President Bush, speaking in Latin America, defended his Administration's treatment of detainees:

President Bush vigorously defended U.S. interrogation practices in the war on terror today and lobbied against a congressional drive to outlaw torture.

"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again," Bush said. "So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law." He declared, "We do not torture."

Right. We just send them to other countries that do allow torture.

The editorial board of the Birmingham News, the largest newspaper in the largest city in the very conservative state of Alabama, has decided they can no longer support capital punishment.

"After decades of supporting the death penalty, the editorial board no longer can do so. Today and over the next five days, we will explain our change of mind and heart..... Why? Because we have come to believe Alabama's capital punishment system is broken. And because, first and foremost, this newspaper's editorial board is committed to a culture of life.

by TChris

The Supreme Court agreed this morning to hear Salim Ahmed Hamdan’s plea for a real hearing before a real court, rather than a military tribunal at Guantanamo. TalkLeft background on Hamdan’s case is here and here and here.

Chief Justice Roberts was on the lower court panel that deferred to the Bush administration’s desire to keep detainees like Hamdan out of the judicial system. Roberts did not participate in the decision to grant certiorari, and presumably won’t play a role in deciding the case. That’ s good, since we already know what Roberts thinks about the issue. Alito would probably be just as deferential to the executive branch as was Roberts, raising the possibility (if Alito is confirmed) that the lower court’s decision might stand on a tied (4-4) vote in the Supreme Court.

The Wall St. Journal (free link) today discloses Lewis Libby's latest defense strategy. Goodbye memory defense (smart move.) Hello trash the reporters.

But legal experts say Mr. Libby's attorneys, like any attorney trying to impugn the testimony of a witness in a criminal trial, will likely try to blunt the prosecution by challenging the reporters on their other sources, their memories of events in question and their own reputations.

While the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, would be able to limit the grilling of witnesses to what is relevant to the case, criminal-defense attorneys say he will have to allow at least some questions that go to the credibility and professional ability of key witnesses, which in this case are the reporters. That could include performance reviews, corrections on previous stories and internal correspondence related to the reporters or their stories.

The good news is that White House and Pentagon officials are deserting Cheney in droves. The bad news is, as most of us suspected, he is the Torturer in Chief.

Cheney's camp says the United States does not torture captives, but believes the president needs nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists to protect Americans. To preserve the president's flexibility, any measure that might impose constraints should be resisted. That is why the administration has recoiled from embracing the language of treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Cheney's aides find vague and open-ended.

It's now Cheney and Addington vs. the detainees:

When is your DNA not your DNA? When you've had a bone marrow transplant.

IT SOUNDS like an open-and-shut case: a clear DNA match is made between semen from a serious sexual assault and a blood sample from a known criminal. Yet in a recent case from Alaska, the criminal in question was in jail when the assault took place. And forensic scientists had already matched the crime sample to the DNA profile of another person who was their prime suspect. It was only after careful detective work that the mystery was solved: the jailed man had received bone marrow from the suspect many years earlier.

The cat's out of the bag. Who urged New York City to begin conducting searches of subway riders' bags? Richard Clarke.

Mr. Clarke, a former counterterrorism adviser to two presidents, received widespread attention last year for his criticism of President Bush's response to the Sept. 11 attacks, detailed in a searing memoir and in security testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

Unknown to the public, until recently, was Mr. Clarke's role in advising New York City officials in helping to devise the "container inspection program" that the Police Department began in July after two attacks on the transit system in London.

I'm with Atrios on this one. I like Jennifer Aniston. This afternoon while channel surfing I ended up watching Along Came Polly for the second time. She seems like a real person. Anyway, here's why I'm writing about her.

An interview in this week's Newsweek asks her to list the seven things she'd rather talk about than men. Number 6:

The state of the world. How about that indictment?! And why did it take so long to respond to the crisis in New Orleans? Everything is imploding. It all seems to lead back to our dear president.

I haven't written about:

• the Paris Riots,
• the disclosure in today's New York Times that a primary intelligence source for Iraqi information was branded a "likely fabricator" months before his information was used by the Administration "to gin up sentiments for war."
• Sen. Jay Rockefeller saying today he was "dead wrong" in his vote for the Iraq War
• Warren Beatty trying to crash Gov. Arnold's rally
  

Does anyone have something to say about these or other topics? Go right ahead.

I often criticize aspects of America's criminal justice system, particularly our over-reliance on incarceration and the unduly harsh sentences meted out to non-violent offenders. But I also try to remind people that for all its flaws, America has the best criminal justice system in the world.

Reports such as this in today's New York Times make my stomach churl. Read it before, not after breakfast. But please, read it.

Where are Bono, Geldorf and Live Aid? Where are Madonna and Green Day? If they are so concerned about the people of Africa, shouldn't they be doing something to publicize the plight of those imprisoned in Africa for years without a trial, in cells that house 160 inmates in the size of a 2-car garage where the only drinking water is from the single toilet that often doesn't work? Where inmates who have yet to be convicted of a crime die from diseases borne of the filth?

The Washington Post reports that the FBI has been obtaining and reviewing records of ordinary Americans in the name of the war on terror through the use of national security letters that gag the recipients.

"The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters -- one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people -- are extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans. "

What's a national security letter?

Did you know that Rudy Guiliani's law firm is representing Tom DeLay -- and that it has received more money from DeLay's legal defense fund than Dick DeGuerin, who is DeLay's lawyer in the criminal case? According to the Houston Chronicle:

Dick DeGuerin, DeLay's lawyer in that case, was paid $25,000 from the fund in the past three months.

Other attorneys and law firms received $235,000 during the same period, with the largest share, $100,000, going to the Houston law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani. The payments to Bracewell & Giuliani, which has offices in several cities and a lobbying component in Washington, triggered conflict of interest protests from a public interest group.