Word: courtroom
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When Vietnam granted rare access to the trial of prominent dissidents, it may not have expected to produce the sight of communist officials slapping their hands over the mouth of a 60-year-old man - a Catholic priest, no less - and wrestling him out of the courtroom. But that is exactly what happened foreign journalists and diplomats saw in the trial of dissident priest Father Nguyen Van Ly and four other activists...
...that, yeah, you can come into our trials, and they're phony and it's a kangaroo court - and tough luck," Adams says. "It's also entirely possible that somebody in the system considers this is a small reform in opening up trials, even if what happened in the courtroom isn't very pretty." If Vietnam says it's just following the law in its dissident crackdown, the open trial could be seen as delivering on pledges of transparency...
...court. The defendants had no lawyers present, but at least one didn't deny the charges. "For the country and the people of Vietnam, I will continue to fight for democracy," said the Progression Party co-founder Nguyen Phong, 32. Soon after that, the audio feed from the courtroom was abruptly cut off. Phong was later handed a six-year sentence. (Two other defendants were given probation and Father Ly's assistant, Nguyen Binh Thanh, was sentenced to five years...
...Libby's defense wasn't wrong. Libby was consumed by the war on terror. The courtroom record strongly indicates, though, that he viewed his media monitoring and attacking of critics as a natural extension of that war on terror...
...drama in a D.C. courtroom demonstrated the extent to which political "talking points" aren't just messages, but rather the very currency of government. The Libby trial contained examples of the Vice President's office trading talking points with reporters in exchange for access (TIME reporter Matt Cooper got an "exclusive," while in the same bargain Libby got his message in the magazine), and soliciting talking points from the President's office. Cheney himself demanded that the White House spokesman tell "key press" that Libby was as innocent of the charge of leaking classified information as Karl Rove (whose innocence...