by TChris

The North Texas Innocence Project will bring together faculty and students from six universities who will join defense lawyers in investigating the possible innocence of convicted inmates.

The project will be based primarily at the University of Texas at Arlington and the Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, with 40 criminal-justice and law-school students working with lawyers on the cases. The UT-Arlington students, who have been meeting for almost a year, have identified a murder in Tyler, a sexual assault in Dallas and a robbery in Fort Worth for further review.

Under the direction of licensed lawyers, the local students will work with law students from Texas Tech University, Texas Southern University and the University of Houston as well as journalism students from the University of St. Thomas in Houston.

Innocence projects are always needed. This one had the support of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which successfully urged the Texas legislature to provide funding.

National Law Journal has selected Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the Valerie Plame leaks case, as Lawyer of the Year.

Runner-up is Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, for his challenge to the Guantanamo Review tribunals.

Both are excellent choices in my opinion. The articles are outside the subscription wall and available to all.

President Bush held a news conference today that was dominated by recent news that after 9/11 he ordered electronic surveillance without a warrant or court order.

President Bush offered a vigorous and detailed defense of his previously secret wiretap program today, calling it a legal and essential tool in the battle against terrorism and saying that whoever disclosed it had committed a "shameful act."

Mr. Bush said the surveillance would continue, that it was being conducted under appropriate safeguards and that Congress had been kept informed about it. He rejected any suggestion that the surveillance program was symptomatic of unchecked power in the presidency.

It's important to note here that people in this country have been subjected to the warrantless surveillance, not just foreign nationals.

Yes, this is TalkLeft. It's our new design. We hope you like it.

The new graphic is by Monk of Inflatable Dartboard. I designed the layout (colors, font styles and sizes, columns and content arrangement) based upon a Wordpress theme named Relaxation.

The indefatigable Mike Ditto did the lion's share of the work over the past week. He converted the Wordpress coding to Movable Type, writing approximations where there was no equivalent. He converted and created a total of 17 templates and modules, while I insta-messaged him every 15 seconds over the past 8 hours asking "Can we do this?" and "Can we change that?" Then he made everything work across IE, Firefox and Safari.

Now, there are going to be undocumented features ( "bugs" is a politically incorrect term.) Feel free to point them out in comments. The new design may take some getting used to. But I hope you like it and agree it's an improvement over our previous look.

Webmaster Mike Ditto and I are almost done with TalkLeft's redesign which we have spent dozens of hours on this past week. I'm hoping it will be finished tonight. It really looks good. But, as with any major site overhaul, and this one has turned out to be really major, there are tests and retests and kinks to iron out.

While I continue to work on that, here's an open thread for you.

Time Magazine has chosen U-2's Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates as persons of the year:

For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow, Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono are TIME's Persons of the Year.

Michelle Malkin thinks it's a lame choice.

And, sorry, but Melinda Gates? She marries the software mogul after he has done his greatest work...and that makes her a co-person of the year.

How mean-spirited to suggest that Melinda Gates is being honored for being married to her husband as opposed to the thousands of hours she spends working on the Foundation. Michelle needs to do a little research on Melinda Gates' contributions in creating and co-running the largest philanthropic organization in America, one that is dedicated to reducing world poverty, saving lives by discovering global health cures and providing educational opportunities for children in our own country.

What greater work could there be?

The New York Times has a good editorial today on Bush's insistence that his executive orders allowing domestic warrantless monitoring of conversations was in accord with the Constitution and our nation's laws.

President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's existence. We don't know if he was right on the first count; this White House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of the law, much less respect them.

Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the illegal spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it. Perhaps the Congressional leaders who were told about the program could get the ball rolling.

What section of FISA do the Bush advisors not understand? Glenn Greenewald makes his case here .

The only way to argue that the Bush Administration’s warrantless eavesdropping on suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, complied with the law is by misquoting the law in order to change its requirements.

As to the credibility of Bush officials on this issue, Think Progress points out:

Senator Russ Feingold has issued a response to President Bush's admissions during his radio address today that he authorized domestic intelligence wiretaps without a warrant or court order. It is available as a radio actuality at the following number: 800-511-0763, Code 4945:

"The President believes that he has the power to override the laws that Congress has passed. This is not how our democratic system of government works. The President does not get to pick and choose which laws he wants to follow. He is a president, not a king."

Here is a fact sheet I received from Sen. Feingold's office on domestic intelligence wiretaps:

by TChris

The Bush administration has rewritten the nation's first principles. No man is above the law, except the president. Ours is a government of men (gathered in the White House) and not of laws. Separation of powers gives way to a concentration of power in an omnipotent executive. The president's power must be unchecked, even if the president is unbalanced.

The federal legislature enacted laws that prohibit the executive branch from electronically eavesdropping on private communications without the approval of the judicial branch. The law authorizes the president to apply to a special court for easily-obtained permission to intercept telephone calls of persons suspected of supporting terrorism or of working on behalf of a foreign government. Nothing in the Constitution gives the president greater power than that bestowed by Congress to listen to private conversations, and the Fourth Amendment requires the executive branch to obtain a warrant before it does so.

Like a rebellious child who continues to stick out his tongue after being told to behave, President Bush today acknowledged that he has authorized wiretaps and insisted that he will continue to do everything in his power to protect Americans. While the president contended that he is acting "under our laws and Constitution," his understanding of the law -- detention without trial or counsel, torture, secret renditions to foreign prisons, all deemed appropriate exercises of presidential power -- is untrustworthy.

A president who lies about a private sexual encounter is impeached. A president who defies the law and, when exposed, arrogantly proclaims his right to do so, will never stand trial.

Update: Webmaster Mike Ditto and I spent 8 hours implementing the new design today. We're not quite done. Hopefully, it will be finished tomorrow night. It's looking really good, but I don't want to republish the 13,000 entries and 180,000 comments until it's close to perfect. We expect that to be tomorrow night.

Update: The upgrade to MT 3.2 is mostly done. There are some kinks in the search results, comment preview layout and a few other pages, which we are working on. But you can go ahead and comment.

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Webmaster Mike Ditto is about to upgrade TalkLeft to MT 3.2. This means comments will not be available for an hour or so.

Sometime tonight, we will be converting to our first new design since June, 2002, with a new graphic by Monk. Every template of TalkLeft needs to be changed over, which Mike is handling.

I'll update here when comments are back and again when the new design is implemented.

Here is the entire FISA Act. Section 1802 covers electronic surveillance under the Act without a court order. You may have to check the GAO database to make sure none have been updated recently. I will be posting another version from Lexis later, but since readers can't access it without paying, I thought this publicly available version would be helpful to get you started.

Section 1811 of the act pertaining to surveillance during wartime states:

Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for a period not to exceed fifteen calendar days following a declaration of war by the Congress.

Section 1805 of the Act covers emergency situations where a court order cannot be obtained in advance. Such surveillance can only last 72 hours before an Order is applied for.

President Bush today admitted he ordered National Security wiretaps without a warrant more than 30 times since 2001. He says he has the power to do it. You can watch his statement here.

From the Washington Post:

Bush said that he authorized the program "using constitutional authority vested in me as commander-in-chief." He argued that the program is consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, and used "to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."