Michael Tomasky writes an article on warbloggers in New York Magazine, Blog On:

But newspaper dispatches are merely a sideshow. The media keep telling us that the military difference between this Gulf War and the last one is technology. True. But it's the media difference, too. The change is the Web, and the people really following this war are following it online. Dozens of bloggers, writing under rubrics like the Fly Bottle, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, and the Volokh Conspiracy, are providing serious, up-to-the-minute critiques of the action.

Say hello to The DAILY WHIRL--bringing you the latest posts from top legal blogs and legal news sites on one page--You can pick your own favorites to display: How Appealing, SCOTUSblog, Ignatz, Volokh, TalkLeft and lots more. You can choose law blogs, law news or both. If your blog or your favorite blog or news site is not listed, they are accepting recommendations.

Here are the details of the House-Senate Conference on the Feeney Amendment, submitted by Kyle O'Dowd, Legislative Affairs Director for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyerss (NACDL):

The S.151 conferees met today and approved a Hatch-Sensenbrenner amendment to the Feeney provisions in the House-passed bill.  Senator Kennedy's second-degree amendment to strike the Feeney provisions altogether and direct the Sentencing Commission to study departures failed on a strictly party line vote, all Dems voting aye and all Repubs voting nay.

Sen. Hatch described his amendment as addressing the concerns raised by judges and others.  He suggested that it only affects departures in sex cases involving minor victims, while requiring the Commission to study other departures.  IN FACT, THE HATCH-SENSENBRENNER AMENDMENT RETAINS MUCH OF THE UNDERLYING FEENEY AMENDMENT AND DRAMATICALLY LIMITS DEPARTURES IN ALL CASES.  Indeed, the new amendment directs the Sentencing Commission to amend the guidelines and policy statements "to ensure that the incidence of downward departures are [sic] substantially reduced."

The following are the key components of the Feeney amendment as amended by
Hatch-Sensenbrenner.  It is based on a preliminary analysis of the complete text.

The FBI Lab is facing scrutiny in over 100 cases in which it performed DNA tests.

Five years after FBI administrators pledged to clean up their much-maligned evidence lab, officials are again facing questions over shoddy lab work -- this time involving more than 100 DNA tests.

A bureau spokesman says the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General, its internal investigative branch, is looking into how an FBI lab technician might have compromised DNA tests over a two-year span.

Officials at the National Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, which has been critical of the lab, said they were unaware of the latest problem and urged the FBI to reveal more information.

"Our concern is just the typical Justice Department stonewalling on this thing," said Dan Dodson, an association spokesman. "Every defense attorney in every case should be notified."

Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, the former FBI lab chemist whose allegations of incompetence sparked the 1997 investigation, said the technician's mistakes are more proof that the lab should be subject to independent regulation and inspection.

Via GovExec.Com: Here comes TID (Terrorist Information Database)

The FBI is building a massive database to store case information, leads, intelligence and even newspaper and magazine articles related to terrorism.

Articles, the names of suspected terrorists on watch lists and terrorism-related message traffic from the Defense Department and the CIA have been placed into the database, which is being tested by some agents, according to Wilson Lowery, the FBI executive assistant director leading the project. Visa information from the State Department will be added to the database within 60 days, he said.

The database also would store information from state and local law enforcement agencies, records of telephone calls and terrorism-related information from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Defense agencies. It would also contain data from the 66 joint terrorism task forces at FBI field offices, as well as from the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, an interagency group formed by Attorney General John Ashcroft in October 2001 to keep known terrorists and suspects out of the United States and to track them if they do enter the country.

Reporters have already been briefed on the new system. Lowery acknowledged that security is an issue, and said one safeguard will be that "information would be collected according to guidelines established by the attorney general." That's supposed to make us less concerned about the civil liberties and privacy issues involved? If anything, it makes us worry more.

Update: Patriot Watch explains the danger in these databases.

The House-Senate Conferees met today on the Feeney Amendment. The news is not good. Senator Kennedy submitted a secondary amendment to strike the Feeney provisions altogether and direct the Sentencing Commission to study departures. That failed on a strictly party line vote, with all Democrats voting in favor and all Republicans voting against it.

Hatch and Sensenbrenner submitted an Amendment. They are presenting it as a compromise amendment that only limits prevention of downward departures to sex cases with minor children and merely requires the Commission to study other departures. It's not true. We've seen a preliminary point-by point-analysis prepared by two pre-eminent legislative analysts. We can't publish it yet because it's not in final form and we don't have the authors' permission. We hope to have a final analysis from them tomorrow and will reprint it here.

Here's what we can say for now. The Hatch-Sensenbrenner Amendment Retains Much of the Underlying Feeney Amendment and Dramatically Limits Departures in All Cases. In fact, the Amendment directs the Sentencing Commission to amend the guidelines and policy statements "to ensure that the incidence of downward departures are [sic] substantially reduced." There's a lot more, stay tuned.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has issued a statement criticizing both sides in the war for the death of journalists. They are also calling for an inquiry. You can read the statement here.

To date 12 reporters have died covering the war and two are missing.

MEDIA DEATHS IN IRAQ 8 April: Jose Couso (Telecinco, Spain)
8 April: Taras Protsyuk (Reuters, UK)
8 April: Tareq Ayoub (al-Jazeera, Qatar)
7 April: Christian Liebig (Focus, Germany)
7 April: Julio Anguita Parrado (El Mundo, Spain)
6 April: David Bloom (NBC, US)
6 April: Kamaran Abdurazaq Muhamed (BBC, UK)
4 April: Michael Kelly (Washington Post, US)
2 April: Kaveh Golestan (BBC, UK)
30 March: Gaby Rado (ITN, UK)
22 March: Paul Moran (ABC, Australia)
22 March: Terry Lloyd (ITN, UK)

The U.S. also comes under fire today from Reporters Without Borders , which has issued a statement accusing the US military of deliberately firing at journalists. Reporters Without Borders called today on US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to provide evidence that the offices of the pan-Arab TV station Al-Jazeera and the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad were not deliberately fired at by US forces earlier in the day in attacks that killed three journalists.

"We are appalled at what happened because it was known that both places contained journalists," said the organisation's secretary-general Robert Ménard. "Film shot by the French TV station France 3 and descriptions by journalists show the neighbourhood was very quiet at that hour and that the US tank crew took their time, waiting for a couple of minutes and adjusting its gun before opening fire."

Nathan Newman examines yesterday's Supreme Court ruling limiting punitive damages and its recent ruling upholding three strikes laws, and concludes that pro-corporate bias is what really lies behind the Court's "judicial restraint" policy.

So it's unreasonable to significantly decrease shareholder profits for an insurance company that commits fraud, but it's "reasonable and proportionate" to essentially obliterate a life of someone stealing $153 worth of goods?

My general legal position is pretty much one of judicial restraint-- it's up to the political branches to define the limits of punishment, not the courts who have no greater philosophical wisdom than those enacting either fraud or criminal statutes.

But this kind of contrasting justice for corporations versus the poor in our rightwing-dominated courts just shows the pro-corporate bias that really lies behind all the "judicial restraint" rhetoric from so much of the conservative side.

Update: Sam Heldman at Ignatz is livid over the opinion for the same reasons. Calpundit agrees.

As of this morning, the state-run Bagdad television station has gone off the air. Baghdad radio is still broadcasting, but playing "only national music and songs in praise of Saddam." Iraq's international satellite station stopped broadcasting a few days ago.

Eric Muller at IsThatLegal is guest blogging at the Volokh Conspiracy. He doesn't want to let the issue of the FBI-Iraqi interviews rest. He challenges us and Atrios to tell him what's so bad about the interviews.

Eric thinks the interviews are fine. We don't. We pretty much said all we had to say here. But in a nutshell, here's our reasons:

The program amounts to racial and ethnic profiling. It's viewing immigrants and those born in Iraq with suspicion, a guilty-until-proven-innocent approach.

It is morally offensive to us in the same way Mcarthyism was because many of those being questioned are American citizens, some who have been here for decades or who left Iraq as little children. Only by virtue of their heritage are they being asked questions like, Do you support Saddam Hussein? Do you know any Saddam sympathizers? What is your religious affiliation? What are the names and addresses of your Iraqi family members living in the United States?

It's not so different than, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party?" "Is any member of your family a member of the communist party?" Both have "witchhunt" aspects to them.

While the interviews were supposedly voluntary, many Iraqis felt threatened and intimidated. They were discouraged from seeking legal counsel.

There's also the issue of how the Government assembled its database of 50,000 people in America who were born in Iraq. Was it census records? We don't know, but we don't much like the idea of the Government pressing a computer button to single out a specific group for rounding up and questioning.

The Guardian provides details on why it is likely Saddam was killed in yesterday's blast:

Accordings to the reports President Saddam and his sons Qusay and Uday were seen walking into a restaurant in the al-Mansour district of Baghdad early yesterday afternoon. The meeting, with up to 50 members of the top Ba'ath leadership is thought to have taken place in a bunker either below the restaurant or in an adjacent building. A voice sounding like President Saddam's had been overheard discussing escape routes out of the city. According to one report, his voice was intercepted because he was using an encrypted communication system sold to him by a British company in the 1980s, which British intelligence has since been able to decode. The belief that the Iraqi leader was at the meeting was reinforced by US intelligence sources within the Iraqi leadership. The intelligence was relayed almost immediately to central command headquarters in Qatar, who sent the co-ordinates to one of its B-1 stealth bombers, which are constantly patrolling the skies over Iraq in search of such targets of opportunity.

Who dresses Richard Perle and prods him to lose weight? Read all about Eleana Benedor, who wants her right wing hawks to look good on tv and the lecture circuit. If this story weren't so pathetic, it would be funny.

"I’m very meticulous," said Ms. Benador, a diminutive woman in her 40’s who is a publicist to neoconservative stars. "Clothing. Attitude. Hair style. I’m always fussy about it. Some of them, if they’re putting on weight, very gently I will go to them and say, ‘You have two choices: You go to my doctor who makes you lose weight, or you buy a new suit.’ Very gently." Ms. Benador, a Peruvian-born New Yorker who runs a one-woman publicity firm for experts on national security, foreign policy and the Middle East, noted that her star client, Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, had shown marked improvement. "I think we have seen that he’s losing weight," she said in her heavily accented English. "I’ve looked at him."