I really enjoy Atrios' "Wanker of the Day" series. But today he really misses the mark though, naming Richard Cohen Wanker of the Day, thanks to some overblown reporting by Media Matters.

Today Cohen wrote a terrific column on Al Gore. It seems impossible to me that Cohen could be the Wanker of the Day for that column. If that is the worst of the day, then our work is done as bloggers and we can all go back to our previous quiet lives.

Update: The jury had a note at end of the day. Received by e-mail from DOJ spokesperson Randall Samborn:

The Court received a note containing a question from the jury at the end of the day today. Judge Walton will address the note with the parties in court at approximately 9:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, following the conclusion of another matter the Court has scheduled at 9 a.m. The contents of the note will not be disclosed until the note is addressed in court and docketed sometime tomorrow morning.

Update: 5:05 pm ET and no verdict. Looks like everyone comes back for more waiting tomorrow.

********

The 11 remaining jurors are in day 5 of jury deliberations in the Scooter Libby trial. Jane and Marcy of Firedoglake are at the courthouse, as is Aldon Haynes of Orient Lodge (blogging for MediaBloggers.

Lots of people have asked me what's taking so long. I don't think this is a particularly long time yet.

The U.S. Government says there are 500,000 torture survivors living among us. California has Torture Survivor Treatment Centers, and today marks No Torture.Org's beginning of its awareness campaign, which will run through June 26.

The U.S. government estimates that 500,000 torture survivors live in the United States. University of the Pacific’s School of International Studies in Stockton, Calif. is in the process of developing baseline population data for torture survivors in California. The research will be conducted under the supervision of Professor Jean-Marie Stratigos, a former United Nations humanitarian affairs officer.

“Survivors are a hidden population in our state and many obstacles prevent them from receiving adequate healthcare,” said Kathi Anderson, executive director of Survivors of Torture, International. “We hope that this campaign will build knowledge among both medical professionals and the general public.”

It's the largest awareness campaign to date in the U.S. Here are the points they would like to get across:

Once again, no justice for Emmett Till. The grand jury investigating his 1955 murder has returned a "no true bill" against Carolyn Bryant, now 72.

The grand jury in Leflore County wrapped up its work this past week and issued a "no bill" against Carolyn Bryant, the widow of one of two white men originally acquitted of Till's death. A "no bill" means the grand jury found insufficient evidence existed for an indictment on a criminal charge. Documents made public Tuesday show prosecutors sought a manslaughter charge

.....Till was kidnapped from the Leflore County town of Money in 1955. Three days later, the 14-year-old's mutilated body was found in the Tallahatchie River.

Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant's husband, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted of the crime by an all-white jury. The two men later confessed in an interview with Look magazine. Till had been accused of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, and some witnesses have said a woman's voice could be heard at the scene of the abduction.

David Seth at Daily Kos has the details and a strong reaction.

Lawyers for the three charged Duke lacrosse team players filed a 39 page motion (available here, pdf) today arguing that they still have not received complete DNA analysis in the case.

In the motion, defense attorneys do not blame the special prosecutors for the issues because they said they did not have any direct knowledge of the withholding of evidence.

Glenn Greenwald does a nice writeup on NYT Times Public Editor Barney Calame's review of the paper's recent Iran coverage. I differ with Glenn in this respect, I think Calame's piece a standard for how the work should be done. If Deborah Howell were actually a capable person, she might learn something from it. Glenn sees some significant deficiencies that I don't. In any event, as Glenn points out, the most significant part of Calame's piece is this:

Editing vigilance on intelligence and national security coverage means dealing with the anonymous sourcing that many deem essential to bringing vital issues to light in that murky area. So editors need to ensure that unnamed sources are in a position to know and that any biases are clear to the reporter. The Times’s most important requirement for anonymous sources — that an editor must know their identity — was followed for Mr. Gordon’s Feb. 10 story. Douglas Jehl, a deputy chief of the Washington bureau and his editor, told me he knew the name of each anonymous source in the article. The story also attempted a generalized explanation of why the officials were willing to talk. I do wish, however, that the article had found a way to comply with the paper’s policy of explaining why sources are allowed to remain unnamed.

Human Rights Watch issued a 50 page report yesterday on missing prisoners from secret CIA prisons or Guantanamo, most of whom are unaccounted for after flights on Ghost Air.

"President Bush told us that the last 14 CIA prisoners were sent to Guantanamo, but there are many other prisoners 'disappeared' by the CIA whose fate is still unknown," said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counter-terrorism director at Human Rights Watch. "The question is: What happened to these people and where are they now?"

HRW noted that in September 2006, 14 detainees were moved from secret CIA jails to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Sept. 6, U.S. President George W. Bush said that following that move, there were no more captives in secret CIA installations.

However, HRW said it had two lists of former detainees who were still missing and that it had sent their names to the U.S. president.

President Bush must provide a full accounting of those seized, held and transferred. Nothing less is acceptable.

Matt Stoller asks that question. The answer is obviously yes. I am a Centrist. And yet on Iraq, the voices joining me on the call to end the Iraq Debacle through the only viable way to do it, defunding, have been relatively few to my knowledge.

In this post, I warned of the Netroots forgetting the lessons learned from the intraparty battles on Iraq and other issues from 2003 to 2006:

Are we forgetting these lessons? I fear we are. The Netroots must not forget this fight, how we won it and how we must continue to win it in our Democratic Party.

See also Glenn Greenwald.

On June 19, 2006, Senators Carl Levin and Jack Reed introduced a resolution calling for the phased redeployment of US military from Iraq commencing in 2006. Senator Levin said:

Our current open-ended policy is counterproductive and unsustainable. The Administration’s policy of ‘we’ll be there for as long as Iraq needs us’ will result in Iraqis depending on us longer. Three and a half years into the conflict, we should tell the Iraqis that the American security blanket is not permanent. Beginning a phased redeployment this year will add incentives for the Iraqis to make the hard compromises necessary to bring their country together and secure it. They need to do that job themselves and our amendment is one way to prod them to make that commitment and stick to it.

Now, the Democrats do not need to "prod" the President to do anything. They can do it themselves. They have the power. They have no excuses. The question is do the Democrats in Congress actually want to have our troops redeploy from Iraq or not? They can do it if they want. If they believe what they said in in June 2006, then they will.

It's Tuesday open thread day. If you have something you'd like to discuss, here's a place for you.

Vice President Dick Cheney was whisked off to a bunker Tuesday morning in Afghanistan after a suicide bomber attacked the main entrance to the U.S. military base he was visiting.

The Taliban has taken credit for the attack. At least 23 others were killed.

...a purported Taliban spokesman, Qari Yousef Ahmadi, said Cheney was the target of the attack.

Former Rep. Bob Ney's former chief of staff William Heaton followed Ney's lead by pleading guilty to a federal charge resulting from his corrupt relationship with Jack Abramoff. Talk about having your fingerprints all over the money:

Heaton was also was one of several recipients of a number of other [Abramoff-financed] trips abroad, concert and sporting-event tickets, meals and gambling chips, all taken with full knowledge the gifts were in exchange for official favors from Ney.

During one of those trips, Heaton and another staffer helped Ney conceal $5,000 brought into the country through customs and stored the money in a safe inside Ney’s congressional office. Court documents said Heaton “open[ed] the safe as requested so that Ney could make repeated withdrawals.”