Susie Quinn Bergstein and Steve Bergstein, civil rights attorney and author of our Psychsound feature, in New Paltz, NY.

SO FAR Planet Waves remains the only astrology website to publish a civil rights blog -- Psychsound by Steve Bergstein. Earlier this week, Steve did an entry on a case being appealed before the 2nd Circuit of the federal courts in Manhattan, involving an Egyptian national named Abdallah Higazy. Higazy was coerced by the FBI into falsely confessing for crimes associated with the Sept. 11 attacks. He did so because they told him his family would  be tortured in Egypt if he did not. Apparently, they needed suspects.

Steve, who litigates before the 2nd Circuit but was not involved in this case, was among the first to report that the court had pulled down its published decision, then replaced it a day later with one that redacted, or removed, the FBI's particular method of getting the false confession out of Higazy.

The legal blogosphere went wild with the story, and most of the articles referred back to Psychsound, which is a combination civil rights and music blog. The story was also picked up by the one blog that inspired Planet Waves to get into the business, This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow. It was credited by the Columbia Journalism Review, and was also due to appear in the Washington Post's Friday editions.

Steve has worked with Eric Francis since 1990, when he served as legal affairs editor of Student Leader News Service while a student at the City University of New York Law School. He also writes a blog exclusively devoted to the 2nd Circuit called Wait A Second. He is a specialist in free speech cases and is considered unusually young to be an advanced civil rights litigator in the federal courts.

You can read more about him and his astrology (he's a Capricorn, of course, and born in the Sixties) at this article.