Fred Grimm at the Miami Herald has a column on detained "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla.

In describing his trip to the jail dentist, Grimm writes:

Padilla's dental visit -- photos of the exercise are in the federal court files -- reach beyond the legal questions. It has the look of gratuitous cruelty.

The treatment of an American citizen in pretrial detention seemed to be taken from the imaginings of Kafka. It appeared to be sensory deprivation just for the hell of it.

Grimm recaps Padilla's treatment:

The accused was held in extreme isolation for 1,307 days. Held in a nine-by-seven-foot cell. The only window blacked out. He was the lone prisoner on the two-tier cellblock. He was given food through a slot in the door. He slept on a steel mattress. No reading material. No calendar. No clock. Nothing to connect him to the outside world.

Today was another day of jury selection. To get the full flavor, you need to read Pach at Firedoglake who lived-blogged the whole thing. His updates are in the comments here and here.

His reporting makes you feel like you are in the courtroom, witnessing the questioning and hearing the jurors speak.

Recaps are one thing, but it's great to get the play by play.

He'll be live-blogging tomorrow too.

Murray Waas has a new article on Scooter Libby up at HuffPo. He recounts yesterday's N.Y Times profile and an earlier WAPO profile, and asks,

How could it be that Libby--- seemingly such a stickler for the rules-- outed Valerie Plame, as prosecutors claim in their case against him?

There is always, or course, the possibility that Libby will be found innocent of any and all of the charges. He should be entitled, as should any of us, to a presumption of innocence.

As Murray notes, people don't become loose cannons overnight. He gives two possibilities:

The Justice Department today disclosed that the NSA warrantless surveillance will be discontinued in its present form and in the future operate under the FISA court.

The Justice Department announced today that the National Security Agency's controversial warrantless surveillance program has been placed under the authority of a secret surveillance court, marking an abrupt change in approach by the Bush administration after more than a year of heated debate.

There has been a dearth of reporting on who got deals in the Scooter Libby case. Who agreed to testify for the Government only with the assurance that they wouldn't be charged with a crime? Similarly, who, if anyone, copped a plea to a minor or lesser charge in exchange for testifying against Libby.

Why do I think there's at least an immunized witness? First, there almost always is in cases like this. Second, Patrick Fitzgerald says as much in his Response to Libby's tendered jury instructions:

The government proposed that the Court give 15 additional D.C. Form Instructions: .... 2.23 (Testimony of Immunized Witness) (if applicable);

I think the "if applicable" part means Fitz may or may not call an immunized witness, but if no one had been granted immunity, there'd be no need to ask that this instruction potentially be given to the jury.

Lawrence Korb slices Reuel Gerecht into little pieces at TNR:

I applaud your work on the consequences of failure in Iraq. It is good that, after four years, conservatives have finally started thinking about the implications of failure in Iraq. But critics of the war don't need to be lectured on the consequences of failure. We have understood the consequences of failure from the beginning, and many of us opposed the invasion on these very grounds. We were aware that, as Ray Takeyh and Nikolas Gvosdev note, Iraq was "an incongruous collection of sectarian groups cobbled together by the British Empire and then sustained by Sunni terror"--and that an American invasion "has irrevocably unraveled that arrangement." As a result, the empowered Shia, the embittered Sunnis, and the secessionist Kurds would have little incentive or desire to cede power to their foes.

It's ironic that, when you describe the consequences of failure, you are describing the present, not the future. We are witnessing the consequences of failure right now in Iraq. Today, Iraq is immersed in a deep sectarian civil war (sorry, Reuel, it is what it is), where 7 percent of the country has fled (Jordan estimates that there are more than 750,000 Iraqis now in Amman and that about one million have fled to Damascus), millions more have been internally displaced, sectarian militias and death squads roam the streets, more than 100 Americans and many thousands of Iraqis are being killed each month, and our ground forces are being degraded to the point where we lack a realistic deterrent against countries like North Korea and Iran.

Ouch. More.

Chris Dodd proposed legislation imposing a cap on troop levels in Iraq:

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) announced legislation today capping the number of troops in Iraq at roughly 130,000, saying that lawmakers should take an up-or-down vote on President Bush's plan to send additional troops to the country and not settle for the non-binding resolution several Senate leaders prefer.

Well, I do not think this is Constitutional or practical. I also do not think it is good politics or policy.

Kevin Drum gets this one right:

[T]hese moves by Dodd and Clinton actually strike me as the worst of all possible worlds. Legislation to get us out of Iraq would be a fine idea. Legislation to reinstitute the draft and send 200,000 more troops to Iraq would be a horrible idea, but would at least have some internal consistency. But legislation that essentially locks in place the status quo? That really makes no sense at all. If there's anything we can be absolutely sure of, it's the fact that the status quo isn't working. Democrats should either go the political route and pass a nonbinding resolution, or they should pull up their socks and support legislation that defunds the war and sets a timetable for withdrawal. There's really no way to triangulate out of this.

For those who wonder, my plan is to set a date when funding ends, say October 30, 2007. Announce it NOW. Vote on it NOW. Then it is up to Bush to have the troops out by then. If he does not, then he is the one endangering the troops. He has 9 months to get them out.

This is the only policy and plan left. And it is good politics. The American People will support such an action. In fact, I bet at least a third of Republicans in the House and Senate vote for it.

This is solely my opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of Talk Left and its contributors.

When Alberto Gonzales was nominated to become Attorney General of the United States, I, and thousands of others, opposed his confirmation:

As the prime legal architect for the policy of torture adopted by the Bush Administration, Gonzales's advice led directly to the abandonment of longstanding federal laws, the Geneva Conventions, and the United States Constitution itself. . . .

In January 2002, Gonzales advised the President that the United States Constitution does not apply to his actions as Commander in Chief, and thus the President could declare the Geneva Conventions inoperative. Gonzales's endorsement of the August 2002 Bybee/Yoo Memorandum approved a definition of torture so vague and evasive as to declare it nonexistent. Most shockingly, he has embraced the unacceptable view that the President has the power to ignore the Constitution, laws duly enacted by Congress and International treaties duly ratified by the United States. He has called the Geneva Conventions "quaint." . . .

Now, Attorney General Gonzales has the audacity to state that the Judiciary should not enforce the Constitution and the laws of the land when the President chooses to ignore his responsibility to faithfully execute the laws and the Constitution of the United States:

U.S. Attorneys are being forced out of office, replaced with interim appointees chosen by the attorney general. Why? Let's start with the false explanation:

“We in no way politicize these decisions,” Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Right. That's why the choice to replace H.E. Cummins in Arkansas is the former research director for the Republican National Committee.

The selection of U.S. Attorneys is always political. Justice Department officials assured the NY Times that there are "frequently changes in the ranks of United States Attorneys after an election." That's true when the election produces a new president, but it's usual for an administration to force out prosecutors who the admInistration chose for the position.

A suspicious mind might wonder whether it's a coincidence that Carol Lam lost her job after prosecuting former Rep. Randy Cunningham, and that Kevin Ryan is getting the boot after investigating the backdating of stock options awarded to corporate executives. The Justice Department claims the prosecutors had poor priorities, pushing corruption cases rather than gun cases. Shouldn't federal resources be devoted to complex federal crimes, leaving states to prosecute simple "felon in possession" cases? Not according to the Gonzales Justice Department.

The ACLU has released a new report (available here) documenting that "the Pentagon monitored at least 186 anti-military protests in the United States and collected more than 2,800 reports involving Americans in an anti-terrorist threat database."

“It cannot be an accident or coincidence that nearly 200 anti-war protests ended up in a Pentagon threat database,” said Ann Beeson, Associate Legal Director of the ACLU. “This unchecked surveillance is part of a broad pattern of the Bush administration using ‘national security’ as an excuse to run roughshod over the privacy and free speech rights of Americans.”

The ACLU report reviews hundreds of pages of Defense Department documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed last year. The documents revealed that the surveillance of peace groups and anti-war activists was more widespread than previously known.

The Pentagon document released in conjunction with the report is here.

All lawyers like to humanize their clients, to show to the world (in a high profile case) and the jury in a routine case, that their client is more than the sum of any misdeeds he may have committed.

Very little of that has gone on so far in the Libby trial, but today there is a long profile of Mr. Libby in the New York Times, that attempts to do the job.

You read, you decide. Did it accomplish its mission?

Update: Is That Legal? says "no." On a related note, James Joyner at Outside the Beltway wonders if Scooter Libby can get a fair trial. Pacachutec at Firedoglake recaps Day 1 of jury selection and already beginning to blog on Day 2.

Kevin Drum asks:

Question: [Re:] the primary critique among the anti-war left, has the Iraq war vindicated them?

Well, my quick answer as to my primary critque of the Iraq Debacle is - for the same reasons Bush pere did not go to Baghdad at the end of Desert Storm. But my long answer relies on the Congressional testimony of General Wesley Clark in September 2002:

GEN. CLARK: I've been concerned that the attention on Iraq will distract us from what we're doing with respect to al Qaeda. . . . I think, as a minimum, that when one opens up another campaign, there is a diversion of effort. The question is whether the diversion of effort is productive or counterproductive. I really -- it's -- there are forces operating in both directions at this point. You can make the argument, as General Shalikashvili did, that you want to cut off all sources of supply. Problem with that argument is that Iran really has had closer linkages with the terrorists in the past and still does, apparently, today, than Iraq does. So that leads you to then ask, well, what will be the impact on Iran?

More.