"Advocates for tougher immigration enforcement" are complaining that four members of the Arizona National Guard didn't take aggressive action when they encountered six to eight armed men wearing bulletproof vests near an observation point.

The soldiers contacted Border Patrol agents and pulled back, investigators concluded. The Border Patrol tracked the armed men back to the border but could not locate them. No shots were fired.

The complainers argue that it makes the United States look weak when Guardsmen fail to engage those they suspect of crossing the border illegally. The National Guard isn't permitted to assume a law enforcement function in border security. Do "advocates for tougher immigration enforcement" expect Guard members to disobey orders and violate the law?

Dennis Delano, a Buffalo homicide detective, thinks the police caught the wrong man when they arrested Anthony Capozzi for three sexual assaults in 1985. Delano is convinced that the crimes were committed by the Bike Path Rapist.

Delano doesn't think the rapist was Capozzi, who has a history of mental problems. Delano believes - based on numerous similarities to the Bike Path Rapist's methods - that the attacks were the early work of Altemio Sanchez.

Delano, a cop for 28 years, said, "I would bet my career on it."

These are the facts as Delano sees them:

As TalkLeft discussed here, Roy Brown was convicted of a brutal murder on the basis of dubious bite mark evidence. Fifteen years later, a DNA analysis proved that the state's bite mark expert was wrong.

A piece in today's NY Times takes a helpful look at bike mark evidence.

What happened to Mr. Brown is hardly an aberration. Prosecutors have invoked bite-mark matches to secure convictions in numerous cases, only to see these convictions overturned when DNA or other evidence has become available.

In spite of the evolution of other forensic sciences, bite-mark analysis remains an inexact tool. A 1999 study by a member of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, a professional trade organization, found a 63 percent rate of false identifications.

Why do prosecutors consistently rely upon such consistently unreliable evidence?

There is, experts say, a mix of ignorance on the part of jurors and defense lawyers about the evidence’s scientific shortcomings and the overzealousness of prosecutors and their expert witnesses, who are seen as too quick to validate an unproven technique.

For all Plameologists, and those that want to make heads or tail of the Scooter Libby trial, Marcy (Empty Wheel), who has been live-blogging the testimony at Firedoglake, has a terrific diary up at Daily Kos on Libby, potential witnesses, and problems with Libby's timeline.

Marcy agrees with me that Rove's testimony may be more problematic than helpful for Libby. And, she raises the possibility that since Fitz isn't calling Rove as a witness, he may not have turned over all of Rove's statements. Fitz has taken the position since day 1 that he's not obligated to turn over statements of defense witnesses, only those of witnesses he intends to call. (That wouldn't be acceptable in my federal District, which has a more open file policy, but each District is different.)

At last, a little bit of justice for Maher Arar.

The prime minister of Canada apologized Friday to Maher Arar and agreed to give $9 million in compensation to the Canadian Arab, who was spirited by U.S. agents to Syria and tortured there after being falsely named as a terrorism suspect.

Arar, 36, a former computer engineer who was detained while changing planes at a New York airport in 2002 and imprisoned in a Syrian dungeon for 10 months, said after the announcement that he "feels proud as a Canadian."

One reader has reported the site is not loading properly for him and that the sidebars are loading very slowly and the comments are skewed. I am not having the problem. Is anyone else experiencing this?

The war isn't in Vietnam, and it isn't 1967. But a bad war and bad government have again engendered protest. Some of the faces are familiar, although the slogans have been updated.

Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters, energized by fresh congressional skepticism about the war in Iraq, were demanding a withdrawal of U.S. troops in a demonstration Saturday featuring a handful of celebrities such as Jane Fonda and Susan Sarandon. ...

Other demonstrators on a clear, sunny day carried signs to the National Mall that said "Make hip-hop not War," "The surge is a lie," and "Clean water speaks louder than bombs."

Not that the president will notice ... or care.

First, thanks to everyone who responded to my request for assistance with travel expenses for my trip to Washington tomorrow to cover the Scooter Libby trial this week. I just got my thank-you e-mails sent out.

I will be in the actual courtroom, sitting in for Christy of Firedoglake who did such a great job of providing observations and analysis last week. Together with Marcy's outstanding live-blogging from the media courtroom which reads like a line by line transcript (although she cautions it is not), FDL has provided coverage that makes the blogosphere shine.

Originally, I was just going to attend the trial Monday and Tuesday, but Christy has asked if I'd stay the full week, so I will be in the courtroom Monday through Thursday.

I think it's too soon to say whether Karl Rove will be called as a witness at Scooter Libby's trial. Michael Isikoff of Newsweek has a new scoop up telling us Rove and Dan Bartlett have been subpoenaed by Team Libby, but it's not known whether either will testify. Isikoff think it got more likely Rove will testify after Ted Wells gave his opening.

The possibility that Rove could be called to testify would bring his own role into sharper focus—and could prove important to Libby’s lawyers for several reasons. Rove has said in secret testimony that, during a chat on July 11, 2003, Libby told him he learned about Plame’s employment at the CIA from NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert, a legal source who asked not to be identified talking about grand jury matters told NEWSWEEK.

Jane Hamsher is back to posting after her surgery, which thankfully, she says went really well. She'll be recovered enough to travel to D.C. to cover the Libby trial beginning Feb. 5th.

What great news, it's great to have her back. Go on over and tell her yourselves.

Law Prof Doug Berman of Sentencing Law and Policy has a post up today asking readers to rate the following injustices:

1.  The federal sentences for two border patrol agents, Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean, who each got more than 10 years' in prison for the shooting of a suspected Mexican drug dealer in Texas (details here).

2.  The state sentence for Genarlow Wilson, who got 10 years' in prison for having consensual oral sex with a fellow teenager (details here).

3.  The possible (but not certain) limited period of extreme pain that a convicted and condemned murderer might feel in the course of an execution.

I'll go with number 2, the sentence with Genarlow Wilson. But, I'd have given another example, one of the many defendants serving life in prison for crack offenses due to the sentencing disparity in powder and crack cocaine penalties.

The U.S. Sentencing Commission is calling for public response (pdf) to various guidelines, including those for crack and powder cocaine offenses.

Last July, I wrote a post titled What Obama Needs To Learn From . . . FDR. One of my main points was:

[T]hat is FDR's lesson for Obama. Politics is not a battle for the middle. It is a battle for defining the terms of the political debate. It is a battle to be able to say what is the middle. . . . FDR governed as a liberal but politicked like a populist. . . . The lesson of Hofstadter is to embrace liberal governance and understand populist politics. It may sound cynical, but you must get through the door to govern. Lincoln knew this. FDR knew this. Hofstadter knew this. I hope Obama can learn this.

Today Paul Krugman, who has discussed this issue in some detail with Brad Delong, picks up on the lessons of FDR:

Barack Obama recently lamented the fact that “politics has become so bitter and partisan” — which it certainly has. But he then went on to say that partisanship is why “we can’t tackle the big problems that demand solutions. And that’s what we have to change first.” Um, no. If history is any guide, what we need are political leaders willing to tackle the big problems despite bitter partisan opposition. . . .

Or to put it another way: what we need now is another F.D.R., not another Dwight Eisenhower. . . . I urge Mr. Obama — and everyone else who thinks that good will alone is enough to change the tone of our politics — to read the speeches of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the quintessential example of a president who tackled big problems that demanded solutions.

For the fact is that F.D.R. faced fierce opposition as he created the institutions — Social Security, unemployment insurance, more progressive taxation and beyond — that helped alleviate inequality. And he didn’t shy away from confrontation. “We had to struggle,” he declared in 1936, “with the old enemies of peace — business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. ... Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

Yes, I made this point also, when Cass Sunstein made his ahistorical argument of FDR as nonpartisan. More.