Conspiracy!

I read a post about this story the day it happened and in my busy law-student way I thought, well, that should be making the papers soon. It's not every day that a circuit court posts an opinion, then takes it down, then posts a redacted version that's missing the most interesting bits. And by interesting, I mean the allegations of an eff-bee-eye agent getting a suspect to confess by threatening his family. And by his family, I mean the family he had in Egypt, including a particularly vulnerable younger brother.

And I suppose having a friend recently go through a rather shattering experience in which she was strongly pressured to stop telling the truth and confess to something she'd never done made the story of a coerced confession stick in my mind a bit. But only in a background way, because busy law student yada yada.

Strangely, the story is not much making the news.

So is this how it happens? A little chip of news taken away here, a little bit of state-sponsored censorship there, a smattering of filings under seal, and before you know it you don't know much of anything anymore and couldn't find out if you wanted to?

Nah. Clearly not.

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[JR]

Clearly civil liberties are out of fashion. Maybe they will come back into vogue with the next administration. If not perhaps we can revisit bell bottoms instead.