One of the most disgusting rituals in the criminal law is the judge's questioning of a defendant who offers to plead guilty. If he says he's been pressured into pleading, the deal is off. So if he has been pressured, the law in effect requires him to lie, and requires the judge to pretend to believe the lie, for the plea to be accepted....

I suppose if you're facing a military tribunal and the judge disqualifies two of your three lawyers on the eve of trial, leaving you only with the one who has already been threatened with prosecution himself for representing you too zealously and daring to criticize the judge, the Secretary of Defense, and the President, you're well-advised to plead guilty if you can get any sort of a deal at all. And of course if you don't say that your plea was voluntary and that the dismissal of two-thirds of your legal team had nothing to do with it, the bargain is no good.

Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty at the Guantanamo Bay Navy Base yesterday to supporting terrorism in exchange for a nine-month prison sentence under a plea deal that forbids him from claiming he was abused in U.S. custody.

In return, Hicks, 31, will be allowed to leave Guantanamo within 60 days to serve out the sentence in his native Australia. He will be free by New Year's Eve. [emphasis added]

This does not look good.

The senior counselor to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will refuse to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the unfolding U.S. attorneys scandal, invoking her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, her attorneys said today.

Monica M. Goodling -- who is on an indefinite leave of absence from Gonzales's office -- also alleges in a sworn declaration that a "senior Department of Justice official" has admitted he was "not entirely candid" in his Senate testimony and has blamed Goodling and others for not fully briefing him.

The only two people from the Justice Department who have testified before the Senate regarding the US Attorney firings are Alberto Gonzales and Deputy AG Paul McNulty. Shall we flip a coin?

Goodling, 33, is the second senior Justice aide to pose a serious legal threat to Gonzales and other senior Justice officials. Former Gonzales chief of staff D. Kyle Sampson, who has been accused by Gonzales of withholding information, is expected to dispute that claim in testimony scheduled for Thursday in front of the Senate Judiciary panel.

I don't quite understand Goodling's explanation for taking the fifth. She says that some lawmakers have already decided there was wrongdoing, so her testimony could put her in jeopardy. How, exactly?

In the declaration presented to the Senate committee and released by her attorneys today, Goodling says [Sen. Charles] Schumer and other lawmakers, including Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), have already "drawn conclusions" about the U.S. attorney firings. As a result, Goodling says, she has decided to "invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege against self incrimination and decline to answer any and all questions from the committee or its staff."

"I have decided to follow my lawyer's advice and respectfully invoke my constitutional right, because the above-described circumstances present a perilous environment in which to testify," Goodling says.

Oh. I see. If that's sufficient reason to invoke the fifth amendment, then maybe Gonzales should try it too.

There’s no comparison between the levels of profanity and hateful venom you’ll find at left-wing sites such as Huffington Post and the comments posted at Little Green Footballs. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at Howard Kurtz’s lame attempt at moral equivalence though; it’s what mainstream media does, whether the topic is blogs or “terrorism” or the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Besides stealing cars, sheep, beehives, whatever they can get their hands on, from their Jewish neighbors, the palestinians will uproot Jewish fruit trees and plant olive trees there. The Jews hesitate to cut them down, the army declares it a military zone, and the arabs steal Jewish land.

I am beginning to see where some of the folks around here are starting to wake up. However, we do have an incredibly large Persian population. As well as just a very large muuslim population. So we better be WIDE awake.
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I agree. Saudi Arabia intends to absorb the Black Muslim movement lock, stock, and barrel. Using money and the untrue, but apparently tempting, theory that American Blacks were Muslims before being forcefully indoctrinated in Christianity. 3 million native born terrorist. Just like Britain with their Pakistanis.
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this war isn't going to be won on small 'intelligence' victories.

It will only be won by killing, killing, killing, killing....
[to which another commenter adds:]
/Iranians, we need to get to the root of the problem
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Why do we have to tolerate these jackasses that want to spread Islame the death cult by hook or crook. It is a sick cult where the religious train there followers from a very young age to give them hugh amounts of power. These bastards should be horse whipped and run out of this country unless they are citizens. I am fed up with them. In Boston In Minnesota The Flying Imams why don't they fly there goat smellin butts back to the burning sands and leave us the hell alone.

Some good points made upthread by Tom Hilton (and by Steve himself) regarding the sense that the big-name Republican candidates could trounce the big-name Democrats now. Personally, I think that it's way too early to be taking this kind of talk very seriously. Just to put it into some kind of perspective, we're now about nine months away from the point in the 2004 race where all the pundits were confidentally predicting that Howard Dean had the Democratic nomination sewn up. Still, it's a good idea to be prepared and ready to come out swinging.

But Tom refers to the media going after the Democrats with more zeal than they're going after Republicans. I'm sure there are specific instances that one could cite, and it's happened in the past--to Clinton, to Gore for damn sure. Right now, though, as a general phenomena, I don't see it happening that much; I think that the public image of Romney that's come through the mainstream media is that he's a sell-out, and McCain and Guiliani have both taken a few lumps recently, and I think that the press coverage of Obama that's concentrated on the warm glow he installs in people has mostly outweighed the coverage that deals with the sense some people have that he's an empty suit. I'm sure that there will be a lot to be outraged about when things pick up. Right now, the press actually seems to be on the verge of acknowledging, if not addressing, the real pressing question of the moment, which is: given what we now know, in the wake of this business with the Attorney General, and the sense that there's a lot more to come, how harshly will history judge us if we don't impeach the son of a bitch?

Which is why what I'm really concerned about now isn't so much press atacks on Democrats or Democrats doing enough to tar Republicans as Republicans (though I think that, in any open debate forum, Republican candidates should be asked whether they "support" the Bush presidency, and, when they inevitably say that they do, that they ought to be asked to justify that support on specific terms) so much as I am concerned about Democrats being attacked by Democrats--or by progressives, leftists, liberals, anyone who claims to care enough about what happens in this world to vote and who would seem to be better aligned with the Democrats than with the Republicans. One of the venerable lines you hear on this topic has always been that, well, it's a sign of better character and more open mindedness to vote for "the person" and not be partisan and identify with a party. Theoretically, that's a fine idea. Theoretically, voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 was going to help bring about a strong new "genuinely" progressive and viable third party and in the meantime, George Bush and Dick Cheney wouldn't screw up the planet because, well, they just wouldn't. As my grandpa used to say, why don't you crap in one hand and theorize in the other, and then see which one fills up first? Only a committed twit could still be making noises about how the two parties aren't "different." Even if you wish the prominent Democrats would do more to stand for something, where does that place them in relation to McCain, Guiliani, and Romney, all of whom have to some extent jumped into their campaigns by insisitng that they don't stand for certain things that they were recently on record as believing?

I actually rather liked that rogue anti-Hillary ad that made all that noise last week. I liked it even though, if I had to vote today, I'd vote for Hillary. (Who will I vote for in twenty months? How could I possibly know that?) I understand Steve's point in saying that it puts a fascist frame on a candidate who doesn't deserve that, but I don't think it was meant to be taken seriously in that way, any more than that Apple actually meant to suggest that its competitors were fascistic. It's a pop mash-up, a joke that taps into people's memories and that spins off an earlier joke that tapped into people's half-formed fantasies about the concept of being "Orwellian." It also addresses something that Clinton is going to have to deal with, just as Kerry and Gore (and before them, Michael Dukakis, and Walter Mondale, and going all the way back to the original victim of the modern television campaign, Adlia Stevenson) had to deal with the media-generated public perception that they were stiffs. What's distinctive about Hillary's problem, and what I think connects it to Gore's, is that actual, potential voters on her side have had as much to do with building this perception that she's the "establishment" candidate (God, talk about your nostalgic concepts) who must be destroyed because she stands in the way of the pure, grass-roots everyman candidates. She's supposed to be this Goliath powered by money and connections who's going to steamroller everything in her path so that she can gain power and govern from the center, like the madwoman she is. And it wasn't that long ago that the knock on her was supposed to be that her name recognition obscured the fact that she was an unpopular barnicle on the ship of state who under no circumstances could actually win.

I think the most reassuring thing about the whole Apple-Obama ad business was that it actually seemed to inspire responses from the key players that were more or less in proportion to the event. Hillary herself even seemed not just well-controlled but good-spirited about it, as if she'd seen the thing and had been unable to suppress a chuckle. Whatever underhandedness went into its being created and injected into the cultural bloodstream, it's definitely on a different level of scurrilousness than the Swift Boay slimers or Michelle Malkin pointing out that we don't have actual footage that would confirm that John Kerry's war wounds weren't self-inflicted. (Or, for that matter, or Fox News running with the "story" that Obama grew up in a Muslim terrorist training camp, or whatever the hell it was supposed to be. To say nothing of the cesspool rumors about Vince Foster.) I'm not saying that progressives should take what they're offered and like it or lump it. After all, it was Bill Clinton who said that Democrats are fated to disagree on things because that's an inevitable by-product of their greater receptivity to actual thought. (Unfortunately, he said it in the course of stumping for Joe Lieberman, but there's still some truth to it.) The closest that George Bush has come to fulfilling his claim to be a "uniter" was when he persuaded a record number of liberal-minded voters to swallow their differences long enough to pull a lever for John Kerry, not a man of such charisma and broad-based appeal that such an outcome would to be obvious. We can't count on the Republican nominee in 2008 being such a three-ring circus of horrors with extra added attractions that everyone in the country with sense can see that they need to get behind whoever the hell is going to keep this ass from assuming power. It didn't happen in 2000, and maybe the best thing you can say about history is that it probably can't cough up someting like George W.Bush twice in one generation.

Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani has been married three times and, as it turns out, so has his wife. The campaign confirmed Friday that Judith Nathan Giuliani was married twice — not once — before she wed the former New York City mayor in 2003. It was Giuliani's third marriage, and, until Thursday, had been thought to be his wife's second.

Giuliani asked voters to judge his private life in the context of his performance as mayor of New York.

"I was able to handle the worst attack in the history of our country, while all these things the press is caring about were going on," Giuliani said, when asked how conservative voters might judge his personal conduct. "So I think when people look at it fairly, they will see it has nothing to do with job performance."

Mrs. Giuliani told The New York Post in an article on its Web site Thursday night that Giuliani was, in fact, her third husband. Her first marriage was to Jeffrey Scott Ross in 1974, when she was about 20. They divorced in 1979.

She then met and married Bruce Nathan. They divorced in the 1990s.

Soon after she earned her nursing degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1974, Judith met Bruce Nathan, who came from a rich family and is now a sales manager for a wall-covering company based in New Jersey.

It was Dec. 8, 1974, when then-20-year-old Judith Stish, fresh out of nursing school, ran off with Jeffrey Ross to the Chapel of the Bells in Las Vegas, according to a copy of the marriage certificate unearthed by the Daily News.

The couple separated after four years of marriage and, citing an "irretrievably broken" relationship, divorced in Florida on Nov. 14, 1979, according to court records.

Five days later, Judith married husband No. 2, wallpaper salesman Bruce Nathan, the records show.

The pulverized remains of bodies from the World Trade Center disaster site were used by city workers to fill ruts and potholes, a city contractor says in a sworn affidavit filed Friday in Manhattan Federal Court.

Eric Beck says debris powders - known as fines - were put in a pothole-fill mixture by crews at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, N.Y., where more than 1.65 million tons of World Trade Center debris were deposited after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I observed the New York City Department of Sanitation taking these fines from the conveyor belts of our machines, loading it onto tractors and using it to pave roads and fill in potholes, dips and ruts," Eric Beck said.

Beck was the senior supervisor for Taylor Recycling, a private contractor hired to sift through debris trucked to Fresh Kills after the trade center attacks. Before the arrival of Taylor's equipment at Fresh Kills in October 2001, the debris was sifted manually by workers using rakes and shovels.

The papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan relied in part on affidavits from four people who participated in the recovery efforts at the Fresh Kills Refuse Site on Staten Island.

Plaintiffs who brought the case against the city in 2005 include World Trade Center Families for Proper Burial, a group of about 1,000 families who believe their relatives' remains are at Fresh Kills.

Court papers said the city failed to deliver on a promise to sift all debris through delicate screens to find body parts, human remains and personal belongings as small as a quarter inch in diameter. Only about 63 percent of the 1.65 million tons of debris recovered from the trade center site were subjected to the sifting screens, the court papers said.

In one affidavit, former police Sgt. John Barrett said supervisors at Fresh Kills pressured workers to sift through piles hurriedly. He said he once refused to sift quickly, only to see two other piles carted away and dumped without having been sifted at all.

In another, construction worker Eric Beck, who worked at the landfill from October 2001 through July 2002, said recovery workers found as many as 2,000 bones a day in the early months, along with personal belongings including keys, wallets, pictures and jewelry. But he said some debris that had been through the quarter-inch sifting equipment was later loaded onto tractors by the city and used to pave roads and fill in potholes.

Since the families sued, more than 1,200 human remains - ranging from small slivers to full arm bones - have been recovered from an abandoned skyscraper near the trade center site, the landfill of a service road at ground zero and underneath a former destroyed church.

One of the biggest stories of the presidential campaign is being ignored by the major media. It's how the president of the firefighters union engineered an endorsement of John Kerry for president without asking his members about it. It turns out most of the members of the union are Republicans who support Bush.

Harold Schaitberger, the president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, the IAFF, has received tons of publicity and has been shown repeatedly with Kerry at campaign events. These appearances convey the impression that the firefighters who performed heroically on 9/11 have abandoned Bush. But it's Schaitberger who abandoned his members.

During the Republican convention, the union representing New York City's 8,600 firefighters endorsed Bush. But stories about this development tried to diminish the significance of the endorsement by noting that the international union, the IAFF, had endorsed Kerry. The stories failed to explain, as we did in a recent Media Monitor, that Schaitberger made this decision without polling his members. Instead, a few members were asked about the characteristics they wanted in a president. On that basis, Scahitberger decided to endorse Kerry. Schaitberger admitted to MSNBC's Chris Matthews that there are more Republicans than Democrats in his union.

"Thank you so very much for your work on exposing these facts." That's how a professional firefighter and member of the IAFF local 2876 of South Kitsap Fire District 7 in Washington state responded to our Media Monitor on this matter. He told us, "I am so sick and tired of union 'leaders' talking for us, so much so that I don't pay into the PAC [political action committee] fund anymore because it does not represent my views or the majority of those of my co-workers either. No one in our department, to my knowledge, received or heard of a poll regarding who we supported. I am a proud firefighter for Bush as are, I believe by straw poll, a great many of my fellow firefighters, including our VP. "

Using the same old ploy, a Newsday story about the firefighters' endorsement of Bush claimed that, "the International Association of Fire Fighters unanimously endorsed Kerry and its members have since often campaigned with him." But that once again ignores the fact that the endorsement was delivered without polling members of the union. Not surprisingly, the New York Times compounded the error. It declared, "A year ago, the nation's main firefighters' union, the 260,000-member International Association of Firefighters, became the first large union to endorse Mr. Kerry." That falsely implied that these 260,000 members had voted to endorse Kerry.

The Firefighters for Bush website continues to ask firefighters whether any of them were ever consulted by Schaitberger about the Kerry endorsement. One posted the following answer: "I don't think anyone but Schaitberger's opinion counts at all. The IAFF is stealing our dues to support Kerry." Another said, "It's disgusting a portion of our dues go toward campaigning against President Bush." This is the story that the media should tell.

Stephen J. Cassidy, the current president of Local 94 whose name appears on the press release endorsing Bush in 2004, has reportedly criticized Giuliani in the past. An October 12, 2002, Newsday article quoted Cassidy as saying that "[a]lthough Giuliani is 'the most despised man in America' among firefighters," they would not stage "an overt protest" at a memorial service that day. Instead, Cassidy told the paper, "We decided that this is a solemn day for our families and our fallen brothers so we decided to tell them they should sit on their hands," rather than having "uniformed firefighters stand and turn their backs on the former mayor."

No Democrat, when confronted with a microphone, should ever utter the name of a GOP candidate for president without attaching the word "Republican" to the name...

AG Alberto Gonzales has maintained that he wasn't involved in any discussions regarding the firings of eight US Attorneys. That's his story, and he was sticking to it -- until the Justice Department made another document dump late Friday night.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met with senior aides on Nov. 27 to review a plan to fire a group of U.S. attorneys, according to documents released last night, a disclosure that contradicts Gonzales's previous statement that he was not involved in "any discussions" about the dismissals.

...The hour-long November meeting in the attorney general's conference room included Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty and four other senior Justice officials, including the Gonzales aide who coordinated the firings, then-Chief of Staff D. Kyle Sampson, records show.

Documents detailing the previously undisclosed meeting appear to conflict with remarks by Gonzales at a March 13 news conference in which he portrayed himself as a CEO who had delegated to Sampson responsibility for the particulars of firing eight U.S. attorneys.

"I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on," Gonzales said.

Of course, the Justice Department is parsing the whole thing, saying the documents don't contradict Gonzales' previous statement.

Spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos said last night that there is no "inconsistency" between the Nov. 27 meeting and Gonzales's remarks. She argued that Gonzales was simply emphasizing at the news conference that he was not involved in the details of Sampson's plans.

Sorry, Ms. Scolinos, but, "I was not involved in seeing any memos, was not involved in any discussions about what was going on," does not square with, "Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales met with senior aides on Nov. 27 to review a plan to fire a group of U.S. attorneys..."

The Justice Department also announced that the Office of Professional Responsibility and the Department's Inspector General are conducting a joint investigation into the circumstances surrounding the firings. Given how well that went the last time, I don't expect much in the way of results.

As for Gonzales' underlings, who did the actual dirty work, they don't seem to share his job security:

Sampson, who resigned March 12 after the discovery of e-mails contradicting assertions that the White House was not closely involved in the firings, may be the official best positioned to describe the roles top Justice and White House officials played in the ouster of the federal prosecutors.

The Justice Department also said yesterday that Monica Goodling, a senior counselor to Gonzales who worked closely with Sampson on the firings, took an indefinite personal leave from her job on Monday. A Justice official said that she is still employed there but that it is not clear when she will return.

Sampson has agreed to testify before Congress and is scheduled to appear on Thursday.

Sampson's planned testimony complicates the standoff that developed this week between Democrats and the Bush administration, which has refused demands for public testimony from presidential adviser Karl Rove and other White House aides. The House and Senate judiciary committees have authorized, but not issued, subpoenas for the testimony.

Gonzales and other Justice Department officials have said that Sampson quit because he withheld information from other officials and Sampson's action may have led them to give misleading testimony before Congress. Sampson's attorney has disputed that characterization and has said that others in the Justice Department were fully aware of "several years" of discussions with the White House about dismissing the prosecutors.

The point is crucial because Justice officials said in previous statements and testimony that the White House was involved only tangentially, at the end of the process.

This whole mess reminds me of peeling an onion, layer after layer. Will the "loyal Bushies" ever come clean? Stay tuned.

KSM: "I stole milk money"