A new report released today by the Death Penalty Information Center shows death sentences in the U.S. have dropped in each of the past four years.

The Death Penalty Information Center, which is to release the report tomorrow, attributes the decline largely to growing public awareness of death-row exonerations and concerns that innocent people might be sentenced to die.

John Kerry has said he supports a moratorium on the death penalty.

The mainstream media has made up its mind: The CBS Killian memos on Bush's National Guard Service were forgeries. The LA Times lead editorial in Wednesday's edition carries the headline " A Black Eye for CBS News." But the paper also bashes Bush on his Guard service.

Whatever the truth, CBS' real error was trying to prove a point that didn't really need to be proved. It doesn't take documents for anyone to realize that . Bush pulled strings to get into the National Guard. And, during the Vietnam draft, nobody went into the National Guard out of passion to defend his country. It also doesn't take new documents to establish that Bush shirked even his National Guard duties when he moved to Alabama and then to Harvard Business School.

In an interesting twist, Marian Knox, Killian's former secretary has spoken out. She says the memos are not the ones she typed, and some of the words are different, but they accurately reflect Killian's views and may have come from real memos that she did type for Killian.

She said that although she did not recall typing the memos reported by CBS News, they accurately reflect the viewpoints of Killian and documents that would have been in the personal file. Also, she said she didn't know whether the CBS documents corresponded memo for memo with that file. "The information in here was correct, but it was picked up from the real ones," she said. "I probably typed the information and somebody picked up the information some way or another."

Knox also said that Killian kept a "cover his back" file that he kept in a locked file. She said she used a mechanical Olivetti that had a "th" superscript key. as well as an IBM selectric.

Former D.C. Mayor Marion Berry has won the Democratic primary for a Ward 8 City Council Seat with 61% of the vote. The district is so Democratic that he is virtually assured of winning in November.

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Author Kitty Kelly was on Aaron Brown's Newsnight discussing her book on the Bush family. A summary of the interview:

Ms. Kelly said the book is an unsettling image of the Bush family, and a realistic one. She stands behind everything in it. She's 100% comfortable with her sources and documentation. Even on Sharon Bush. On Sharon and the cocaine allegation that Bush and one of his brothers used cocaine many times --including at Camp David while Bush, Sr. was President. She says the interview with Sharon occurred on 4/1/2003. there was another person named Lou present (I didn't catch the last name) . Kelly said Sharon came to her, not the other way around, and even confirmed the quotes next day in front of Kelly's editor. Kelly said she took Sharon to see her editor because she wanted to give speeches. She says she has two independent witnesses for the Sharon Bush allegations.

Kelly said Sharon talked about former President Bush's infidelity. During her interview over lunch, told Kitty and Lou that Neil left her a telephone message that if she didn't watch herself, she might find herself in a dark alley.

Kelly said George would drink and ignore Laura. She talked about how abusive GW was to Laura and that Bush Sr and Barbara didn't speak to him because of it for a year. She says that lots of people she interviewed said there was spousal abuse, but she couldn't find one to go on record who had first hand knowledge of it and said that there were no police or other written reports to confirm what people told her.

Regarding the National Guard service, Kelly said the Guard began drug testing around April, 1972, when Bush didn't show for his physical. She says, "connect the dots." She says "it bears examination" whether he didn't take the physical because he would have had to take a drug test. She doesn't think it's a coincidence that between April, 1972 to October, 1972, he didn't fly or take a physical.

Kelly said that if we could find the Flight Inquiry board records, they would tell the story. It has the medical information.

She was matter of fact, non-emotive and kind of boring.

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) today called upon the Inspector General's office to conduct an investigation of Attorney General John Ashcroft's use of government funds to pay for his "Patriot Act" tour. American Progress Report has the details. His letter to Inspector General Glenn Fine begins:

I am writing to ask that the Office of the Inspector General investigate whether the Attorney General of the United States violated federal law by conducting public relations efforts to stem criticism of and generate support for the USA PATRIOT Act and the U.S. Department of Justice's enforcement of that law. I believe these efforts violated not only prohibitions on propaganda efforts by the Executive Branch but also the Anti-Lobbying Act.

For those of you who think this is an election ploy, think again. Democrats have been complaining about Ashcroft's use of public funds to go on tour to plug the Patriot Act since it began. Check out this 9/9/03 letter to the U.S. Comptroller General from Rep. Conyers and Sen. Leahy at the end of the tour requesting an accounting.

Here's another sign that Bush has not made any progress in the war on terror. According to a new survey, Amercians don't put much faith in the ability of the federal government to protect them from an attack.

Most Americans would not cooperate as officials expect during a terror incident such as a smallpox or dirty bomb attack, U.S. researchers say. An in-depth survey found that the people do not trust the federal government to take care of them during an attack, and would take many matters into their own hands -- endangering themselves and their families.

70 people were killed in Iraq today.

The attacks - the latest in violence that has killed nearly 150 people in three days - were part of an increasingly brazen and coordinated militant campaign to bring the battle to Baghdad, sowing chaos in the center of authority for Prime Minister Ayad Allawi and his American allies. Insurgents appear to have only grown deadlier since Allawi's interim government took power in June, despite U.S. claims that Iraqi security forces are showing more resolve against guerrillas.

The mounting attacks aim to wreck the centerpiece of the U.S. plan for defeating the militants: building a strong Iraqi security force able to bring some calm before elections slated for January. Doing so is also a key prerequisite for any withdrawal of American troops.....

Crowds at the scene of the Baghdad explosion pumped their fists in the air and directed their anger against the United States and Allawi for failing to protect the station even though police recruiting points have repeatedly been attacked.

``Bush is a dog,'' they chanted.

Say hello to the New York State Progressives weblog. It a wordpress rather than an MT blog. Several MT blogs have converted lately, does anyone know what the advantages are over MT, if there are any?

NY Progressives is a group blog, with postings by Communication Services, John Maggoire, Long Island Progressive Coalition, Pinnacle Creative Services and USWA Local 9265. Nicely done, too.

In an editorial today, the Washington Post castigates Congress for continuing to stall passage of the DNA reform bill that was to be the Innocence Protection Act in a former incarnation.

YOU WOULDN'T think that what's left of Sen. Patrick J. Leahy's Innocence Protection Act could spark much controversy. A few years ago, when Mr. Leahy started pushing legislation to encourage post-conviction DNA testing at the state and federal level and improve the woeful quality of counsel in death penalty cases, the measure had real teeth. Now, however, compromise upon compromise has left the Innocence Protection Act, which has been merged with a bipartisan package with President Bush's initiative to reduce the backlog of physical evidence awaiting DNA testing, a shadow of its former self. The House passed the DNA legislation by a lopsided vote, 357 to 67, last year. Yet the Bush administration continues to oppose the Innocence Protection Act, and last week the Senate Judiciary Committee's conservative members, led by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), managed to stall the larger bill of which it is a part, the Advancing Justice Through DNA Technology Act. Though the committee is scheduled to continue marking up that bill today, and though it would clearly command majority support in the full Senate, it is far from clear that the bill will ultimately get to a vote.

Vladimir Putin is making changes in Russia's political system in response to last week's massacre. Critics charge he is moving the country towards a dictatorship.

Putin called for measures limiting the role of smaller opposition political parties, barring independent politicians from running for the national legislature, and effectively giving the president the power to appoint regional governors who are now elected. The changes are likely to be approved before the end of the year by Kremlin loyalists who control Russia's Parliament.

Opposition leaders and some political analysts responded that the changes would do little or nothing to stop terrorism, and they accused Putin of using the Beslan school raid that killed more than 330 people, half of them children, as a pretext for gaining full control over Russia's political institutions.

Colin Powell refused to weigh in Sunday on the Kerry vs. Bush military service fracas, but had this to say about U.S. draft policies during the Vietnam era in his 1995 autobiography, "My American Journey."

"The policies determining who would be drafted and who would be deferred, who would serve and who would escape, who would die and who would live, were an anti-democratic disgrace." He went on: "I am angry that so many sons of the powerful and well-placed … managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units."

Asked on Fox if Bush's National Guard service fell into that category, Powell said only: "I disagreed with the policies that were in place at that time. I didn't think it was the right set of policies for the challenge the nation was facing. But those are the policies that were in place at that time."

On the connection between Saddam and 9/11:

During a session of "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Powell also said he had no indication there was a direct connection between the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and those who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Boston Globe reports:

First, Abu Ghraib, then Basra, now Mosul. The Guardian has the details of a third Iraq city in which detained Iraqi prisoners have filed reports of torture at the hands of U.S. servicepersons.

Two statements have been taken from Iraqis detained in Mosul and more are expected. In one, an Iraqi lawyer says he was hooded and stripped naked in a building known as the "disco".

Yasir Rubaii Saeed al-Qutaji describes how loud western music was played and cold water poured over his body; he said he was also threatened with sexual abuse. "For the next 15 hours they tried to break me down by taking me frequently inside and repeating the stripping, cold water and loud music sequence," he says. "Due to the very loud music," he adds, "they would talk to me via a loudspeaker that was placed next to my ears."

he beatings did not leave a mark on his body because his attackers wore special gloves, he says. Mr al-Qutaji says he was a founder member of the Islamic Organisation for Human Rights. He claims that other prisoners were treated even worse. "Some were burnt with fire, others [had] bandaged broken arms."

The second detainee's account is even worse. Haitham Saeed al-Mallah, an engineering graduate, recounts his own torture and then says:

Mr al-Mallah says the next day, he saw "a young man of 14 years of age bleeding from his anus and lying on the floor. "He was Kurdish and his name was Hama. I heard the soldiers talking to each other about this guy, they mentioned that the reason for this bleeding was inserting a metal object in his anus."