Classified dossiers of detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison released by Wikileaks were naturally splashed on the front of Monday’s New York Times, which had editorialized in strong terms for the closing of the Cuba prison. Reporters Charlie Savage, William Glaberson, and Andrew Lehren filed “Details of Lives in an American Limbo.”

(In February 2009, Glaberson let two hard-left groups he called "human rights groups" ridicule a Pentagon report saying there was no mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay.)

From Monday's lead story:

A trove of more than 700 classified military documents provides new and detailed accounts of the men who have done time at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and offers new insight into the evidence against the 172 men still locked up there.

Military intelligence officials, in assessments of detainees written between February 2002 and January 2009, evaluated their histories and provided glimpses of the tensions between captors and captives. What began as a jury-rigged experiment after the 2001 terrorist attacks now seems like an enduring American institution, and the leaked files show why, by laying bare the patchwork and contradictory evidence that in many cases would never have stood up in criminal court or a military tribunal.

When former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay announced that the Justice Department was dropping its six-year investigation of his relationship with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, The Washington Post put the news on the front page Tuesday. The New York Times decided that this story was best put on page A-18.

The front page of the Times covered flooding in Pakistan, Team Obama's tough evaluation of offshore drilling permits, and a chilling Rod Nordland story on new public executions by the Taliban in northern Afghanistan. But the front page also offered "Walking in New York? Beware Men Turning Left" and "Exclusive Golf Course Is Also Organic, So a Weed or Two Get In."

At least the Times covered the DeLay story. To date, the newspaper "of record" has not mentioned Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's exclamation last Tuesday that "I don't know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican."

New York Times legal reporter Charlie Savage's original online report on the long-expected retirement of liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (filed Friday afternoon) had a familiar ring to it which went beyond the usual effusiveness the paper bestows on liberal justices. While noting Stevens held down the left wing of the Supreme Court, Savage twice emphasized the court's "increasingly conservative" nature in his original nytimes.com posting:

A soft-spoken Republican and former antitrust lawyer from Chicago, Justice Stevens has led liberals on a court that has become increasingly conservative. He was appointed by President Gerald Ford in December 1975 to succeed Justice William O. Douglas, who had retired the month before. He is the longest-serving current justice by more than a decade.....Confronted with a court far more conservative than the one he joined, Justice Stevens showed the world what his colleagues already knew: that beneath his amiable manner lay a canny strategist and master tactician, qualities he used to win victories that a simple liberal-conservative head count would appear to be impossible. A frequent dissenter even in his early years on the court, he now wrote more blunt and passionate opinions, explaining on several occasions that the nation was best served by an open airing of disagreements.

This next paragraph sounded very familiar to Times Watch: