Under what evidence rule or exception did this testimony come in at Scott Peterson's trial today?:

Scott Peterson talked to a friend nine years ago about how he would dispose of a body if he killed someone, saying he would weight the body down and dump it in the ocean so the fish would eat it, a detective testified Tuesday. "He said he would tie a bag around the neck with duct tape," weight the body down and toss it into the ocean and "fish activity would eat away the neck and hands and the body would float up, no fingers, no teeth," making it impossible to identify, Detective Allen Brocchini said. Brocchini did not elaborate on how he learned of the 1995 conversation.

One day after the Supreme Court decisions on detainees and enemy combatants, the Military announced the formation of three tribunals to try David Hicks of Australia, Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul of Yemen and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi of Sudan.

The three have been charged with conspiracy to commit war crimes and other offenses. They could face up to life in prison if convicted, the Pentagon has said previously, ruling out death sentences for the three. Al-Qosi is alleged to have been an al-Qaida accountant and bin Laden bodyguard, while al-Bahlul, of Yemen, is accused of being a propagandist for bin Laden who produced videos glorifying the killing of Americans, according to an official list of charges released by the Pentagon in February.

The men are alleged to have trained at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, but the Pentagon's list of charges makes no mention of either man carrying out or planning any terrorist attack. Hicks, 28, a convert to Islam, is accused of training at al-Qaida camps and taking up arms against U.S.-led forces. Charges include war crimes conspiracy, attempted murder and aiding the enemy. The attempted murder charge relates to claims he was an "illegal combatant."

The presiding officer will be Retired Army Col. Peter E. Brownback III. The military says yesterdays' Supreme Court decisions have nothing to do with today's announcement and that it was just time to move the cases forward. The DOD announcement is here.

by TChris

The Bush administration's aggressive use of the military not only means that the troops are spread thin, but that replacement troops are hard to find. The temporary solution:

The Army is preparing to notify about 5,600 retired and discharged soldiers who are not members of the National Guard or Reserve that they will be involuntarily recalled to active duty for possible service in Iraq or Afghanistan, Army officials said Tuesday.

Will they be ready to serve?

Unlike members of the National Guard and Reserve, the individual reservists do not perform regularly scheduled training. Any former enlisted soldier who did not serve at least eight years on active duty is in the Individual Ready Reserve pool, as are all officers who have not resigned their commission.

by TChris

Bringing the term to an end with another 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court upheld an injunction that prevents the Justice Dept. from enforcing an overbroad law that's meant to shield minors from internet porn -- a law that, in practice, threatens to keep adults from viewing materials that are legal for an adult to see.

The law, which never took effect, would have authorized fines up to $50,000 for the crime of placing material that is "harmful to minors" within the easy reach of children on the Internet. The law also would have required adults to use access codes and or other ways of registering before they could see objectionable material online.

For now, the law, known as the Child Online Protection Act, would sweep with too broad a brush, Kennedy wrote. "There is a potential for extraordinary harm and a serious chill upon protected speech" if the law took effect, he said.
Kennedy said that filtering software "is not a perfect solution to the problem of children gaining access to harmful-to-minors materials." So far, he added, the government has failed to prove that other technologies would work better.

The Court sent the case back to the district court for a trial, giving the government a chance to prove that filtering software has improved in the five years since the injunction was granted.

Bump and Update: Theresa Heinz Kerry, Al Gore and one of Kerry's primary opponents also will speak. We're thinking the unnamed primary opponent will be Howard Dean.

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Original Post

Sen. Edward Kennedy and former President Bill Clinton will speak at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in late July.

Clinton is scheduled to speak July 26, the opening night of the four-day convention, and Kennedy will address the audience the second day, Democratic officials said Monday. The vice presidential pick will speak July 28, and presumed Democratic nominee John Kerry will close the convention July 29 with his acceptance speech.

The DNC now has a blog just for the convention--check out the bostonDparty, written by Matt Stoller and Eric Schnurer. The latest convention news is here.

This will be an exciting convention. We believe Bush's popularity will continue to decline and Kerry will start picking up speed, big time. The convention can only help.

House Democaratic leader Nancy Pelosi today released the following statement on the Supreme Court decisons with respect to the rights of detainees and Bush-defined "enemy combatants."

The Supreme Court's decisions in the Hamdi case and the case involving the Guantanamo detainees are triumphs for the rule of law. The notion that the President has the unchallengeable authority to define the circumstances of a person's detention, especially that of a United States citizen, is contrary to our nation's history and experience.

"The right to counsel and the right to contest government actions in court are among our most cherished liberties. We cannot, and we must not, allow our civil liberties contained in the Constitution to become a casualty in the war on terrorism. "The Supreme Court's decisions today are a timely reminder of the constant need to evaluate actions taken in the name of national security, no matter how well-intentioned those actions may be."

Where's Diane Feinstein? Still partnering up with Orin Hatch to draft bills that will diminish our rights? Nancy rocks in our book. Diane doesn't.

We'll go on record with a bold prediction. Bush is toast. Here's the latest poll that supports our view. As Iraq descends into further chaos, it will only go downhill from here. Say hello to President John Kerry.

Instapundit explains why he doesn't have comments. He's right. At his level of traffic, monitoring the comments would take so much time that there'd be no time for blogging. While we get hundreds of comments a day, we still read each one--and try to delete those that contain profanity and name-calling. Because we're nowhere near as popular as Instapundit, we can still do it. We hope to continue, and we've noticed in recent months, that our readers are getting the message. There are fewer objectionable comments. For that, we thank you, because we believe interaction and the ability of readers to express their view is important. Plus, it's a lot easier for us to report the news than to analyze it. Reader comments allow you to write the analysis so we don't have to, which in turn allows us to keep TalkLeft up to the hour (give or take a few) with current events.

So, thanks to you readers who use asterisks in place of letters to help us avoid the profanity censor-blocking software used by businesses and law firms, who use words other than name-calling and personal attacks to voice your disagreement with us or another commenter and who follow the html instructions for including url's in your comments. It will help keep the comment section of the site alive even as we continue to grow--and we are committed to trying to do that. We think it's time we recognized your efforts to accomodate our idiosyncratic rules publicly, because so many of you have adapted. Thank you.

Update: Samizdata states a great comment policy here. Trolls and blogroaches beware.

Several civil liberties groups announced today they will sue to prevent Massachussetts from implementing plans to search mass transit passengers and their belongings.

Civil rights groups said Monday that the MBTA's proposed searches of bags and packages on subway and commuter trains would be unconstitutional, and urged riders to not give their consent. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority wants to begin random searches next month, an anti-terrorism measure it plans to have in place before the July 26-29 Democratic National Convention. The civil rights groups said they'll file a lawsuit to stop the T from instituting the policy which would be the first of its kind in the country.

''Public transportation is a community resource that should be available to everybody without requiring people to sacrifice their constitutional rights in order to use it,'' said Michael Avery, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.

We agree. We taught the TL kid early on to protect his rights. Here's how he described it in an essay he wrote in high school that we just happened to have kept:

I have always been taught to stand up for what I believe is right. For as long as I can remember, my mother, a criminal defense lawyer, always recited anecdotes like: "If an officer stops you and asks you to waive your rights so he can search the car, just tell him ‘I'm sorry, Sir, but I only wave the flag.'" She added that the "Sir" was the most important part, but even being polite wouldn't spare me from the probable beating I would get for being smart with the officer. The point being that asserting your rights can be painful, and often, all you are left with is the knowledge that you did the right thing.

Iraq militants have been holding American soldier Keith Matthew Maupin since April when his convoy was attacked in Iraq. Al-Jazeera reported today that his captors say they have killed him.

Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a videotape has surfaced in Baghdad that shows a person who was shot in the back of the head, but that the person was not identifiable.

The Arab satellite station aired video showing a blindfolded man sitting on the ground. Al-Jazeera said that in the next scene, gunmen shoot the man in the back of the head, in front of a hole dug in the ground. It did not show the killing. Maj. Willie Harris, public affairs spokesman for the Army's 88th Regional Readiness Command, said the videotape is being analyzed by the Department of Defense. "There is no confirmation at this time, that the tape contains footage of Matt Maupin or any other Army soldier," he said, adding that the Maupin family was briefed "as to the existence of a videotape."

by TChris

In a victory for individual expression over the interests of big business, Mattel's lawsuit against artist Tom Forsythe for copyright and trademark infringement has come to an end. Mattel didn't like the way Forsythe photographed his Barbie dolls (posed nude in provocative stances next to household appliances). Forsythe says he was making a point about "Barbie's power as beauty myth" and "crass consumerism." Mattel, on the other hand, hoped to wield its financial might to protect Barbie's honor.

Art won -- and won big -- as a federal court, after a series of appeals, not only ruled in Forsythe's favor but concluded that Mattel's failure to recognize protected parody resulted in a frivolous lawsuit. The court ordered Mattel to pay Forsythe more than $1.8 million in attorney's fees.

National Guard Spc. Patrick McCaffrey, 34 was killed in Iraq last week. His mother, Nadia McCaffrey, is challenging President Bush's rule that photos of her son's coffin cannot be displayed.

Her son's coffin arrived in Sacramento Sunday night. She allowed the media to take photos and encouraged the press to disseminate them.

"I don't care what [President Bush] wants," Nadia McCaffrey said of the administration's policy that bans on-base photographing of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan....Patrick "did not die for nothing," she said in a telephone interview. "The way he lived needs to be talked about. Patrick was not a fighter, he was a peacemaker."

Patrick, his mother said, had grown deeply disillusioned about the war. "He was really, really disappointed and hurt about the way Americans and Europeans were treated" in Iraq, McCaffrey said. When he called home, every two days, he also said he was ashamed by the allegations that American troops abused Iraqi prisoners. "He said we had no business in Iraq and should not be there," McCaffrey told The Times in another interview, shortly after her son's death. "Even so, he wanted to be a good soldier."

Patrick was Mrs. McCaffrey's only son. RIP.