Update: Lieberman must collect 7,500 signatures by Aug. 9, the day after the Democratic primary in order to run as an "unaffiliated candidate" on the November ballot. Coverage of his announcement: New York Times; CBS; Reuters

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Joe Lieberman is made a major announcement at 1:00 pm ET.

Lieberman is running as a Dem in the primary. But he's having staffers put out petitions in case he loses the primary so he can run as a "petitioning Democrat."

The AP reports here. The Hartford Courant here.

Update: The affidavit in support of the arrest warrant detailing the alleged crimes is here.

Update: Steven D. Green of North Carolina has been charged in federal court with rape and murder:

Federal prosecutors charged a veteran of the Iraq war with murder and rape Monday in connection with the killing of an Iraqi woman and members of her family.
Steven D. Green, a 21-year-old former private first class who was discharged from the Army, appeared in a federal magistrate's courtroom in Charlotte Monday.

More here.

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The Washington Post has new details in the case of the five U.S. soldiers charged with raping an Iraqi girl and killing her family in Mahmudiyah.

Abeer Qasim Hamza was 15 years old. It appears she had been targeted. After raping and killing her they tried to set her on fire.

Let's try this again. As New York Times editor Bill Keller said on Face the Nation yesterday, and the Boston Globe reported last week, Operation Swift and the Administration's war on terror financing was no secret. From the Globe:

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. ``A lot of people were aware that this was going on," said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.....

Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. The system, which handles trillions of dollars in worldwide transactions each day, serves as a main hub for banks and other financial institutions that move money around the world. According to The New York Times, SWIFT executives agreed to give the Treasury Department and the CIA broad access to its database.

Here is the U.N. report. Check out Paragraph 31: [Add: Link may not be operational this morning, it was fine last night.]

In 2004, in noting that one of Rudy Giuliani's last acts in office was to rename the Manhattan Detention Complex (better known as 'The Tombs') the "Bernard Kerik Detention Complex," I wondered if Rudy would ever live down his endorsement of Kerik.

On Saturday, one day after Kerik pleaded guilty to two corruption-related misdemeanors, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered Kerik's name removed from the complex. Within hours, it was physically stripped from the building, which will again be known as the Manhattan Detention Complex.

As for Kerik, he's "unfazed." [More...]

In honor of Bernie Kerik's name being stripped from the Manhattan Detention Complex, fomerly known as the Tombs, before it became the Bernard B. Kerik Detention Complex, here's Eric Burden and the Animals singing "The House of the Rising Sun."

Round the blogosphere today:

• Water Tiger at Firedoglake does the heavy lifting.

• Arianna has a Sunday roundup.

• Avedon Carol at Sideshow wonders if "Memo from Turner" from Mick Jagger's movie Performance is on YouTube. Right here.

Check out this news release from the Defense Department.

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research recently began funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs. Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

The study will include, but not be limited to, researching blog patterns:

"It can be challenging for information analysts to tell what's important in blogs unless you analyze patterns." ...Patterns include the content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the blog.

They even have a unique moniker for the blogosphere: "Information Battlespace"

"The fact that the web is a vast source of information is sometimes overlooked by military analysts," Kokar said. "Our research goal is to provide the warfighter with a kind of information radar to better understand the information battlespace."

James Carville and Mark J. Penn have an op-ed in today's Washington Post positing that Hillary Clinton is electable and that the key may be women voters.

The X factor for 2008 -- and we do mean X -- is the power of women in the electorate. Fifty-four percent of voters are female. George Bush increased his vote with only two groups between 2000 and 2004: women and Hispanics.

...Hillary's candidacy has the potential to reshape the electoral map for Democrats. ....with the pathbreaking possibility of this country's first female president, we could see an explosion of women voting -- and voting Democratic. States that were close in the past, from Arkansas to Colorado to Florida to Ohio, could well move to the Democratic column. It takes only one more state to win.

They discount her polarization factor ("some people say she is too liberal, some that she is too conservative") pointing out:

We believe that she is squarely in the mainstream of America.

Time Magazine has a long feature article, How to Fix Guantanamo.

It offers five suggestions, all well-taken:

• 1. The White House must work with Congress
• 2. Repatriate the small fish
• 3. Process the 400 plus habeas cases through the courts. In other words, let the judiciary do its job
• 4. Live by the Geneva rules
• 5. Lift the veil of secrecy

The article also notes that 75% of those being held are no longer being interrogated. If they haven't been charged with a crime and have no useful intelligence information, it's time to send them home -- or to another country that is willing to take them and allow them to live in freedom.

by TChris

My stay in Madrid happened to coincide with the city's annual gay and lesbian pride festival. From my balcony yesterday, I had a great view of the colorful parade, and of the thousands of onlookers lining the street. The celebration of unity and diversity was inspiring, but I was most taken by the absence of protest. There were no religious fundamentalists attempting to disrupt the parade, no counter-demonstrators claiming that any acceptance of LGBT rights will bring about the destruction of society. Just people enjoying the opportunity to support the right of every human being to live without oppression or discrimination.

Gay marriage, such a divisive topic in the United States, has been legal in Spain for about a year. The wild claims in the U.S. that gay marriage is a threat to the family are belied by all the heterosexual couples in Spain whose marriages have survived nicely since the law was changed. There are, of course, Spaniards who oppose equal rights for gay couples: a judge was recently censured for refusing to perform same sex marriages. But experience shows (in Spain as in Massachusetts) that gay couples function as family units just as well as straight couples. In fact, Spain recently had its first gay divorce -- just one, of the 1,300 same sex marriages performed in the last year. Let those who think that gay marriage destroys families explain that statistic.

I'm very proud to announce TalkLeft's first video promo. It was produced by Actor Will Keenan and designed and edited by 3rdi of Intellectual Design and Defcon Films 2006. The theme:

"Believe in people powered politics. Crises precipitate change. Let's right their wrongs before there is nothing left to talk about."

It's on You Tube, I hope you will watch and go over to rate it.

Thanks, Will!

One more shout of gratitude, to TalkLeft's anonymous artist, our man in Hollywood, C.L., for contributing so many outstanding graphics to TalkLeft. And of course, to TChris, who will be back from Europe this week, and Last Night in Little Rock, whom I hope gets a break soon from the trial trenches.

Jane Mayer's extensive profile of Cheney aide David Addington in the New Yorker is an excellent read.

Addington, who now holds Scooter Libby's job, has been a formidible force in the Administration's positions on everything from torture to Guantanamo to presidential signing statements.

He insisted, for instance, on maintaining the admissibility of statements obtained through coercion, or even torture. In meetings, he argued that officials in charge of the military commissions should be given maximum flexibility to decide whether to include such evidence. "Torture isn't important to Addington as a scientific matter, good or bad, or whether it works or not," the Administration lawyer, who is familiar with these debates, said. "It's more about his philosophy of Presidential power. He thinks that if the President wants torture he should get torture. He always argued for 'maximum flexibility.' "