The court put the case, which has been in legal limbo for several years, on a "fast track," with the defense brief on the three claims scheduled to be filed Jan. 17.

The decision caught both the defense and the Philadelphia district attorney's office by surprise, because the appellate court had been compelled to consider only one possible avenue of appeal by Abu-Jamal. Pending before the same court is the district attorney's appeal of the 2001 lifting of Abu-Jamal's death sentence.

"Today we achieved a great victory in the campaign to win a new trial and the eventual freedom of Mumia," said a jubilant Robert Bryan, of San Francisco, who took over as lead attorney in Abu-Jamal's case in 2004.

Bryan said all three claims accepted for argument by the 3rd Circuit panel "are of enormous constitutional significance and go to the very essence of Mumia's right to a fair trial, due process of law, and equal protection of the law under the Fifth, Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution."

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Now a technical expert who designs and makes such devices for the U.S. military and private industry tells Salon that he believes the bulge is indeed a transceiver designed to receive electronic signals and transmit them to a hidden earpiece lodged in Bush's ear canal.

"There's no question about it. It's a pretty obvious one -- larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability," said Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president for Resistance Technology in Arden Hills, Minn. Darbut examined photographs of the president's back taken from the Fox News video feed at the first presidential debate in Coral Gables, Fla., as well as 2002 photos of the president driving and working in a T-shirt on his Crawford ranch, which were posted on the White House Web site.

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While the White House and the Bush campaign repeatedly blew me off when I tried to elicit some explanation from them for the obvious bulge under the president's jacket, the Times and Post had better luck.

According to the Times, Bush's aides first tried to claim that the photo that appeared in Salon and on the Web was "doctored." When they were forced to admit that the image of the object was clear in the original video feeds of the debate, they changed their story, according to the paper, suggesting that it was nothing but a wrinkle in the president's jacket. Even the Times itself noted that they failed to explain why the wrinkle had a rectangular shape. The most important piece of information obtained by the Post reporter was a statement by the Bush campaign that the president was not wearing a bullet-proof vest during the debate appearance -- one of the most widely offered alternative explanations for the bulge in the jacket.

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The president is not known to wear a back brace, and it's safe to say he wasn't packing. So was the bulge under his well-tailored jacket a hidden receiver, picking up transmissions from someone offstage feeding the president answers through a hidden earpiece? Did the device explain why the normally ramrod-straight president seemed hunched over during much of the debate?

Bloggers are burning up their keyboards with speculation. Check out the president's peculiar behavior during the debate, they say. On several occasions, the president simply stopped speaking for an uncomfortably long time and stared ahead with an odd expression on his face. Was he listening to someone helping him with his response to a question? Even weirder was the president's strange outburst. In a peeved rejoinder to Kerry, he said, "As the politics change, his positions change. And that's not how a commander in chief acts. I, I, uh -- Let me finish -- The intelligence I looked at was the same intelligence my opponent looked at." It must be said that Bush pointed toward Lehrer as he declared "Let me finish." The green warning light was lit, signaling he had 30 seconds to, well, finish.

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"Serve Your Community and the Nation," the announcement urges. "If a military draft becomes necessary, approximately 2,000 Local and Appeal Boards throughout America would decide which young men ... receive deferments, postponements or exemptions from military service."

Local draft board volunteers, meanwhile, report that at training sessions last summer, they were unexpectedly asked to recommend people to fill some of the estimated 16 percent of board seats that are vacant nationwide.

Especially for those who were of age to fight in the Vietnam War, it is an ominous flashback of a message. Divisive military actions are ongoing in Iraq and Afghanistan. News accounts daily detail how the U.S. is stretched too thin there to be effective. And tensions are high with Syria and Iran and on the Korean Peninsula, with some in or close to the Bush White House suggesting that military action may someday be necessary in those spots, too.

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He never got to display his sign for President Bush to see, though. As he stood among milling groups of Bush supporters, he was approached by a local police detective, who told him and his sister that because they were protesting, they had to move to a "free speech area," on orders of the U.S. Secret Service.

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But in documents released this week in a federal court case in San Francisco, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) confirmed for the first time that it keeps not just a list of potential terrorists barred from the air, but also a list of "selectees" who are subject to strict security checks before they're allowed to board commercial aircraft. The agency has revealed almost nothing else about the selectee list, and is fighting in court to keep secret the names of people who are on it and the standards for putting them there.

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A federal judge finally overturned Williams' sentence, citing two errors: Williams had confessed only after a police officer promised Williams he wouldn't get the death penalty, and his attorney never offered any evidence of mitigating circumstances during the sentencing phase of his trial -- evidence that should have included Williams' mental deficit and a childhood of abuse and neglect.

But Williams was executed anyway in 1999, when the notoriously pro-death-penalty 5th Circuit Court of Appeals (which serves Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas) overturned the district court judge's decision, ruling that the revelation of errors came too late under the 1996 Effective Death Penalty Act (EDPA). Williams' appellate attorney, Nick Trentacosta of the Louisiana Center for Equal Justice, maintains that his client's execution was in error. The fact that mitigating evidence hadn't been presented to the jury wasn't in dispute -- just the timing of when that issue had first been raised on appeal.

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Amrine was convicted of the 1985 knife slaying of Gary Barber largely on the strength of eyewitness testimony from three jailhouse informants. A prison guard disputed the inmates' stories, testifying that he had seen Amrine elsewhere at the time of the fatal stabbing, but the guilty verdict stuck and Amrine, having exhausted his appeals, was scheduled to die.

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Now, however, it appears that the promises were all for show. AmeriCorps, under attack by right-wing Republicans in the House, suffering from internal accounting problems, and left undefended by the White House, is facing a funding crisis and may not have enough money to put more than 28,000 volunteers to work.

That leaves countless organizations across the country that run programs in housing, education, healthcare, conservation and even homeland security -- Bush's Citizen Corps program is part of AmeriCorps -- unsure of getting the volunteers they're relying on to provide crucial services this year. And it has forced some AmeriCorps troops to choose between working for free or quitting.

The idealism of the AmeriCorps program has had broad bipartisan appeal, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. And the surprising news of its current trouble has frustrated elected officials in both parties.

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Perhaps one such incident might've been forgotten, but Olshansky, the assistant legal director for the left-leaning Center for Constitutional Rights, was pulled out of line for special attention the next time she flew. And the next time. And the next time. On one flight this past September from Newark to Washington, six members of the center's staff, including Olshansky, were stopped and subjected to intense scrutiny, even though they had purchased their tickets independently and had not checked in as a group. On that occasion, Olshansky got angry and demanded to know why she had been singled out.

"The computer spit you out," she recalls the agent saying. "I don't know why, and I don't have time to talk to you about it."

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For four weeks, a racially mixed jury of six women and six men (and a packed courtroom filled with curious spectators) heard both sides of a case that began with the 1977 slaying of Maddux, a pretty young hippie who was found a year later mummified in a crate in Einhorn's closet. They heard the prosecution's evidence that it was all Einhorn's doing, and they heard Einhorn's claim that he had been framed by unidentified "enemies," possibly the CIA or KGB.

The jury went with the prosecutor.

The 62-year-old Einhorn, who spent 20 years on the lam after skipping out on his 1981 trial while free on bail, stood stoically as the jury foreman read out the verdict: guilty of first-degree murder. But he shook his head slowly in a sign of disagreement as the judge, William Mazzola, read out the sentence -- life in prison without parole -- and told Einhorn he was "an intellectual dilettante" who "preyed upon the uninitiated, uninformed, unsuspecting and inexperienced."

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Today, after more than nine months in solitary confinement, Haddad is moving uncertainly toward a hearing that could result in his deportation to Lebanon. He doesn't know what evidence the government will use against him. He had long ago notified the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service of his tourist visa status, and he had filed an application with the INS under the last Clinton-era amnesty for a green card. But for Haddad and other Muslim immigrants caught in the post-Sept. 11 crackdown, none of that seems to matter.

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Lieberman, who chairs the powerful Senate Government Operations Committee, reportedly favored some limited version of the program, known as Operation TIPS (for "Terrorism Information and Prevention Service"), during the summer. But he has become increasingly disenchanted with the controversial program, according to several of his staffers.

"The more definition that has been given to the program by the Justice Department, the more skeptical the senator has become about the program," reports a Government Operations Committee staff member.

Lieberman blocked an effort last month -- a measure by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. -- to bar TIPS from the Senate version of the Homeland Security bill. Leahy subsequently vowed to bring his measure to the Senate floor as an amendment when that body considered the bill. Now, as the Senate has started debating it, Lieberman is said to be "working with" Leahy on the wording of such an amendment to be introduced next week.

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The Richmond, Va.-based nonprofit company, called the National White Collar Crime Center, confirmed Wednesday that it is discussing plans with the Justice Department to operate a hotline that would take calls from citizens that the department signs up in its planned Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) spy program. Civil libertarians are outraged by the plan to privatize the operation. "It's troubling that the Justice Department would go out of its way to try to get around the Fourth Amendment and the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act this way," says John Whitehead, president of the conservative Rutherford Institute.

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To find out, I went to the Citizen Corps Web site, then to the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) page, and signed up as a volunteer. I quickly discovered that TIPS is having a devilish time getting off the ground. After an initial welcome from the Justice Department, I heard nothing for a month. When I finally called two weeks ago to ask what citizens were supposed to do if they had a terror tip, I was given a phone number I was told had been set up by the FBI.

But instead of getting a hardened G-person when I called, a mellifluous receptionist's voice answered, "America's Most Wanted." A little flummoxed, I said I was expecting to reach the FBI. "Aren't you familiar with the TV program 'America's Most Wanted'?" she asked patiently. "We've been asked to take the FBI's TIPS calls for them."

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Now documents obtained by the defense in the Stewart case show that the government was secretly taping meetings and phone calls between Stewart and Rahman and others for over two years. While the government obtained a court order authorizing some surveillance of their meetings in 1998, the scope of what was monitored seems to extend beyond what is commonly authorized. And at a hearing July 19, prosecutors refused to say whether they are currently taping Stewart's conversations with her own attorney, Michael Tigar.

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For that crime, which was established by a decision of the U.S Treasury Department, and for the additional crime of carrying a hand grenade while he was a Taliban soldier, Lindh will be sentenced to up to 20 years in federal prison after striking a plea agreement with the government Monday.

Lindh had been facing life in prison for his involvement with the ousted Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But the plea agreement appeared to be a tacit acknowledgement by the federal government that its case was at best uncertain against the 21-year-old Islamic convert. Dropped were all charges of terrorism, consorting with al-Qaida, and attempting to kill Americans. Nor did the agreement mention the government's earlier claim that Walker had been guilty of participation in a plot to murder CIA agent Johnny Spann, who died in an uprising of captured Taliban and al-Qaida fighters shortly after he had been interrogating Walker at the Mazar-i-Sharif prison.

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They claimed his dragnet was ruining the government's best chance to find out what terrorists were up to in the U.S. by arresting everyone who seemed remotely suspicious and by scaring any real terrorists deeper underground. As one former G-man said at the time, the way to catch a conspiracy is to patiently watch it develop, and then swoop in and nab everyone.

Now the arrest of alleged "dirty bomb" conspirator Abdullah al Muhajir -- often referred to by his birth name, Jose Padilla -- on apparently thin evidence, has renewed criticism that the government is mishandling the campaign against terrorism.

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With little fanfare, on April 22 the nine justices heard a case, Ring vs. Arizona, in which the defendant claims that because a judge used evidence not presented at trial to justify sentencing him to death following his murder conviction, he should not be executed. His attorney argues that the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and a decision by the high court two years ago, require such a decision to be made by a jury, not simply by a judge.

If the court rules in Timothy Ring's favor, it could potentially affect some 800 cases -- more than one-fourth of the total number of prisoners currently on death row -- in the nine states in which judges either always make the fateful sentencing decision between life in prison or death, or in which they are permitted to override a jury and impose a death sentence. That's more people than were on death row at the time of the Furman vs. Georgia decision on June 29, 1972, which temporarily ended capital punishment in America. At the minimum, it will overturn the death sentences of dozens of Arizona inmates, and perhaps hundreds nationwide.

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