Happy First Blogiversary to Whiskey Bar - and don't miss Billmon's latest analysis of Iraq, Countdown to Failure.

I suppose it's a natural human response: eye for any eye, atrocity for atrocity. But I still find it amazing that the progressive collapse of every single justification offered for this war -- the nonexistent WMDs, Saddam's mythical connection to Al Qaeda, the craving of the Iraqi people for Western-style bourgeois democracy and Big Macs -- has had so little effect on the willingness of the American people to keep fighting it.

....the events of the past week have probably doomed whatever slender chance existed for stabilizing Iraq in the post-June 30 period. It looks like the Coalition is on a countdown to political failure. And political failure will eventually mean military failure as well, since it's hard to see how public support for an indefinite occupation can be maintained indefinitely. ...The only remaining question, it seems, is how much more blood will have to be spilled -- in Iraq, and maybe in America as well -- before the price of that failure has been paid in full.

The New York Times reports Saturday that Bush was briefed at his ranch in August, 2001 about a planned Osama attack in the U.S. :

President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday. The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford.

The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders.

Update: Rittenhouse Review has a wrap-up of editorial reviews on Condi's testimony.

It's not just Fallujah. The early Saturday AP headline is Baghdad Turns to Chaos:

Gunmen running rampant on Baghdad's western edge attacked a fuel convoy, killing a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi driver and causing a fiery explosion that sent up a pall of black smoke. A Baghdad correspondent for Al-Jazeera Arab television said that at least nine people had been killed. Another U.S. soldier was killed in an attack on a base elsewhere in the capital, and large groups of insurgents fought U.S. soldiers in two cities to the north, Baqouba and Muqdadiyah.

This week's toll so far: 46 U.S. soldiers killed. 460 Iraqis killed, 280 in Fallujah.

The Guardian judges the right-wing Iraq pundits. Christopher Hitchens is but one:

He taunted the anti-war marchers and "half the newspaper columnists in England" for their forecasts of doom, confidently claiming that all was well in liberated Baghdad, which had not "become a Stalingrad, with house-to-house resistance". The Arab streets had not risen, "to spit in the face of Zionism and imperialism". He thrilled to the news that the US and its allies had made "a clean sweep of Arab de-Stalinisation".

Anti-war demonstrators who claimed that "there would be heaps and heaps of slaughtered Iraqi civilians, and massive casualties among coalition troops" had been wrong. "Soon it will become evident to the naked eye that the city is substantially undamaged. It will also become obvious that its inhabitants waited patiently through what must have been very stressful days and nights, trusting and being able to tell that the targeting was careful and the intentions honourable."

The moral of the story: "Journalism and propoganda should be separate."

[link via Sean Paul at Agonist who is doing a great job of reporting current events in Iraq despite the paucity of official news reports.]

Diane Carman of the Denver Post interviewed Condoleezza Rice's former professor , Arthur N. Gilbert, at the University of Denver International Studies Program. Interestingly, the former Director of the Program was Josef Korbel, the father of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In fact, Korbel was the reason Rice changed her major from music to international studies.

Professor Gilbert has some flattering things to say about Condi personally, but is harshly critical of her stance on Iraq.

Gilbert is puzzled by what has become of this bright, diligent student...he believes she has failed to heed the lessons of the past. To a historian, this is unconscionable. When the Bush administration exploited the nation's anxiety over 9/11 to justify invading Iraq, Gilbert said, "it was the worst foreign policy decision made in living memory. "It worries me that with all this focus on 9/11, it's taking the grave situation in Iraq off the front page," he said, referring to the hearings. "Iraq is a catastrophe beyond measure."

The fact that Rice is capable of defending the decision to go to war is a "terrible failure of education, of picking up what your education should have led you to."....Whether Rice shared the neoconservatives' obsession with Iraq or was just being a "good soldier," Gilbert said, Iraq will be her disastrous legacy. "It was such a horrendous mistake, knowing what she should have known.... He shakes his head. Rice should have known better than to send our troops to Iraq, he said.

For anyone interested in watching this week's oral argument in the Rush Limbaugh case concerning the privacy of his medical records, you can watch it online here at his lawyer Roy Black's website. The firm has a page devoted to Rush, with transcripts, briefs, pleadings, news articles and press releases.

It's great not to be under a gag order. We think these types of webpages soon will be de rigeur in high profile cases.

Enron's former CEO Jeffrey Skilling was taken by NY police to a hospital at 4 a.m.

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was taken to a hospital early Friday after several people called police saying he was pulling on their clothes and accusing them of being FBI agents, a police source told The Associated Press. Police found Skilling at 4 a.m. at the corner of Park Avenue and East 73rd Street and determined he might be an "emotionally disturbed person," said the source, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity.Police did not charge Skilling with a crime. They took him to New York Presbyterian Hospital for observation. Hospital officials did not immediately return calls for comment.

Skilling was at two bars in Manhattan - American Trash and The Voodoo Lounge - where he allegedly ran up to patrons and pulled open their clothes, the source said. "He was shouting at them 'You're an FBI agent and you're following me,'" the source said. Skilling allegedly did the same thing to people on the street, the source added. He was with his wife at the time. Skilling was described as being intoxicated and highly uncooperative when he was approached by police, the source said.

Skilling is on bail awaiting trial on charges of insider trading and fraud-related crimes.

by TChris

Contending that the prosecution withheld key evidence, lawyers for former NBA player Jason Williams, on trial for manslaughter, want the judge to dismiss the charge. The defense also wants the judge to rule that Williams can't be tried again. Prior commentary about Williams' case is here.

On the last day of testimony in Williams' two month long trial, the prosecutor acknowledged that he had not provided the defense with photographs and notes created by the prosecution's expert witness while examining the gun Williams fired. Shortly before a prosecution expert gave rebuttal testimony, the defense learned for the first time that the expert had disassembled the gun to examine it. Whether the gun might have misfired is critical to Williams' defense, and the disassembly might have altered the weapon's condition, rendering subsequent examinations useless. The defense also contends that the examination occurred in secret, in volation of an agreement that defense experts would be present whenever the gun was tested.

The prosecutor is willing to reopen the evidence, but the defense says the prosecution deliberately withheld the information. They want the judge to dismiss the case without the possibility of retrial. The judge will hear argument on the motion Monday.

On April 23, the Senate will consider the proposed Victims' Rights Amendment (VRA) to the U.S. Constitution (S. J. Res. 1). Below is the text of the action alert we received from National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Legislative Director Kyle O'Dowd.

Action Requested: Contact your Senators and urge them to oppose this dangerous measure. Encourage your local prosecutors to do the same. Remember that many Senators will soon be arriving in their home states for spring recess (which lasts until April 16), and face-to-face meetings may be possible. Contact information for Members of Congress is available at here.

Background: The Victims’ Rights Amendment was approved 10-8 by the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 4, 2003. On the House side, the Constitution Subcommittee held a hearing regarding the VRA on September 30, 2003. The latest version of the proposed Victims’ Rights Amendment would give victims of violent crimes : (1) the right to notice of proceedings involving the alleged crime and of prisoner release or escape; (2) the right not to be excluded from proceedings involving the alleged crime and, with respect to certain proceedings, the right to be heard; and (3) the right to "adjudicative decisions" that consider the victim's safety, interest in avoiding delay, and claim to restitution.

The VRA’s sweeping, unfunded mandates would diminish the constitutional rights of accused persons and wreak havoc on our criminal justice system. Specifically --

by TChris

Forced by public criticism to flip-flop its position about Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 commission, the Bush administration allowed her to testify, no doubt hoping that Rice would reassure the public that the administration did everything right and has nothing to hide. If that was the plan, it didn't work. According to a CBS poll:

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice’s public testimony at the Sept. 11 Commission hearings may have improved her own image with the public, but most Americans still believe that the Bush administration could have done more to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, was not paying enough attention to the issue before Sept. 11 and is still hiding something about what they knew.

by TChris

As TalkLeft reported yesterday, U.S. Marshals guarding Justice Scalia confronted journalists who were recording his speeches to school audiences on Wednesday. Accounts of those confontations are conflicting.

Journalists report that, at a speech Justice Scalia gave to high school students in Hattiesburg, Deputy U.S. Marshal Melanie Rube demanded that they erase their recordings.

After Associated Press reporter Denise Grones balked, the marshal took her digital recorder and erased its contents -- after Grones explained how the machine worked. The marshal also asked Hattiesburg American reporter Antoinette Konz to hand over a cassette tape and returned it, erased, after the event.

Rube won't comment, but Nehemiah Flowers, the United States marshal in Jackson, Miss., said "that Deputy Rube ... asked politely if they would erase the tape." Flowers denied that the request was "coercive." Seizing the recorder and erasing the tape despite a reporter's objection seems coercive, notwithstanding Flowers' spin.

But did Rube act on her own, or at the direction of Justice Scalia? According to Flowers, Rube was "following the court's orders." But David Turner, a spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, said "Justice Scalia did not instruct the deputy to take that action." Seems the Marshals are having a problem getting on the same page.

The Marshals may also have a problem explaining how their interference with a free press is justified.

"The seizure and destruction of a reporter's tape recordings is remarkable, and I think it would be difficult to find any law that would justify it," said Luther T. Munford, a First Amendment expert at Phelps Dunbar, a law firm in Jackson.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press protested the seizure yesterday in a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft. The letter noted that the deputy's action appeared to violate a 1980 federal law prohibiting most seizures of journalists' resource materials.

by TChris

Federal oversight of internal investigations of misconduct by the New Jersey state police, implemented in 1999 after the state admitted that troopers engaged in racial profiling to make traffic stops, will end in response to a joint request made by the U.S. Justice Department and the state attorney general's office. Those agencies say that an internal affairs unit is doing an admirable job of handling complaints against officers and no longer needs oversight. Monitoring of other functions of the state police would continue under the judge's order.

Critics, including State Senator Nia Gill, complain that they weren't given notice of the proposal to end the monitoring and didn't have a chance to respond. Sen. Gill believes that all concerned parties should be heard before the judge decides whether to end the monitoring.

Minority leaders and civil rights groups plan to challenge the ruling, saying the consent decree that mandated the overall monitoring should not be lifted piecemeal. They also claim that questions remain about whether the internal affairs unit has truly reformed its practices.