The New York Times reports that 33 Years Later, Draft Becomes Topic for Dean.

Dean got a medical deferment for back problems in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam war. He says he probably could have served but was happy with the deferment. His back didn't bother him enough to keep him from moving to Aspen to ski for a few years.

Kerry and Clark may try and get some play out of this but we think its a non-issue. Dean is anti-war now, just as he (hopefully) was anti-war in 1970. To us the issue is consistency of beliefs and actions.

Everyone we knew in 1970 tried to get a deferment. Everyone we knew then opposed the war in Vietnam. Everyone we know now opposes the war in Iraq. Ok, so we have a small circle of friends, but we're all consistent and true to our beliefs.

The same can't be said for the current President who dodged active service in the war (and who, according to many sources, went awol from the National Guard by failing to report , and now, because it suits his imperial purposes, has morphed into a hawk of the first order.

An anonymous U.S. army official today said that the Army is planning to have 100,000 GI's in Iraq until 2006. The article also reports that

Teams of Army Special Forces are now training Iraqis in an accelerated program to fill out the ranks of a civil defense corps, the equivalent of a militia.

In the "Doctor, My Eyes" department.....Laura Bush didn't see what everyone else saw yesterday. Check out her description of the London protesters.

President and Mrs. Bush left England today from the small rural town of Sedgewick, which is Tony Blair's home town. A few hundred of the town's five thousand residents turned out at the village green to protest. We wonder if Mrs. Bush missed them too.

Knights-Ridder reports:

The president's three-day state visit to Great Britain and the war in Iraq sent more than 100,000 protesters to the London streets Thursday. His visit Friday to Sedgefield, 250 miles north of London, spurred about 300 demonstrators to line the route between Blair's house and the Dun Cow Inn, a pub where Bush and Blair lunched along with their wives.

Some demonstrators near the pub chanted "Bush go home." Others along the route to the pub held signs that read "Bush is Not Very Nice" and "Mad Cowboy Disease." The road also was lined with supporters waving American flags and signs welcoming Bush.

The pub's main room was packed, with about 50 people seated at a half-dozen tables, when the Bushes and the Blairs arrived to nosh on leek and potato soup, fish and chips, mushy peas, and lemon creme brulee. "Hey there," Bush repeatedly said as he encountered pub patrons, "thank you for having us. We're thrilled to be here."

Breaking with the official White House position, Pentagon official Richard Perle yesterday acknowledged that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was illegal.

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."

....Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

....Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.

Howard Dean's lead has taken a big leap forward in an new poll released today. He's 21 points ahead of John Kerry. Two weeks ago his lead on Kerry was 14 points. Wesley Clark moved up three points.

Dean stayed the same with 38 percent in the American Research Group telephone poll, while Kerry dropped 7 points to 17 percent. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark had 7 percent, up from 4 percent two weeks earlier.

Next was Sen. Joe Lieberman, 5 percent; Sen. John Edwards and Rep. Dick Gephardt, 4 percent each; Rep. Dennis Kucinich, 3 percent; and former Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun, 1 percent. Minister Al Sharpton had less than 1 percent, and 21 percent were undecided, unchanged from two weeks earlier.

MSNBC reports that Iowa is still up for grabs. The race appears to be down to Dean and Gephardt in that state.

This really makes us mad. Gloria Allred has no business in this case. Yet she filed a complaint with child welfare services today asking them to remove Michael Jackson's kids from his home. Doesn't she have enough publicity with her representation of Amber Frey in the Scott Peterson case to sastify her? Is she jealous that Mark Geragos is getting more media time than she is? Gloria, give it a rest. It's none of your business.

Allred has announced she's filed a complaint with the child welfare services in Santa Barbara, seeking an investigation of Jackson. She says that's warranted because of Jackson's previous statements about sleepovers with children, previous sex abuse allegations and an incident in which he dangled his infant son from a window.

Update: Jackson family attorney Brian Oxman responds to Allred's action:

"It is outrageous that she should seek such media attention for her own aggrandizement. She is attacking Michael for her own benefit," Oxman said.

Zacarias Moussaoui's redacted brief in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals is now available online here. Oral arguments are set for Dec. 3. Moussaoui says the testimony of three government witnesses could save his life.

Terrorism defendant Zacarias Moussaoui needs access to three al-Qaida prisoners to prove he was not part of the Sept. 11 conspiracy and to spare his life, his lawyers said Friday. With the government seeking the death penalty, the three witnesses could demonstrate that Moussaoui was, at most, a bit player in the conspiracy, the defense team told an appellate court in a written filing.

Oral arguments are December 3. At issue is whether Moussaoui will be given access to Ramzi Binalshibh, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and one other prisoner. The trial judge ordered the government to make the witnesses available to Moussaoui and the Government has appealed.

The defense motion accused the government of ignoring the Sixth Amendment, which guarantees defendants information that might exonerate them; and the Eighth Amendment, which provides protection against cruel and unusual punishment in this case, the death penalty. "No matter how well the government dresses up its arguments, the truth is that it seeks absolute power to withhold material, exculpatory witnesses in a death penalty case without suffering sanctions," the filing said.

But even if the government wins the argument over witness access, "the Eighth Amendment cannot tolerate a death sentence where the government has control over, but will not produce, witnesses" whose testimony could aid Moussaoui, the lawyers said.

The jurors in the trial of John Muhammad sent out a note today asking the Judge what happens if they are divided. This is a good sign, because all it takes is one juror to vote for life to defeat the death penalty.

The jury has retired for the weekend. You can access the jury instructions and verdict forms here.

A new report by the National Research Council finds that the methodology used by the FBI to match bullets is flawed. For background on the issue, see our report here.

A panel of government scientific advisers has found that an FBI forensic technique long used to link bullets with assailants is scientifically flawed and potentially misleading to juries, a finding that could affect hundreds of convictions.

The method, which measures the likelihood of a chemical match between bullets found at crime scenes and those in the possession of a defendant, has been used for more than three decades. The Los Angeles Times obtained a draft summary of the report, which is expected to be released by the National Research Council (NRC) in December.

....FBI examiners have often stated or implied in court that a bullet can be traced to a specific manufacturing batch — even to a particular box.....The NRC panel substantially agreed with recent research indicating that bullets from the same source of lead can significantly vary in their chemical makeup, and bullets from different sources — even those manufactured years apart — can share nearly identical amounts of trace elements.

The finding contradicted some prosecutors' depictions of each batch of lead as being unique, like a snowflake or fingerprint. The study suggests the number of "matching" bullets was impossible to determine and could be in the tens of millions or higher — reducing the significance of a match.

As we await the Virginia jury's verdict on whether John Muhammad will be sentenced to life in prison or death, we thought we'd point out this excellent series by investigative journalist Alan Berlow at American Radio Networks called Deadly Decisions about how jurors decide who lives or dies. Using real life cases, the report is divided into in three parts, Juror Responsibility, Juror Confusion and Juror Bias. You can choose to read or listen to the reports.

Alan Berlow provides his thoughts on the project here.

Whether or not one supports the death penalty, we like to assume that when the state is trying to take a person's life, that individual will get a fair trial by a jury. What the Capital Jury Project's research and my own interviews with capital jurors suggest is that this is often not the case.

The Chicago Tribune has a moving and sad series of reports this week under the heading Tossed Out of America. It investigates how America's post-9/11 treatment of Muslims has shattered lives. [link via Patriot Watch.]

On a related note, there is a push to revise how America is tracking foreign visitors.

Police departments are now using palm prints as means of identifying offenders.

All of a person's "friction ridged skin" is distinctively patterned: soles, palms and even the writer's palm, as the outer side of the hand is called. Surveys of law enforcement agencies indicate that at least 30 percent of the prints lifted from crime scenes — from knife hilts, gun grips, steering wheels and window panes — are of palms, not fingers.

30 police agencies around the country now have palm databases.

Beginning next month, the [New York City] department will be able to do computerized matches of the 100,000 palm prints it has already collected. As the database grows, it will become one of the largest of its kind.

Defense lawyers are dubious about the new "science."

Using palm prints for identification concerns some defense lawyers, who point out that the reliability of fingerprint matching has come into question in the courts in recent years, and that there is even less data available on palm prints.

...Some defense lawyers raise the same objections to palm print identifications as they have to fingerprints. "The criminal courtroom is no place to experiment with a scientific method that may incriminate someone," said Steven D. Benjamin, the co-chairman of the forensic evidence committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The FBI says the technique is as reliable as that for fingerprints, and in a few years, they probably will be adding footprints.