The United States Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces issued an interesting opinion today. Here are the issues:

I. Whether appellant was denied the fundamental right to conflict free and effective assistance of counsel when the lead defense counsel and appellant engaged in a secretive homosexual relationship. II. Whether the army court of criminal appeals erred when it determined that appellant’’s sexual relationship with his lead defense counsel did not create a conflict of interest denying appellant effective assistance of counsel.

The ruling: Military defense attorneys may not engage in homosexual sex with their military clients. "For the reasons set forth below, we conclude that Appellant did not receive effective assistance of counsel and reverse."

Among the Bush Administration's new drug war plans: Spending $25 million to test high school students for drug use. First off, drug testing is ineffective:

Despite the administration's claim that mandatory drug testing curbs adolescent drug use, a recent federal study of 76,000 students by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research paints a far different picture. According to the study's findings, published in the Journal of School Health, there is no difference in the level of illegal drug use between students in schools that test for drugs and those in schools that do not.

"Drug testing of students in schools does not deter use," states a University of Michigan news release summarizing the findings of the four-year study, the first national, large-scale survey ever to assess student drug testing. "At each grade level studied -- 8, 10, and 12 -- the investigators found virtually identical rates of drug use in schools that have drug testing and the schools that do not."

More importantly, students should not have to shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door:

Though random student drug testing may sound like a "silver bullet" in the
administration's campaign to discourage adolescent drug use, it opens a
"Pandora's Box" of practical, ethical and financial questions. Students
should not be taught that they must abandon their constitutional liberties
at the school door or that they must submit to an invasion of their privacy
because some leaders in Washington are willing to write off an entire
generation of students as potential criminals in their overzealous "war" on
drugs.

The Government is seeking to expand the witness protection program to include witnesses in terror cases. Ever wonder what the requirements are? The AP lists them here.

Georgetown Law Professor Neal Katyal has an essay up at Slate today called Gitmo' Better Blues: The folly of the new Guantanamo trials.

These military charges are unconstitutional, inconsistent with international law, and unwise....They will demonstrate what critics of the military tribunals have been saying all along: that the administration has sought to create an end run around guarantees of fundamental rights enshrined in our Constitution and universally accepted agreements such as the Geneva Conventions.

Katyal is also chief counsel to the military defense lawyers in the Guantanamo case pending at the U.S. Supreme Court. [link via How Appealing.]

Talk about the absurdity of our federal drug laws....

Miguel Mendoza Palominos grew up in extreme poverty. He was shoeless throughout his childhood and often without a roof over this head. He did not go to school and has never been able to read or write. At times, his mother sent him to beg for food. His alcoholic father played little or no role in the family's day-to-day struggle for existence. At age 21, Palominos came to California from his village deep in Mexico on the promise of "agriculture" work that would enable him to better support his mother and sisters.

Only after being delivered to a remote area of Tehama County and tasked with watering marijuana plants was he aware of the job's precise nature. He was never paid, and when the camp was raided two months after his arrival by sheriff's deputies, he was the only one of five "irrigators" caught. A jury found him guilty in November of manufacturing 1,000 or more plants and Palominos, now 23, was sentenced Wednesday in Sacramento federal court to 10 years behind bars.

After he serves 8 1/2 years, Mr. Palominos will be deported to Mexico:

"When Mr. Palominos is done swabbing prison floors, somewhere between 2010 and 2014, he will be given a one-way ticket back to poverty," defense attorney Timothy Zindel noted in a court document. "The ones who exploited him are out there somewhere today carrying on business as usual."

The prosecutor, Samuel Wong, thinks the sentence is fair. In fact, he's made a specialty of going after Mexican immigrant grunt workers.

Juan Cole, writing for Salon says Welcome to the Quagmire:

The Bush administration invaded Iraq a year ago expecting a shower of rose petals. Today, the country is on the verge of chaos, and there may be no way to stop it.

Is this a bad time for John Kerry to take a vacation? Some think so. We don't. We're of the mind that this is March, and while it's true that Kerry has yet to become fully defined for the voters, there's time enough for that. The issue for the Democrats is booting Bush....Kerry has the nomination sewn up. A six day absence won't change their minds. Kerry has been going non-stop since Iowa, let the man get some rest and recharge.

Oliver Willis, writing for DailyNewsOnline, says the culture war is over and the radical right has lost.

Check out the Al Jazeera cartoon, Al Qaida credit card.

It's a short flash that tells a story of how Al Qaida was born, beginning with the conquest of Afganistan, first by Russia, then by us. It references the lack of money the U.S. has provided for rebuilding the country and includes an animated version of the 9/11 attacks.

It's always interesting to see how others view us.

Update: The New Yorker profiled al-Zawahri in September, 2002--it is available here [thanks to the commenter who pointed this out.]

The media is calling Ayman al-Zawahri the brains behind Osama bin Laden. Who is he? Here's a profile from Al Jazeera:

Decades ago he gave up the affluent life of a Cairo doctor to dedicate himself to the Islamist underground, a choice that would eventually take him, like bin Ladin, to the mountains of Afghanistan. In December 2001 his wife and several children were reported to have been blown to pieces by American bombing in Afghanistan, but the bespectacled al-Qaida leader managed to escape the US dragnet and went on the run.

Born in 1951, Zawahri espoused his cause from an early age. In the 1960s he joined Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world's oldest Islamist group. He was tried, along with many others, for links to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He served a three-year jail term for illegal arms possession but was acquitted of the main charges. In 1985, Zawahri left Egypt for Pakistan, where he worked as a doctor treating fighters wounded in battles against Soviet forces occupying neighbouring Afghanistan.

He took over in 1993 the leadership of Jihad, Egypt's second largest Islamic armed group. A military court in Egypt sentenced Zawahri to death in absentia in 1999 for militant activities. Zawahri joined forces with bin Ladin in 1998. He has been indicted in connection with the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

John Kerry is on a mission to raise $10 million in 10 days. Atrios and Daily Kos readers have given a bunch. We're asking TalkLeft readers to chip in too.

Frank Newport is the editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. In an LA Times op-ed (free subscription required), he writes that based on what the polling data shows now, things don't look too hot for Bush. The two key points of his analysis are:

Bush's 50% approval rating on job performance: It's lower than that of recent successful candidates during March of election year--including Clinton, Reagan and Nixon.

Point two is the "trial heat factor:" Newport says it's unusual for Bush to be losing to Kerry in the polls during the election year:

Since 1956, of eight presidents who sought a new term, five won. Two of these eventual winners started their reelection years on somewhat shaky ground but quickly recovered. Reagan was tied with Walter Mondale in a Gallup poll survey taken in January 1984. Clinton was behind Bob Dole in two Gallup polls conducted in January 1996. But from February 1984 on, Reagan was ahead of Mondale in every trial-heat ballot that Gallup conducted. And, in similar fashion, Clinton was ahead of Dole in every trial-heat ballot Gallup did from February on in 1996. The other three incumbent presidents who won a new term in the second half of the 20th century — Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon — never once fell behind their opponents in the election year.

What's the bottom line?

If Bush is reelected, he will become the only president out of the last eight incumbents to win after having been behind a challenger in Gallup polling conducted after January of his election year. And, if his job approval ratings don't rise above 50% in April and May, his reelection would mark the first of those eight to win with less than majority approval in the late spring of their election year.