Jury selection in the trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby begins Tuesday.

I will be doing a live chat at 2:00 pm ET for the Washington Post. It will focus on the key players, the charges, the likely defense, the jurors each side will look for, and the probable key witnesses for each side.

I hope you'll join me. You can begin submitting questions now on these or other related issues at this link.

Iraq has carried through with its plans to hang Saddam Hussein's half-brother as well as the former head of the Revolutionary Court. Both were hanged before dawn today.

I wonder how long it will take for the hanging video to hit the internet.

President Bush will be on 60 Minutes tonight, admitting that his strategy in Iraq has led to increased instability.

Anyone watch? Any observations?

Update: Some highlights (or lowlights, depending on your perspectvie:)

• He watched part of the video of Saddam's hanging but not the part with him going through the trap door. Iraq could have handled the execution a lot better

• He knows he's unpopular right now but it doesn't bother him

• Using language like "Bring 'em on" was a mistake. The troop levels could have been a mistake. He's proud of our efforts, we liberated that country, Iraq should show more gratitude.

The DNA expert in the Duke Lacrosse case will be on "60 Minutes" tonight admitting to "big errors" in the case.

The forensic expert hired by the prosecutor in the Duke rape case says he made a "big error" in judgment by not stating in his report that the only DNA he found on the accuser was from several men who were not on the Duke lacrosse team.

....Meehan acknowledged that he has never omitted potentially exculpatory evidence before. "We haven't done that before," he tells Stahl. "In retrospect, I should have done a better job of conveying that information."

Always good to hear a mea culpa. Now, if we could only get one from D.A. Mike Nifong.

The full transcript is here.

There are 1,800 articles about the missing boys found in Kirkwood, Missouri. All three cable news networks are giving the story Runaway Bride-type coverage. I've tried avoiding it, but it's almost impossible. Here's the latest.

It makes no sense, particularly the story about Shawn Hornbeck, the now-15 year old. I'm tired of the experts' pat explanations: Stockholm syndrome, fear his family members would be killed, etc. The interview with the cops who found the pick-up truck was non-informational.

The man arrested, Michael Devlin, held the same job at the same pizza joint in Kirkwood, Mo., (population 25,000) where he lived and near where he grew up and where numerous family members still reside, for 25 years. The pizza owner says he was shocked to learn he had a kid. Did Devlin's family not know he had a kid? He never married. What about Christmas and holidays -- did Devlin just go alone? Did his brothers never visit his apartment and see signs of a kid living there? Or, did he introduce the family to the kid, passing the kid off as his own with an improbable story?

In the neighborhood, parents and kids say the kid was just like every other kid, had sleepovers, was allowed to go out to play,etc.

It looks like President Bush and the Pentagon are trying to sneak another fast one by us. This time, it's the deletion of a wiretapping provision that has been in the Army Manual since 1984.

The manual, described by the Army as a “major revision” to intelligence-gathering guidelines, addresses policies and procedures for wiretapping Americans, among other issues.

The original guidelines, from 1984, said the Army could seek to wiretap people inside the United States on an emergency basis by going to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, or by obtaining certification from the attorney general “issued under the authority of section 102(a) of the Act.”

That last phrase is missing from the latest manual, which says simply that the Army can seek emergency wiretapping authority pursuant to an order issued by the FISA court “or upon attorney general authorization.” It makes no mention of the attorney general doing so under FISA.

Bush asks us to trust him.

Military law expert Donald G. Rehkoff, for whom I have the utmost respect, being familiar with his work, had this to say on a message board today about Charles "Cully" Stimson, the Bush deputy for detainee affairs who made reprehensible comments about lawyers who represent the detainees. (He has graciously given me permission to reprint it.)

First, he reminds us of President John Adams, quoting from Key Figures in Public Trials:

John Adams, in his old age, called his defense of British soldiers in 1770 "one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country." That's quite a statement, coming as it does from perhaps the most underappreciated great man in American history.

The day after British soldiers mortally wounded five Americans on a cobbled square in Boston, thirty-four-year-old Adams was visited in his office near the stairs of the Town Office by a Boston merchant , James Forest. "With tears streaming from his eyes" (according to the recollection of Adams), Forest asked Adams to defend the soldiers and their captain, Thomas
Preston.

The Boston Globe reports today that House Democrats may try to force a closure of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other secret prisons by cutting off funding for them.

Representative John P. Murtha, the chairman of the powerful Defense Appropriations subcommittee and a close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said he wants to close both prisons by cutting their funding, "to restore our credibility worldwide." If he succeeds, it would force the administration to find a new location for high-value terrorism suspects.

Murtha said Nancy Pelosi supports the closure move.

Government agencies use national security letters to snoop through financial records without the bother of a judicially issued warrant. The NY Times reports that the FBI "has issued thousands of national security letters" since 9/11, distressing news that TalkLeft discussed here.

But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.

While assuring us that it only investigates terrorism, the Pentagon won't say why it pokes around in domestic financial records. This statement is nonetheless telling:

The jury trial of I. Lewis Scooter Libby begins Tuesday. I intend to follow it closely. However, I don't want TalkLeft to become all Libby, all the time. And, there will be days when I can't monitor live developments.

As I did with the Duke Lacrosse players case, I have set up a TalkLeft forum for those interested in following the trial and commenting on it on a detailed level.

The forum can also be used as a reference section as it has links to documents in the case, other bloggers covering the trial and the archives of several bloggers who have followed the Valerie Plame leak investigation and Scooter Libby Indictment since the beginning.

I will be adding documents to the document section over the weekend.

It is open for posting and registration. Your TalkLeft registration doesn't work on the forums. You will need to do a separate, free registration. You can hide your e-mail address and register using a moniker.

The Washington Post in this great editorial took Cully Stimson to task Friday. Stimson is the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs.

" MOST AMERICANS understand that legal representation for the accused is one of the core principles of the American way. Not, it seems, Cully Stimson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs. In a repellent interview yesterday with Federal News Radio, Mr. Stimson brought up, unprompted, the number of major U.S. law firms that have helped represent detainees at Guantanamo Bay."

"....Mr. Stimson proceeded to reel off the names of these firms, adding, 'I think, quite honestly, when corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.'"

Stimson hinted at nefarious connections, rather than a desire to do pro bono work, as the firms' motives:

How embarrassing for the President.

Negotiations to build George W. Bush's presidential library at Southern Methodist University have divided the campus, pitting the administration and some alumni against liberal-leaning faculty members who say the project would be an embarrassment to the school.

Some professors have complained that the combined library, museum and think tank would celebrate a presidency that unnecessarily took the country into a war.

This is quite a slap at the Bushes:

First lady Laura Bush is a graduate and is on the board of trustees. Vice President Dick Cheney previously served on the board. Presidential adviser Karen Hughes and former White House counsel Harriet Miers are both graduates.

However the school expects the library to go through claiming the protesting profs are in the minority.