This article appeared in Saturday's Washington Post:

President Bush's uncle, Jonathan J. Bush, is a top executive at Riggs Bank, which this week agreed to pay a record $25 million in civil fines for violations of law intended to thwart money laundering. Jonathan Bush, who is a major fundraiser for his nephew, was appointed in 2000 to run Riggs Investment Management Co. His association with Riggs began when he headed J. Bush & Co., a New Haven, Conn., company he created in 1970 and built to offer advice on money management.

David Sirota, who has his own blog and also writes for American Progress, reports that the Riggs Bank handles a lot of Saudi money:

According to the 5/14/04 New York Times, Federal regulators fined the Riggs National Corporation, the parent company of Riggs Bank, $25 million yesterday for "failing to report suspicious activity, the largest penalty ever assessed against a domestic bank in connection with money laundering. The fine stems from Riggs's failure over at least the last two years to actively monitor suspect financial transfers through Saudi Arabian accounts held by the bank." The 5/14/04 Wall Street Journal reported that of particular concern, Riggs failed to monitor "tens of millions of dollars in cash withdrawals from accounts related to the Saudi Arabian embassy," including "suspicious incidents involving dozens of sequentially numbered cashier's checks and international drafts written by Saudi officials, including Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan." According to the 4/18/04 Washington Post, Saudi Prince Bandar's wife, Princess Haifa al-Faisal, "may have used a Riggs account to donate money to a charity that then gave some of it to the Sept. 11 terrorists."

Via Agonist: Charm school time for U.S. soldiers:

At the Camp War Horse detention centre in Baguba, north of Baghdad, it is a surreal scene: US soldiers handing out cash to freed prisoners along with a note saying "You have not been mistreated."

Happy birthday to Matthew Yglesias who turns 23 tomorrow and describes his eventful year:

It's been a pretty eventful twelve months, from the Spurs heroic victory over the Lakers in the Conference Finals right after I turned 22 to their tragic defeat in the Conference Semis right before I turned 23. Perhaps more importantly, I graduated from college, saw a good swath of Italy, moved to a new city, acquired some new friends, and started a new job. More thoughts later.

Patrick at Electrolite explains why "Senator Inhofe is a disgrace to the Senate, to his party, and to the United States of America."

Kevin Drum at Political Animal wants to know more about Joseph Darby, the soldier who blew the whistle on the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

TomPaine.com has a great quote today:

"I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." President George W. Bush, Sept. 11, 2001 (quoted by Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies) .

102 inmated died in a prison fire in Honduras yesterday. Authorities say the fire was caused by an electrical short. It's the second Honduran prison fire causing dozens of deaths in a year. Some are claiming foul play:

...family members of the dead were quick to accuse the government of foul play in its increasingly violent crackdown on the country's burgeoning gang culture. The fire broke out in the prison in San Pedro Sula, near the Guatemalan border, in the early hours. According to one survivor, the fire started at around 1.30am, a full two hours before uniformed officers arrived and began opening up cells to allow the inmates to escape the flames and smoke.

Most of the victims died of suffocation in their cells. Rescue workers found 101 corpses. A 102nd victim died on the way to hospital. ...It was the worst prison disaster in Honduran history but far from the only one. Just over a year ago, a riot and fire at El Porvenir prison in La Ceiba, also involving violent gang members, led to 68 deaths. On that occasion, one group of prisoners started a fire deliberately, which in turn provoked the authorities to storm in with guns blazing. An official report blamed most of those deaths on the government.

Via American Progress and Daily Kos:

GONZALES SAYS ADMINISTRATION IS A 'STRONG SUPPORTER OF GENEVA CONVENTIONS: "At the same time, President Bush recognized that our nation will continue to be a strong supporter of the Geneva treaties. The president also reaffirmed our policy in the United States armed forces to treat Al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in keeping with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention."
- Alberto Gonzales, 5/15/04 (NYT Op-Ed)

Versus

GONZALES SAYS GENEVA RESTRICTIONS ARE OBSOLETE: "The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians...In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
- Alberto Gonzales, 1/25/02 (Memorandum to the President, as reported in Newsweek 5/16/04)

Unless we're thinking about a different memo, the memo from Gonzales was leaked and written about extensively in the mainstream media in early 2002, as was Colin Powell's disagreement with the Administration's intention to withhold Geneva Convention protections from Taliban fighters as well as al Qaeda. There are 59 news articles on Lexis.com discussing the memo between 1/28/02 and 2//8/02.

We're not sure why Newsweek thinks this is a scoop. Originally, Bush was considering withholding the Geneva protections from both the Taliban and al-Qaeda detainees. Gonzales agreed with that approach but wrote Bush a memo in which he advised Bush that Colin Powell disagreed with the policy:

The U.S. is suing Greenpeace over an 1872 law. Trial began today. We've written about the background of the case and criticized the Government for it several times--calling it an example of the Justice Dept.'s "out of control prosecution policy" and warning that:

If successful, will have an extreme chilling effect on the right of all protest groups to aggressively exercise their First Amendment rights.

Never before has our government criminally prosecuted an entire organization for the free speech activities of its supporters.

The basic facts:

Three miles off the Florida coast in April of 2002, two Greenpeace activists clambered from an inflatable rubber speedboat onto a cargo ship. They were detained before they could unfurl a banner, spent the weekend in custody and two months later were sentenced to time served for boarding the ship without permission. It was a routine act of civil disobedience until, 15 months after the incident, federal prosecutors in Miami indicted Greenpeace itself for authorizing the boarding. The group says the indictment represents a turning point in the history of American dissent.

More background here. Today's trial news is here.

A bomb went off near a U.S. convoy in Iraq today that contained nerve gas.

A roadside bomb containing deadly sarin nerve agent exploded near a U.S. military convoy, the U.S. military said Monday. It was believed to be the first confirmed finding of any of the banned weapons upon which the United States based its case for the Iraq war. Two people were treated for ''minor exposure,'' but no serious injuries were reported.

The deadly chemical was inside an artillery shell dating to the Saddam Hussein era that had been rigged as a bomb in Baghdad, said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the chief military spokesman in Iraq....[A spokesman for the Iraq Survey Group] believed that insurgents who rigged the artillery shell as a bomb didn't know it contained the nerve agent, and that the dispersal of the nerve agent from such a rigged device was very limited....It was unclear if the sarin shell was from chemical rounds that the United Nations had tagged and marked for destruction before the U.S. invasion.

Update: Weapons inspectors say it's not a sign that Iraq had stockpiled WMD.

by TChris

Principles come with a price. When Kamala Harris ran for district attorney in San Francisco, she promised she would never seek the death penalty. Now some of her supporters have abandoned her because she intends to keep that promise.

Harris isn't seeking the death penalty for David Hill, a 21-year-old accused of killing a police officer. Some of the police unions that endorsed Harris during her campaign -- apparently not realizing that her campaign pledge applied to all defendants, including those accused of killing cops -- have asked California's attorney general to take over the case and to pursue Hill's execution.

Harris might expect to find some support from other politicians (who should know how important it is to keep campaign promises) but it's rare to find a politician who doesn't want to jump on the death bandwagon in a high pofile case involving a sympathetic victim. Sen. Dianne Feinstein says she might not have endorsed Harris if she knew that Harris' pledge didn't make an exception for cop killers. In Feinstein's mind, it seems, the victim's occupation should determine whether his murderer is executed. Sen. Barbara Boxer has asked federal prosecutors to step in.

Even death-happy John Ashcroft is unlikely to order federal intervention in a case lacking an obvious federal interest. Nor is the California attorney general's office likely to intrude in a local prosecution without being invited by the local prosecutor. The decision belongs to Harris; it's the kind of decision voters elected her to make. Harris will continue to face criticism for standing up for her principles, but her principles got her elected. She shouldn't abandon them -- or the people who voted for her -- to silence the complaints of pro-death forces.

by TChris

Abdel-Zahraa Othman, a/k/a Izzadine Saleem, was killed in a Baghdad car bombing. Othman was serving as president of the Iraqi Governing Council. He is the second member of the Council to be assassinated.

America. Prison Nation. That's what we have become. Don't miss this editorial in Monday's New York Times, The Dark Side of America. The abuses at home are at least as bad, and probably worse, than those abroad.

The nearly 12 million people who pass through the corrections system each year are often subject to violent attacks by other inmates, and prisoner-on-prisoner rape is endemic. Drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, easily transmitted in tight spaces, have become a common problem. Illegal drugs ferried in by prison employees — and used by inmates who share needles — have made prison a high-risk setting for H.I.V. infection and most recently the liver-destroying hepatitis C.

Some prisons have actually cut back on testing for disease, rather than risk being required to treat large numbers of infected inmates at bankrupting costs. That means, of course, that released inmates will unknowingly pass on diseases to others. By failing to confront public health problems in prison, the country could be setting itself up for new epidemics down the line.

Say it isn't so...the Teamsters are pushing John Kerry to name Dick Gephardt as his VP candidate.

Meanwhile, Dennis Kucinich, down but not out, is still fighting for the Democratic nomination.

Last week we wrote about Lane McCotter, the former Texas and Utah prison chief whom Ashcroft picked to head up Abu Ghraib. The Houston Chronicle keeps the story alive, and says New York Senator Charles Schumer is asking Ashcroft for an investigation into how McCotter, who also headed up the Texas prison system during a "bad period" and some private prisons, got the job.

A civilian charged with preparing Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison for U.S. military use headed the Texas prison system during one of its most controversial periods and later resigned as director of Utah prisons after an inmate died while shackled naked to a chair....McCotter spent 18 months administering the Texas system, a period when prison violence made frequent headlines and Justice was threatening to fine the state as much as $1,000 a day if it did not make court-ordered improvements in the system.

....Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, is urging Attorney General John Ashcroft to investigate how civilians such as McCotter were chosen to oversee the opening of prisons in Iraq -- noting that McCotter is an executive for a company operating a private prison in New Mexico that the Justice Department criticized last year for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates.

If Ashcroft and the Justice Department were responsible for McCotter's selection, why isn't Schumer calling for an independent investigation by persons outside DOJ?

Schumer wants to know how someone with McCotter's "checkered record" was appointed to the team Ashcroft dispatched to Iraq to help rebuild its judicial system. "There are many questions begging for answers," Schumer said last week. "Mr. McCotter 's selection also raises serious questions about the role that was played by civilian advisers in setting prison policies, designing training programs for prison guards and directly influencing the environment in which the horrible abuses at Abu Ghraib took place."

The Herald (UK) is reporting that President Bush and British PM Tony Blair have been accelerating exit plans from Iraq:

The prime minister's spokesman, insisting that Mr Blair was not diverted by speculation over his future but was concentrating on getting the job done, denied the new strategy was a panic measure to silence the anti-war critics on both sides of the Atlantic.

He said: "They have been working on a joint strategy for the last few weeks and it has speeded up in the last few days. It is a recognition that people need to see we have a grip, that we are not there for ever amen, politically or militarily. "Neither is this a case of cutting and running, but showing we have a strategy of achieving what we said we wanted to achieve: the transfer of authority to an Iraqi government and responsibility to an Iraqi security system."