Liberty Nov-Dec 2009

Mary Zeiss Stan ge Thursday morning, July 30: The By Il lust r at ion by Tim O’Br ien mainstream media and punditocracy continued to obsess over “Gatesgate” and that evening’s impending “Beer Summit” on the White House lawn.

Meanwhile, in a barely reported story, U.S. district court judge Ellen Segal Huvelle finally ran out of patience with the U.S. Department of Justice over a human rights violation, compared to which Professor Henry Louis Gates’s travails are absurdly trivial.

Issuing a blistering critique of the Justice Department’s case for the prosecution—she What are we enhancing? called it an “outrage,” and “full of holes”—Judge Huvelle ordered the release of detainee Mohammed Jawad from the federal facility at Guantanamo Bay.1 The following day the Defense Department dropped all charges against Jawad, who at the time was thought likely