Wonder who's profiting from the War in Iraq? Here's a sourced list--with detailed explanations.

Daily Kos reports Chemical Ali has been captured.... again ....seems the Brits claimed they discovered his body a while back in Basra. Here's the news article.

Warblogging has more.

We hadn't been reporting on Congressman Bill Janklow's unfortunate collision in his home state of South Dakota in which a motorcyclist was killed because, well, accidents can happen to anyone. It's that one moment in time you can't take back, the "what if I had gone through the intersection thirty seconds earlier," etc., etc. Whether fault is involved or not, a fatal accident is not one in which the driver wishes harm to occur. It occurs either because the driver was careless or reckless or because fate designed it that way. Think of all the times you've sped or indadvertently ran a stop sign, but thankfully, no one got hurt. Isn't that a "simple twist of fate?" (line by Bob Dylan.)

That being said, we have just finished reading this BuzzFlash report on other allegations in Janklow's past, and we are very concerned about them. Paticularly about his past record of treatment of Native Americans. And this comment, which he allegedly made to noted First Amendment attorney and author Martin Garbus, which Garbus published in his book, Tough Talk:

Garbus notes: "On his [Janklow's] way to election as attorney general [of South Dakota] in 1974, he began issuing statements aimed at endearing himself to white, anti-Indian voters. 'The only way to deal with the Indian problem in America,' he admitted saying, is to put a gun in the AIM [American Indian Movement] leaders' heads and pull the trigger."

Like Buzzflash, we don't know if the allegations against Janklow are true. But if they are, unlike the motorcyclist's death, there's no way they can be chalked up to an unfortunate accident.

Update: Is the reinvestigation into the death of Indian activist Anna Mae Pictou-Aquash just a coincidence?

Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton scores again...

Police pursuits, that staple of local television newscasts, have declined sharply so far this year, according to a review of Los Angeles Police Department statistics....Overall, chases are down 62% from last year.

...The decline drew praise from some of the LAPD's biggest critics as well as experts on police pursuits, who described it as a step in the right direction. "These are just astounding numbers," said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the ACLU of Southern California, which had long challenged LAPD pursuit practices.

Chief William J. Bratton, who championed a policy to reduce the number of pursuits, called the figures "good news all around." ... The new LAPD policy is shaping up to be one of the most tangible of Bratton's efforts to remake the department....Bratton said the report contradicts naysayers who had predicted that restricting chases would lead to fewer arrests and increased crime.

Traffic collisions have "plummeted." So have accidents involving officers.

Good going, Chief.

The Justice Department's Bureau of Statistics has released its second report this week on the nation's prison population. Titled Bureau of Justice Statistics Probation and Parole in the United States, 2002, we learn the following:

One in every 32 adults is now on probation, parole or incarcerated.

That's 3.1% of the adult population in the U.S.

Of the more than 2 million probationers discharged from supervision, 62 percent successfully completed the terms of their supervision, 14 percent were reincarcerated because of a rule violation or a new offense, 13 percent had their probation sentence revoked without incarceration and 3 percent had absconded.

As of last December 31, about 1 in 5 probationers were women. More than half were white, 1 in 3 were black, 1 in 8 were Hispanic and 2 percent were of other races.

The bulletin, "Probation and Parole in the United States, 2002" (NCJ-201135), was written by BJS Statistician Lauren E. Glaze. Single copies may be obtained by calling the BJS Clearinghouse at 1-800-851-3420.

You can also read the whole thing here.

This past Sunday, the Justice Department released a report finding that 1 of every 37 adults in the U.S. has done time. The report also found that:

A black male will have a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison while a hispanic male's chance is 1 in 6 and a white male has a 1 in 17 chance...

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers ( NACDL), through its new President, E.E. "Bo" Edwards of Nashville, today condemned the Bush Administration for agreeing with Colombia to resume the shooting down of planes of suspected drug runners:

Another Unwarranted Response to an Exaggerated Threat

Does our government honestly believe that it is acceptable to kill, or even take a substantial risk of killing, unidentified human beings, our citizens or not, just because they may be committing a non-capital crime? Evidently so.

"The Bush Administration speaks in terms of 'procedures to protect against loss of innocent life.' But these mere suspects are innocent until proven guilty, and not subject to the death penalty even if convicted. This administration continues to find the poor and dark-skinned expendable based on almost any fear-based pretext. In this case, we can kill in the name of fighting illegal drugs, which kill 20,000 per year by generous estimates, while subsidizing tobacco, which kills 400,000 per year.

"Just as importantly, should we as citizens, and the media as our watchdogs, continue to let it go on without questioning it?"

While browsing the NACDL website, we also came across this press release --we're excited to be serving in our new role.

While Attorney General John Ashcroft distracts us by parading around the country touting the Patriot Act, the equally dangerous, overly broad Victory Act bill is making the rounds through Congressional offices. The full name of the bill is the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003.

In a nutshell, the bill reinvents drug offenses as terrorism crimes. The ho-hum label of "controlled substance offense" will get a glossy makeover as many routine drug crimes become elevated into crimes of "Narcoterrorism."

Whose brilliant idea was this? The bill was drafted by worker bees in the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-UT.) Justice Department employees are disassociating the department from the bill, but we take that with a heavy grain of salt. Do you have any doubt Ashcroft will come to praise it?

ABC News has obtained a copy of the draft of the bill and provides this preliminary analysis of the 89 page bill:

Provisions in the draft would:

* Raise the threshold for rejecting illegal wiretaps. The draft reads: "A court may not grant a motion to suppress the contents of a wire or oral communication, or evidence derived therefrom, unless the court finds that the violation of this chapter involved bad faith by law enforcement."

Remarks of of Laura W. Murphy,
Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office:

Ashcroft Speech Obscures True Threat of PATRIOT Act

....there is a growing sense among regular Americans of all political stripes – from the most right-wing to the most left – that the PATRIOT Act went too far, too fast. Instead of merely taking rational, judicious steps to update and improve our federal police and intelligence resources, it overreaches by eroding basic checks and balances against White House and cabinet-agency power, at the expense of the people’s representatives in Congress and the bulwark of our rights, the courts.

....Moreover, when the Attorney General makes the unsubstantiated claim that the PATRIOT Act would have definitively prevented the 9/11 attacks, he also obscures another key point: the USA PATRIOT Act isn’t just about terrorism....By the Attorney General’s own admission to the Judiciary Committee, the Act is actively being applied in non-terrorism related investigations, even though terrorism was the sole justification for the bill for most of the lawmakers who voted for it.

....we need to ask ourselves several questions. Most importantly, is the Attorney General’s roadshow political in nature, designed to shore up flagging conservative support in swing states and is it prudent to have the Attorney General give up his official duties to hit the huskings for an unpopular piece of legislation? Safety and freedom will both suffer if the answers are what some expect.

Buzzflash has the text of Presidential hopeful Bob Graham's blast against John Ashcroft.

“I’m glad Attorney General John Ashcroft has left behind his cozy confines in Washington and is traveling the country to meet with regular folks for once. Hopefully, it will do the Attorney General some good to hear from the American people on how his extreme policies have hurt this nation. I only wish that he would actually listen to the people of America as he tours the country and upon returning to Washington straighten up his far-right Justice Department.

“I feared John Ashcroft would become just this kind of Attorney General when I voted against his confirmation in 2001. His Justice Department has demonstrated a willful lack of commitment to the basic fairness and equality of opportunity that has made this country all that it is today.

“I, along with 98 other United States Senators, supported the passage of the Patriot Act. Never did I expect it to be implemented the way it has. Mr. Ashcroft has chosen to destroy our civil liberties under the premise of personal security and safety; the true spirit in which the law was written.”

The Buzz should be one of your first reading stops every day. It's continuously updated, wittily headlined and always relevant.

Via The Horse we find Michael Wolf's article in New York Magazine about the recent Aspen Institute conference:

The psychic heart of the conference was Bill Clinton.

Clinton had lost weight and—with a great collection of just-out-of-the-wrapper pastel-colored polo shirts on view throughout the conference—seemed in fabulous form. He was in campaign mode but without the restraints of campaign mode. While there was clear bitterness on his part toward the successor who had rushed “to undo everything I’d done,” and the Republicans who “will run over you unless you beat their brains out,” there was a feisty humor too. ...

Clinton kept referring to the media as (contrary to Kinsley’s view) the “supine” media, pointing out that when Bush insulted Helen Thomas (who, by asking a rough question in the infamous prewar press conference had, Clinton said, “committed the sin of journalism”), no “young journalists” stood up and walked out. The media, the supine media, was going to have to “go to the meat locker and take out its brains and critical skills.”

Everybody seemed to love this. Clinton was not just the beloved former president, but he had become some sort of sassy oracle.

There's more, read the whole thing. It sure made us miss Bill-- and get angry all over again that we got stuck with GW who has given us nothing but war and Ashcroft and judicial ideologues, sending our economy and civil liberties, not to mention hundreds of our young soldiers, down the drain, all in the first two years of his presidency.

2004 is only 15 months away. We still see a Democratic party in disarray with no candidate knocking us out or even making us want to go to bat for him. We hope something breaks soon.

Police in Tampa have voluntarily scrapped its controversial face recognition surveillance system. It failed to result in any arrests or even positive identifications

In June 2001, Tampa became the first city in the nation to install the software to scan faces in the Ybor City nightlife district and check them against a database of more than 24,000 felons, sexual predators and runaway children.

But critics said it violated privacy rights, forcing people, without their consent, into what amounted to an electronic police lineup.

"People have the right to be anonymous, and not to be put in a police lineup for committing the offense of walking down a public street," said Darlene Williams, chairwoman of the Tampa area chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The program was called FaceIt--manufactured by a company named Visonics, that now goes by the name of Identix, Inc. Visonics had donated the system to Tampa on a trial basis.

.

Bump and Update: Kathy Boudin was granted parole today! She should be out by October, as soon as her parole plans are finalized. We love when the system works.

*****************************

Kathy Boudin, now age 60, has served more than 20 years in prison for her role in the shooting of a Brinks security guard in New York in 1981. She will have her second parole hearing this week.

Two Nyack police officers and a security guard were murdered during the $1.6 million robbery of an armored car on Oct. 20, 1981, by a group of self-proclaimed revolutionaries. The robbery was at the Nanuet Mall, and the police officers were shot to death at a subsequent roadblock in Nyack.

Boudin pleaded guilty in 1984 to first-degree robbery and second-degree murder in the killing of Brinks guard Peter Paige. She was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison in a court-approved agreement with Rockland prosecutors.

Boudin's supporters say "she played a minor role in the robbery, didn't shoot anyone, is rehabilitated and is no longer a threat to society." Also, in setting the sentence, the Judge noted that he expected her to be paroled.

For the parole system to have any meaning, Boudin should be paroled. Otherwise, the executive branch which decides parole is usurping the authority of the legislative branch which sets statutory parole eligibility dates and the judicial branch, which imposes sentences relying upon the statutory structure.

Here's how you can help. Read the letter written by Kathy and use the form to send your own letter to the Parole Board.