The similarities are striking, the most egregious of which is a device Labash uses throughout his piece. He repeatedly breaks up anecdotes with “Stone’s Rules” — things like “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack,” as well as “White shirt + tan face = confidence.” Toobin does the exact same thing throughout his profile, even including the same mathematical equation and, like Labash, basing his conclusion on yet another rule.

Americans may go to the polls with no clear sense of how the likely decisions made by the candidates’ judicial appointees can be expected to affect their lives. It’s the press’s job to ensure that we reach a level of clarity on these other issues equal to the one we currently enjoy on abortion.

the press should accept that judicial appointments are just as political as any other issue in the campaign, and should pull no punches in spelling out the real-world consequences of the likely rulings to be made by the candidates’ appointees.

Early in 2007, as the Bush administration indicated that it intended to release most of the detainees at the prison at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, McClatchy set out to track down as many of the freed prisoners as possible to help determine who they were, what had happened to them in the prisons the Bush administration set up in Afghanistan and Cuba and what had become of them.

For eight months, reporters Tom Lasseter and Matthew Schofield traveled to 11 countries — from England to Pakistan — and interviewed 66 former detainees. They also interviewed political and military officials in those countries to try to establish the detainees' backgrounds and check their stories.

Lasseter and Schofield also combed through unclassified transcripts of the men's tribunal hearings at Guantanamo, when available, and Lasseter interviewed former White House and Department of Defense officials, former guards and lawyers for prisoners who had them.

Of the 66 detainees whom McClatchy interviewed, the evidence indicates that 34 of them, about 52 percent, had connections with militant groups or activities. At least 23 of those 34, however, were Taliban foot soldiers, conscripts, low-level volunteers or adventure-seekers who knew nothing about global terrorism.

Only seven of the 66 were in positions to have had any ties to al Qaida's leadership, and it isn't clear that any of them knew any terrorists of consequence.

If the former detainees whom McClatchy interviewed are any indication — and several former high-ranking U.S. administration and defense officials said in interviews that they are — most of the prisoners at Guantanamo weren't terrorist masterminds but men who were of no intelligence value in the war on terrorism.

Responding to Davidson’s allegations, Ms. Knaupp said, “I am in the business of reporting the news, not making the news. I keep my personal and professional lives separate.”

Ms. Knaupp and Murphy, two single adults, dated, but the relationship ended more than five months ago, long before the trials in the Mineola Swinger’s Club case began.

“The allegations by Thad Davidson that my coverage of this case is biased are wholly unfounded,” Ms. Knaupp said. “I believe anyone who reads my articles will see that.”

"I have decided to try to do more writing, apart from just writing court opinions," he told USA TODAY. "And I have decided to be less stingy with my public appearances, not just for (promoting) the book but generally to get the message out, about the interpretive principles that I believe very strongly in."