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Sunday :: May 28, 2006

Haditha Killings: Video and Survivor Interviews


Lucian Reed, World Picture News Network

Here is a video of a young girl whose father and grandparents were killed Nov. 19 in Haditha by U.S. Marines who burst through their door. She not only details what happened, but shows her own shrapnel wounds from the incident.

In all, 24 civilians were killed by members of the 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regimen, (Kilo Company) which was brought in due to their "success" during the 2004 Fallujah raid. The Independent, Human Rights Watch and others have compared the killings to the 1968 My Lai Massacre.

The Senate Armed Forces Committee will investigate the killings.

The New York Times has interviews with additional survivors. As to who was responsible, the Times reports:

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Duke Lacrosse Case: More Details of Accuser's Changed Story

ABC11 Eyewitness News in Durham has obtained a copy of a police report that outlines in greater detail how the accuser changed her story.

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London Lawyers: 60 Guantanamo Detainees Were Kids

A British legal rights group asserts that 60 of the Guantanamo detainees have been children under 18.

They include at least 10 detainees still held at the US base in Cuba who were 14 or 15 when they were seized - including child soldiers who were held in solitary confinement, repeatedly interrogated and allegedly tortured.

The disclosures threaten to plunge the Bush administration into a fresh row with Britain, its closest ally in the war on terror, only days after the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, repeated his demands for the closure of the detention facility. It was, he said, a "symbol of injustice".

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Yearly Kos in the New York Times

The blogging cool kidz will be in Vegas the weekend of June 9 attending the first Yearly Kos convention. So will many Democratic party leaders. The Sunday New York Times Magazine gives it a big shout-out.

Next week, 1,000 devotees of the liberal blogging universe -- people who know one another only as pseudonyms on a screen, connected by only their running commentaries -- will descend on the Riviera Hotel in hopes of affixing names and faces to their online personas.

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Saturday :: May 27, 2006

The Jefferson Congressional Office Search Redux

by Last Night in Little Rock

I have been provided with the link to a copy of the search warrant for Rep. Jefferson's (D-LA2, New Orleans) Congressional office as well as defense counsel's excellent memorandum for sealing the records pending litigation of speech and debate privilege and separation of powers. I'm impressed with both. The affidavit online has several things redacted, but, what is there is damning. It is painful to read.

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WhiteHouse.gov in Español

by Last Night in Little Rock

While the President and Congress rail against Immigration and non-English speaking immigrants, even objecting to the National Anthem in Spanish (while the rest of the Administration, including First Lady Laura Bush never got the memo), they are seeking to manufacture an election year issue that Lou Dobbs, of course, could love. After all, if there are 11-12 million illegals in the country, they sure aren't voters. (For additional background, see "Immigration Debate" at WaPo, and note the fact that the State Department has four versions of the National Anthem in Spanish on its website, the first dating from 1919.)

And, we see that the White House website also appears in Español.

"Welcome to America. Now learn the language." "Just kidding. Look us up in Spanish, if need be."

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Bernie Kerik Under Grand Jury Investigation

A Bronx grand jury is investigating Bernie Kerik. You remember him -- at the suggestion of Rudy Giuliani, Bush nominated him for Homeland Security.

Ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani - once mentioned as a possible head of the department - strongly lobbied the White House for his former driver, police commissioner and business partner.

"Rudy cashed in a chip on this one," said a White House source, who earlier this week predicted there was "no way" Kerik could land a cabinet-level job in the Bush administration.

He later withdrew his nomination after mutiple problems surfaced with the nomination.

Here are some of his current problems. Hopefully, this will come back to haunt Rudy as he prepares for a 2008 presidential bid.

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15 Unfinished Projects

If you are online today, and not because you are at work, chances are, like me, you are avoiding or procastinating doing something else. In the spirit of 100 Things I've Never Done by Jim Capozzola of Rittenhouse Review (also see his 100 Things About Me), I'm going to list as many projects as I can that I haven't finished -- mostly because it's easier to sit at the computer and surf the net or blog. I'm hoping that by writing them out I'll not only have a written list but actually do some of them.

What could or should you be doing other than reading this? Feel free to list them in the comments. No need to list 15, any number is fine. If you number them, you can post a followup later should you get any done.

Ok, here's my list, in no particular order:

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Weekend Listening Pleasure: Dylan at JazzFest

Bob Dylan: Live at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Fair Grounds, Acura Stage, April 28, 2006.. The audio of the entire set is online here. [Via commenter Squeaky.]

This is also an open thread. I'm probably going to avoid politics this weekend unless there is breaking news. I'm setting up my new digital video camera, i-sight webcam, and i-Movie software and trying to figure out how to capture streaming audio and video and whether it's easier to do it on a Mac or a PC. I recently got Apple's 23 inch cinema display monitor to hook up to my powerbook G4 but I'm still pretty clueless on Apple stuff except for iTunes.

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Gonzales Says He Thought About Resigning

by TChris

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is portraying himself to the press as a prosecutor of principle, claiming he would have resigned had the White House ordered him to return the property seized in a search of Rep. Jefferson's office. Stalling the investigation for 45 days by secreting the evidence with the Solicitor General is apparently an insufficiently significant interference with the FBI's work to trigger a resignation.

The practice of standing up for the law in a principled manner is new to Gonzales, who has been an untroubled defender of torture, secret and indefinite detention without trial, domestic spying, warrantless wiretapping and scrutiny of calling records, while advocating the suppression of whistleblowers who expose the illegal acts that he defends. Ignoring the law is easy for Gonzales. It isn't so easy to ignore FBI agents and career prosecutors who would go public if Gonzales permitted obvious political obstruction of criminal investigations.

The good news is that Gonzales' sudden concern for the appearance of principle might prevent a coverup of Republican scandals.

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Friday :: May 26, 2006

Libby Judge Orders Time to Turn Over Matt Cooper Draft Articles

Did Matt Cooper change a material or a trivial detail of his Time Magazine article about meeting with Scooter Libby? Judge Walton today issued a 40 page opinion (text of opinion here (pdf), thanks to Tom Maguire) in which he ordered Time to turn over earlier drafts of his article to Libby. Walton has been reviewing in camera the materials Libby subpoenaed from Cooper, Judith Miller, Andrea Mitchell and other NBC reporters.

Walton said Time magazine must turn over drafts of first-person stories that reporter Matthew Cooper wrote about his conversations with Libby because the judge found inconsistencies between them..... Walton said, he found "a slight alteration between the several drafts of the articles" Cooper wrote about his conversations with Libby and the reporter's first-person account of his testimony before a federal grand jury.

"This slight alteration between the drafts will permit the defendant to impeach Cooper, regardless of the substance of his trial testimony, because his trial testimony cannot be consistent with both versions," Walton wrote.

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Duke Lacrosse: Accuser First Claimed Grope, Not Rape

Unbelievable. According to an early police report describing an interview with the accuser in the duke lacrosse alleged rape case, the accuser said she was groped but not sexually assaulted.

It was not until the police decided to involuntarily commit her that she changed her account.

There also was an earlier lineup one week after the incident in which she failed to identify Dave Evans.

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