An ominous op-ed piece on Bush's insistence on attacking Iraq called Intoxicated With Power , by Leon Fuerth, national security adviser to former vice president Al Gore and now the Shapiro visiting professor of international relations at George Washington University, strikes a chord with us. It concludes with:

"One can imagine that if the president takes his time, plays out his hand with the United Nations, allows inspectors to return to Iraq and awaits the inevitable demonstration of bad faith by Saddam Hussein, he might be able to deal with Iraq with meaningful, rather than nominal international support; and he might then also be able to deal with the aftermath of a change of regime in the same way. But much of the time the administration's overall approach to policy breathes impatience with the opinion of others, eagerness for military action despite protestations to the contrary and an ideologically driven indifference to consequences that could prove devastating to fundamental American security needs."

For a comprehensive anti-war page offering readers " the best analysis, activism resources, and timely information they need to resist this precipitous rush to war", we recommend Alternet's War on Iraq.

The New York Times today launched a new section called Campaigns that will be "an authoritative source for political news and information". It replaces the usual Politics section and will run until Election Day on November 5. On election day, the site will be renamed "Elections" and will be updated throughout the day with results. Government news and articles about "American leaders and policy" now will appear in a new section called Washington.

The AP is reporting that the late Patsy Mink may win her Hawaii House seat in the November election. At least the Democrats think so.

"Democrats expect Rep. Patsy Mink to win re-election in Hawaii next month – even though she died Sept. 28. Then comes another election for the seat with her widower running. And then maybe another. The Republican candidate, ex-Marine Bob McDermott, has been feuding with party leaders and has received virtually no support from a state GOP that had discounted his chances of beating Mink. But controversy over the scheduling of as many as three rapid-fire elections for her district is giving Republicans new hope for the longtime Democratic seat."

Look to Daily Kos, MyDD , Hamster and Political Wire for analysis on this tomorrow. Actually, for the best in election coverage and news, you should visit them every day, along with Atrios/Eschaton/.

"Gov. Jeb Bush's daughter cannot have her drug court hearings closed to the public, a judge ruled Tuesday. Circuit Judge Reginald Whitehead said that Florida's drug courts are criminal proceedings and are open to the public. He weighed the patient's right to privacy against the public's right to access to court proceedings."

A hearing will be held Thursday and the Court will decide whether Ms. Bush will be allowed to remain in the drug treatment program or turned over to the criminal justice system.

Update: Governor Jeb Bush had this to say about his daughter's case today.

"In interviews Tuesday, the governor said that his daughter's battle with drugs has strained his family. But he accepted the judge's decision."

"The judge had to make that determination. All I can tell you is it's a lot harder to deal with drug addictions with these big lights, but it's his court," Bush said at a campaign stop. "The sad fact is, and the good news is, that frankly cameras and reporters aren't as interested in the other people in drug court, so they have some degree of privacy to be able to cope with their addictions."

"The governor said his daughter has not received preferential treatment. "In fact, as a father my concern is to make sure that she's treated as she should be treated and people don't go overboard because of who she is to treat her differently," he said. "

"Bush said his daughter's addiction is difficult to handle as a father. "I see pictures of her when she was 3 or 4 four years old and I vividly remember that," Bush said. "But now she's 25 and the laws apply to her as they apply to anyone else. I just hope the laws apply to her like anybody else."

Six members of New York's City Council are recommending that the convictions of the five youths in the Central Park Jogger case be overturned. The council members say the conviction should be overturned because of new evidence casting doubt on the guilty verdicts. They emphasize that their recommendation is not based on a "legal technicality," which is the reason DA Morgantheu has put out in the media as the reason he might agree to the reversal.

The vacationing Eric Alterman, author of MSNBC's weblog Altercation and Nation columnist, writes in from Paris today about Bruce Springsteen's concert in Paris last night.

"The highlight for me, however, was the searing “Born in the USA,” restored to its rock ‘n roll roots and placed — as far as one could tell — as a warning against war in Iraq. But it also seemed to be a cry of patriotic solidarity with the men and women about to have their lives ended — or at least badly messed up there. Perhaps this is conjecture on my part.

"Springsteen’s comments have been limited to decrying the loss of civil liberties attendant with Attorney General John Ashcroft’s exploitation of the war on terrorism. But nobody in Paris seems to support going to war, and America is not terribly popular here now for a whole set of reasonable and a few unreasonable reasons."

"Yet, I dunno, 18,000 or so French people were thrusting their fists in the air singing “Born in the USA” and appearing — in some inexplicable fashion — to mean it with all their hearts."

Altercation will have a guest host every day until Eric's return on October 28. We will be doing Fridays, including his famous "slacker friday" where selected responses from readers to his columns are posted. Your mail should go to alterlinks@aol.com.

If you disagree with Bush's war policy or his and Ashcroft's erosion of our civil liberties, or if you care about who sits on the Supreme Court and determines the law that will apply to your children as they grow into adulthood, the best way to show it is by voting for democratic candidates for the House and Senate. And by financially supporting the candidates in the closest races, like Tom Strickland of Colorado, so they can afford to run a final tv media blitz.

Instapundit links to a gun message board where an individual asserts he has been harassed by a Montgomery County Maryland sniper task force agent who falsely claimed to be with the FBI. The agent treated him like a suspect. Scroll down to Oct. 14 at 6:25 am. He didn't ask for a lawyer.

We write the "Ask a Lawyer" criminal law column for Lawyers.Com on Mondays. Here is our advice on what to do when the police ask you to come in for questioning, which we think is equally applicable to when they call you on the phone. Among other things we note:

"If you are going to speak with the police, you should do so with counsel. The police will give you "Miranda" warnings, and they mean it: Anything (and everything) you say can (and likely will) be used against you in court. The jails are filled with people who thought if they could only explain things to the police, they wouldn't be charged with a crime."

And remember, Miranda rights only apply if you are in custody...if your freedom of movement has been restricted in any significant way. They are not applicable to interrogations that occur when you are in your home and the police call you, or if you voluntarily go down to the station house for questioning and are told you are free to leave.

For the answers to the other 136 questions we've answered from the public about criminal law and rights of defendants, an archive with hotlinks to each one is here. If you have a question we haven't addressed yet, you can submit it here. We answer one question a week, but do not give individual legal advice.

We have to agree with Jeffrey Rosen in his New Republic article Civil Right reminding us that it is the libertarian ultra-conservatives like outgoing Representatives Dick Armey and Bob Barr who have advocated most stronglyfor our civil rights since September 11. The Democrats have not. But that is nothing new over the past few decades. We wrote about this issue two months before the 1996 elections when Barr opposed expanded wiretap legislation proposed by Clinton. (See, Partisan Politics vs. The Bill of Rights, published in The Champion.)

As everyone knows, politics makes strange bedfellows. It is good strategy for us to form coalitions with groups from the opposite end of the political spectrum when an issue arises that we both support. We are glad Barr was defeated because of his ultra-right wing views on drug offenders and the death penalty. But we appreciate his views on civil liberties and privacy and the extent to which he went to protect them. As Rosen points out,

"...the alliance between the libertarian right and the civil libertarian left remains vital even if it has little obvious grassroots support. At a time of national trial, this alliance has done more to check executive overreaching and to defend individual liberty than the big-government liberals running the Democratic Party, who have been all too happy to respond to demands by the public and the president for security above all."

Matthew Yglesias, one of our favorite bloggers who we read every day and almost always agree with, is having second thoughts about Rosen's article. He says, "I think this concern for civil liberties sometimes goes too far and one might even want to call it “paranoid”.

We believe our civil liberties must be assiduously protected. Once they start to slip, they go quickly. Once we remove them for one group, it becomes easier to do it for the next group. Once we begin making exceptions for catostropic events, the exceptions will become the rule.

We don't believe in giving an inch on core constitutional rights. The Second Amendment is only one away from the Fourth. As the old saying goes, give them an inch and they'll take a mile."

We'd also like to point out that not all Democrats in Congress are weak on civil liberties. In particular, Colorado's Dianna DeGette and Mark Udall have been constant supporters. If you know of others, feel free to put them here in the comments section.

At the behest of outgoing Illinois Governor George Ryan, clemency hearings began today in the cases of Illinois prisoners on death row. All prisoners will be given a hearing. The process is expected to last nine days with hearings lasting approximately one hour for each inmate.

The first inmate to have a hearing this morning was Leonard Kidd. "During Kidd's hearing, attorneys attacked the death penalty on two fronts. Attorneys said he is mentally retarded and that executing him constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. And in an argument that is expected to be made several times, attorneys said Kidd was tortured by Chicago police detectives."

"Lawyers also questioned the legitimacy of a system that has sent men to death row who were later exonerated. "It has become apparent that our state's death penalty system is severely flawed," said lawyer Charles W. Hoffman in a hearing for Kenneth Allen, who pleaded guilty to the 1979 shooting deaths of two Chicago police officers."

"Prisoner Review Board members in Chicago and Springfield will listen as defense lawyers, prosecutors, expert witnesses and victims' relatives argue for or against execution in what might be the most sweeping review in U.S. history."

"This is remarkably historic and without precedent," said David Elliot of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "All eyes in the death penalty movement are on Illinois."

The board's recommendations will be confidential and the final decision as to whether to grant clemency will be up to Governor Ryan.

We think it is important to recognize why this is happening. It is not because Governor Ryan, a Republican, opposes the death penalty, is "soft on crime" or is acting out of some sort of anger over the bribery scandal that plagued his term as Governor.

It is because during his term, 12 people were executed in Illinois but another 13 on death row were found innocent by later DNA testing. The system is broken.

Ryan commissioned a study of the system. In the Commission's report, 85 death penalty reforms were recommended. The Illinois legisature did not implement any of them. For an excellent article on the Report , we recommend Think First, Execute Later, written by one of the Commissioners. We applaud Governor Ryan's actions and hope other states follow suit, with both a moratorium on the death penalty and clemency hearings until and unless the system can be fixed.

In South Carolina, the race is close between Republican and former House Impeachment Trial Manager Lindsay Graham and Democratic Challenger Alex Sanders. We continue to support Sanders. Here is what he said yesterday on Meet the Press when questioned about the death penalty and abortion rights:

MR. RUSSERT: But you have said, and I'll show it on the screen, that you've been saying all your life that capital punishment is contrary to the will of God.

MR. SANDERS: I have said that and that is my sincere religious belief. Now let me say it would be the easiest thing in the world for me to change my opinion about that. I could simply say in the wake of 9/11, I've revisited the will of God and I've decided that God's changed his mind and that would absolutely prohibit whatever political burden I have, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to continue to stand up for what I believe and I think people respect that, at least they do in South Carolina.

But let me say again, the death penalty is just a diversion from the differences between us on Social Security, the budget, corporate crime and the other issues that legitimately divide us. So when I go to Washington, I'm not going to try to impose my religion on the country; I simply ask that people not impose their religion on me.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe that abortion is contrary to the will of God?

MR. SANDERS: I do not.

MR. RUSSERT: Why not?

MR. SANDERS: Abortion is a legitimate choice that a woman makes. I don’t believe in abortion in the sense that I think abortion is a good idea. It’s just that I don’t think it’s a decision that the government should make for a woman.

Our prior support of Sanders is here.

In Gun Dealer's Case Raises Larger Issue , Washington Post reporter Charles Lane presents both the facts and the legal issues in the case to be argued before the Supreme Court today on restoration of a felon's right to bear arms.

Washington Post reporters Dan Eggan and Steve Fainaru today write that prosecutors are using the provision in the 1996 Anti-Terrorism law that prohibits providing material services to a terrorist organization as their key strategy in terror cases, including those of John Walker Lindh, the Buffalo Six, Oregon Six and James Ujaama in Seattle.

Eggan and Fainaru report:

"Many defense attorneys and civil liberties advocates contend the law is worded so broadly that even unknowing contributions to groups the government labels terrorists can be prosecuted. Two federal judges in Los Angeles, in separate cases, have declared all or parts of the law unconstitutional."

"David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor who has participated in a legal challenge to the statute, maintains that the material-support ban is dangerously vague and could easily be used against people engaged in lawful activity."

"This law is so broad it would make it a crime for a Quaker to send a book on Ghandi's theory of nonviolence to the leader of a terrorist group," Cole said. "It essentially resurrects the guilt-by-association philosophy of the McCarthy era."

"Lee A. Albert, a law professor at the University of Buffalo, said the Lackawanna case will be a significant test of the statute's reach. Even though the defendants may have accepted training, he said, there is no public evidence that they actually provided "material support" to al Qaeda."

We believe the law does not encompass an individual who volunteers for military training. We don't think that constitutes providing material support or resources or that it fits withing the definition of providing "personnel" or "training." We think there is a big difference between obtaining training and providing training, and providing one person, namely one's self, and providing "personnel."

See Section 9-91.100 of the U.S. Attorneys' Manual instructing prosecutors how to apply the law: