No, this isn't an article from 1972, but a new revelation. Ex- Nixon aide Jeb Magruder, who went to prison for his part in the Watergate scandal, is breaking his silence after 30 years.

In a new PBS documentary to be broadcast this coming Wednesday, Magruder says Nixon directed former Attorney General John Mitchell to proceed with the break-in.

Mr. Magruder, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and perjury charges stemming from the break-in and spent seven months in prison, explained his three decades of silence about Nixon's culpability by saying, "Nobody ever asked me a question about that."

John Dean, former White House aide and co-conspirator in the plan, says that while he is surprised by the revelation,

"I have no reason to doubt that it happened as he describes it, but I have never seen a scintilla of evidence that Nixon knew about the plans for the Watergate break-in."

Here's a factoid for you: In all, 25 people served jail terms for the break-in and its cover-up.

New information has come to light about Al Qaeda and its capabilities since the congressional committee finished its 800 page report on intelligence failures and whether 9/11 could have been prevented. As a result, another probe is expected to begin shortly--this time focusing on the Government's responses to the terrorism threats. It will cover both the Bush and Clinton administrations.

The bipartisan commission appointed by Congress and President Bush is conducting what participants believe is the most ambitious government investigation in history, looking not only into intelligence failures, as the congressional committee did, but much more broadly at how the U.S. government responded to the terrorist threat.

"There is new information that has come to us, both classified and unclassified, since Congress finished its work," said commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey. The new information, he said, may provide new facts and lead to some recommendations that are different from those of the joint committee, but he declined to reveal specifics.

In addition to looking at the intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the commission is examining anti-terrorism policies across the board, including in immigration, border control and aviation.

The commission will also examine the actions of Congress, both in terms of its responses to agency funding requests and in fulfillment of its oversight responsibilities.

How does the Government know when a lawyer defending a terrorist has crossed the line and become a terrorist herself? The short answer is, it doesn't.

Ashcroft's prosecutor thought he had an answer for the Judge in the Lynne Stewart case.

Where,[the Judge] asked at a hearing in June, is the line between constitutionally protected political activity and criminal conduct?

"You know it when you see it, your honor," the prosecutor, Christopher J. Morvillo, replied.

That struck Judge Koeltl as dangerously inadequate. Last week, he threw out two terrorism counts against the lawyer, Lynne Stewart, holding that Justice Potter Stewart's famous remark about pornography — "I know it when I see it" — cannot be the standard for imprisoning people.

With the war on terror, the new darling of the prosecutor's nursery has become the law that prohibits providing material support to terrorists. Ashcroft has brought the charge in just about every case Justice has filed. Think, John Walker Lindh, the Buffalo Six, James Ujaama, the Oregon Six (now seven, with Mike Hawash added a few months ago,) the shoe bomber, Zacarias Moussaoui, the Detroit four, Florida professor Sami Al-Arian....and more.

Judge Koetel is not the first Judge to rule the statute unconsitutionally vague for failing to give notice of what is prohibited. In 2000, 9th Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski wrote that the 1996 version of the law was impermissibly vague, criminalizing political advocacy, in Humanitarian Law Project v Reno .

As Georgetown Law Professor and civil liberties expert David Cole points out in today's New York Times article:

"There is a reason that this statute has been a linchpin in the post-9/11 war on terror. "It does not require the government to prove any actual connection to terrorist conduct but instead allows it to rely on guilty by association."

Eric Freedman, another law professor and expert, says:

"The government's position that one can be locked up for decades for expressions of political positions on the telephone amounts to simple thought control."

The Lynne Stewart decision is a big blow to Ashcroft and the Administration. Professor Cole calls it a "milestone."

"It's the first decision throwing out a criminal indictment," Professor Cole said, "and it's the first case after 9/11 to criticize it."

Our full coverage of the Lynne Stewart case is here. Our protests against the whosale use of the material support statute are here.

Despite rumors to the contrary this past week, Jack Kemp says he will not be candidate for Governor in California if the recall election succeeds. He says he is too old, and while it might have been nice at another point in his life, it would not be right now.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine explores false memories and the controversy over the work of Susan Clancy, formerly with the Harvard Psychology Department. We agree with Clancy:

As the subject tries to remember what happened, ''source'' errors creep in. ''You think you're recovering your own memory, when in fact it's something you pulled out of a movie,'' Clancy said. ''Memory's tendency to be reconstructive, combined with the desire to believe, combined with a culturally available script, leads to a false memory. The content of that memory is dictated by the society you live in.''

The current controversy over Clancy involves her use of people who claimed to be abducted by space aliens as subjects for her tests. We'd refer you to the work of memory guru and Distinguished Professor Elizabeth Loftus on the topic and her excellent book, The Myth of Repressed Memory, which is available in paperback.

Popular Science also explored the phenonemon yesterday:

Our memories are, to some degree, like a final-cut videotape: Research confirms that each of us continually edits and splices recollections, replacing one "picture" with another, sometimes with a little outside assistance. "Memory is a creative event, born anew every day," says Elizabeth Loftus, a University of California, Irvine, psychologist who is a leading expert on the malleability of eyewitness testimony. "You fill in the holes every time you reconstruct an event in your own mind."

A decade of intensive research has taught Loftus and her colleagues how easy it is to plant false memories. In experiments, they've demonstrated that few people, if any, can reliably distinguish between memories of something they've been shown and something they've been asked to imagine.

Congress unanimously passed legislation targeting prison rape on Friday. The bill is the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003.

[The bill] establishes a system of grants and reforms that will cost $60 million a year. The centerpiece is an annual survey by the U.S. Department of Justice that will be the most sweeping study ever made of sexual assault in prisons, congressional sponsors and criminal justice experts said.

"It's been a long, strange battle, but I think everyone has come to understand that a prison sentence in the United States should not include rape as added punishment," said Rep. Frank R. Wolf, (R-Va.), a House co-sponsor of the bill, along with Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.).

If you're interested in story of the sealed pages of the 9/11 report, and you should be as they contain information embarassing to Bush about his prior statements about the Saudi connection to 9/11, go right over to Media Horse--they have it all, including this Washington Post article and this one and Joe Conason.

Bush's comment on the Saudis on Sept. 20, accompanying White House Photo:

The President, from the first day, has been very satisfied with the actions of the Saudi government and the Saudi people," said White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer.

Again, a big thanks to the Horse for assembling all this in one place.

Update: The pages themselves have not been released.

There were two significant advances in the drive to restore voting rights to felons this week, one in Florida and one in Washington state.

Advancement One:

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals revived an inmate voting rights case . The challenge was based on grounds that the state's law depriving felons of the right to vote discriminated against minorities. The appeals court sent the case back to the lower court to conduct a "searching" investigation.

The appeals court expressed no opinion on the merits of the inmates' claim, but said the lower court failed to consider evidence of bias in the state's criminal justice system. The appeals court noted, for example, that blacks make up about 3 percent of the state population but account for 37 percent of the ``persistent offender'' sentences handed down.

The law professor representing the inmates said the ruling has national implications. The Sentencing Project describes the ruling this way:

On July 25th, 2003, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision of the district court in the Washington state felony disenfranchisement litigation of Farrakhan v. Locke. While the district court had recognized that the state's disenfranchisement scheme resulted in a disproportionate impact on African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, the court had ruled that this impact was not related to the disenfranchisement provision itself. In overturning the ruling, the 9th Circuit stated that under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act a "totality of the circumstances" inquiry "requires courts to consider how a challenged voting practice interacts with external factors such as 'social and historical conditions' to result in denial of the right to vote on account of race or color." The court further held that "evidence of discrimination within the criminal justice system can be relevant to a Section 2 analysis."

Advancement Two

In Florida, the settlement of a lawsuit means 20, 000 to 30,000 ex-felons will regain the right to vote. There are an estimated 400,000 ex-felons in the state.

Richard Jewell is back in court, seeking the confidential sources of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which he says he needs to proceed with his libel suit against the paper, for its coverage of the 1996 Atlanta bombings in which it was reported that Jewell was a suspect.

The matter is back in the trial court after an Appeals Court reversed its ruling:

The panel said Mather should balance Jewell's need for the information with the public policy that favors protecting journalists' confidential sources by scrutinizing each specific allegation of libel. If the alleged libelous statement cannot succeed as a matter of law or if Jewell could prove it using alternate means, then the court should rule against disclosure of confidential sources. But if a particular libel allegation was legally viable, and the identity of the sources was relevant, material and the only means to obtain other admissible evidence, Mather should order disclosure. Atlanta Journal-Constitution v. Jewell, 251 Ga. App. 808 (2001).

Jewell is still represented by libel guru Lin Wood, who sucessfully represented John and Patsy Ramsey, in several of their suits. He is also suing author Dominick Dunne on behalf of Gary Condit.

Congratulations to the Iowa Civil Liberties Union which won its federal lawsuit today challenging a sex offender banishment law.

A federal judge issued an order Friday blocking enforcement of a state law that prohibits sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of a school or day care center.

The lawsuit said the requirement makes it nearly impossible for an offender to find a place to live ``because there is virtually no place in towns or urban areas in Iowa that is not within 2,000 feet of a school or daycare center.''

The Judge will decide in September whether to make the termporary restraining order permanent. He also allowed the civil liberties group to include prosecutors as defendants.

President Bush has nominated two more ultra-conservatives to the federal bench, adding fuel to Senate fire.

Both are nominated for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the second most influential court in the country. One is Janice Rogers Brown, whom we wrote about here. The New York Times reporter accurately, in our opinion, characterizes her this way:

Justice Brown, 54, has been touted intensively in conservative legal circles as someone whose judicial philosophy would match that of Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, both of whom Mr. Bush said would be his models for any Supreme Court appointments.

The other is Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Mr. Kavanaugh, at 38, would be one of the youngest members of the federal appeals bench. He is assistant to the president and staff secretary, and has been responsible for marshaling the fleet of largely conservative judicial nominees the president has sent to the Senate, resulting in angry battles with Democrats. But he is probably better known as a senior assistant to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated President and Mrs. Clinton for a variety of issues.

During the Clinton Administration, the Republicans refused to allow any judges to be appointed to the D.C. Circuit, claiming its light work load did not require more than ten judges. Miguel Estrada was to have been the tenth judge. That makes Rogers Brown and Kavenaugh numbers 11 and 12. What will the Republicans say now?

These judges are appointed for life. The D.C. Circuit is considered a direct line for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. If you care about preserving the independence of our judiciary during your children's lifetimes, get on the horn now and let your elected officials know you oppose these nominations.

The New York Times opines there is Chaos in California due to the upcoming recall vote on Governor Gray Davis. The Times thinks California's recall methods need to be redesigned. First, it only takes 12% of the voters to cause a recall. In most other states, it's 25%. Next, it's possible for someone without much experience or even broad support to win the prize after a recall.

Salon asks whether it will be Arianna vs. the Terminator.

Kevin Thurman of Raise Your Hands has examined the situation in detail, here and here.

Digby has a very thoughtful piece opposing the recall here.