of cognitive neuroscience for lack of methods; today, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to watch the brain “in action” as normal human participants make decisions about responsibility and punishment. In the new study, Buckholtz and colleagues asked participants to read vignettes describing hypothetical crimes that a fictitious agent, “John,” commits against another person. The stories were divided into three conditions: in the first, the “responsibility” (R) condition, the perpetrator was fully responsible for the negative consequences of his action against the victim; for instance, John might have intentionally pushed his fiancée’s lover off a cliff. In the “diminished responsibility” (DR) condition, mitigating circumstances were present that reduced John’s responsibility; imagine that John committed the same crime, but suffered from a brain tumor.

And finally, the “no crime” (NC) condition consisted of stories that did not describe crimes. The participants had to make judgments regarding the degree of punishment that John should receive, on a scale from one to nine.

The authors then analyzed the brain activation linked to these judgments…

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Bad news, I fear:

Even if by some miracle the nations of the world could bring carbon dioxide levels back to those of the pre-industrial era, it would still take 1,000 years or longer for the climate changes already triggered to be reversed, scientists said Monday.

The gas already here and the heat that has been absorbed by the ocean will exert their effects for centuries, according to an analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Over the long haul, the warming will melt the polar icecaps more than had previously been estimated, raising ocean levels substantially, the report said.

And changes in rainfall patterns will bring droughts to the American Southwest, southern Europe, northern Africa and western Australia comparable to those that caused the 1930s Dust Bowl in the U.S.

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide, the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years," lead author Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a telephone news conference. "That’s not true."

The changes will persist until at least the year 3000, said Solomon, who conducted the study with colleagues in Switzerland and France.

Scientists familiar with the report said it emphasized the need for immediate action to control emissions…

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Very interesting post at Mind Hacks:

The term ‘complex’ used to refer to a mental illness or psychological hang-up has become so common as to have entered everyday language (e.g. ‘he has an inferiority complex’) but I only just recently found out about the origin of the concept.

The following is from the epic and endlessly fascinating book The Discovery of the Unconscious by Henri Ellenberger, where he discusses the use of the ‘word association test’ in early 1900s psychiatry.

The story takes us through some of the most important figures in the history of 19th and 20th century mind science. From p691:

The test consisted of enunciating to a subject a succession of carefully chosen words; to each of them the subject had to respond with the first word that occurred to him; the reaction time was exactly measured…

It was invented by Galton, who showed how it could be used to explore the hidden recesses of the mind. It was taken over and perfected by Wundt, who attempted to experimentally establish the laws of the association of ideas.

Then Aschaffenberg and Kraepelin introduced the distinction of inner and outer associations; the former are associations according to meaning, the latter according to forms of speech and sound; they could also be called semantic and verbal associations.

Kraepelin showed that fatigue caused a gradual shift toward a greater proportion of verbal associations. Similar effects were observed in fever and alcoholic intoxication. The same authors compared the results of the word association test in various mental conditions.

Then a new path was opened by Ziehen who found that the reaction time was was longer when the stimulus word was to something unpleasant to the subject. Sometimes, by picking out several delayed responses, one could relate them to a common underlying representation that Ziehen called gefühlsbetonter Vorstellungskomplex (emotionally charged complex of representations), or simply a complex.

Carl Jung later used the test extensively as a more rigorous alternative to Freudian free association and found some interesting results.

In women, erotic complexes were in the foreground with complexes related to the family and dwelling, pregnancy, children and marital situation; in older women he detected complexes showing regrets about former lovers. In men, complexes of ambition, money and striving to succeed came before erotic complexes.

The description comes from a chapter about Carl Jung, who was originally a psychoanalyst but broke away from Freud’s system and developed his own.

Freud’s theories, with only a few exceptions, just seem to get loopier the more you read them. Jung is interesting because on the surface his ideas seem quite barmy but are often remarkably sensible when you understand them in more detail.

Despite his interest in everything from ghosts to UFOs, he always maintained these were essentially psychological phenomena that reflected important aspects of our collective culture and subconscious mind.

For example, I always thought his concept of the ‘collective unconscious’ was supposed to be some sort of semi-mystical psychic connection, but in fact, he was just describing much of what is now a premise of evolutionary psychology.

Namely, that by nature of being human, we may share some inherited psychological structures, common symbols or ideas – such as what ‘motherhood’ entails – that can be seen in both common behaviours and in myths and stories throughout history.

Tom Ricks has an interesting post:

The latest round of massive corporate layoffs reminds of the financial crisis the Roman Empire suffered in 33 A.D.

It all began when Emperor Tiberius enforced a ceiling on interest rates, which caused a severe credit crunch, Tacitus relates in The Annals (book VI, 16-17). "Hence followed a scarcity of money, a great shock being given to all credit, the current coin too." This was of course followed by deflation of the sort we are seeing now in housing — "a fall of prices, and the deeper a man was in debt, the more reluctantly did he part with his property, and many were utterly ruined." This is what business nowadays terms "distressed sales."

The Roman equivalent of the Fed then pumped tons of money into the financial system, and also cut interest rates to zero, which is about where we are now in our own mess. As Tacitus puts it:

The destruction of private wealth precipitated the fall of rank and reputation, till at last the emperor interposed his aid by distributing throughout the banks a hundred million sesterces, and allowing freedom to borrow without interest for three years, provided the borrower gave security to the State in land to double the amount. Credit was thus restored, and gradually private lenders were found."

Tiberius also raised funds by accusing Sextus Marius, the richest man in Spain, of incest — almost certainly a trumped-up charge — and then having him thrown headlong from the Tarpeian Rock (see below), a cliff at the edge of Rome’s Capitoline Hill. "Tiberius kept his gold mines for himself," Tacitus notes. It makes me think that Wall Street is getting off easy.

Should Barnabas Francus hold the next hearing of his House banking committee atop this cliff?

Read the supporting documentation at Boing Boing.

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

Turns out that even conservatives can’t stomach the indefinite detention of a lawful U.S. resident, without charge, in an American prison.

In an amicus brief filed today in federal court, the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Rutherford Institute, along with the bipartisan Constitution Center, are urging the Obama administration to reverse course on the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri. 

As we’ve reported before, FBI agents arrested al-Marri, a 28-year-old father of five who was legally living with his family in Peoria, Ill., in 2003 and imprisoned him in a U.S. Navy brig in South Carolina. He’s been held there without charge for the last five years as a so-called “enemy combatant” — a situation the Bush administration consistently contended was perfectly legal.

The Obama administration, in an executive order last week, announced it would review al-Marri’s case — the only known instance of a legal U.S. resident being held indefinitely, and without charge, within U.S. borders.  The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals had accepted the Bush administration’s position in the case and allowed it to keep holding al-Marri for as long as it wanted; the U.S. Supreme Court has since agreed to hear the case.

The Obama administration successfully sought an extension of time to respond to al-Marri’s petition to the Supreme Court.  The Justice Department’s brief is now due in mid-March, and the case is scheduled for argument on April 20.

Many legal experts watching the proceedings have predicted that the Obama administration will move al-Marri into the criminal justice system before the Supreme Court gets a chance to decide it.