"When [Democrats] run out of legitimate arguments, their last line of defense is to accuse Republicans of opposing nominees based upon gender or race.
Moro will now hear the final arguments of the defense and the prosecution before ruling.
The accounts of Private Chen's life in Afghanistan, which came from witnesses called by government prosecutors, seemed to buttress, in part, the arguments of the defense lawyers.
"He refuted all of the arguments of the defense, yet ultimately ruled very much in favor of their client," Mr. Tobias said.
Mr. Brodsky, discussing the circumstantial evidence in the case, said: "To believe the arguments of the defense team, you'd have to believe that Mr. Gupta is one of the unluckiest people in the world.
But the judge, Robert J. Miller, seems to have been persuaded by the arguments of the defense attorney, who maintained that the truthfulness of witnesses was something for the jury to decide.
The United States Supreme Court declined yesterday to hear the arguments of a defense lawyer seeking to stop prosecutors from retrying a Brooklyn man in the killing of a Hasidic scholar in Crown Heights in 1991.
Then, in the face of national outrage, when charges were brought, arguments of self-defense were mounted.
While Rebuttal offers one of the first comprehensive collections of arguments in defense of the torture program from past and present agency leaders, many of the accusations detailed in the book have been made before.
