For months, the Justice Department and Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales have taken political heat for the purge of eight U.S. attorneys last year. Now the fallout is starting to hit the department in federal courtrooms around the country. Defense lawyers in a growing number of cases are raising questions about the motives of government lawyers who have brought charges against their clients. In court papers, they are citing the furor over the U.S. attorney dismissals as evidence that their cases may have been infected by politics. Justice officials say those concerns are unfounded (that is ludicrous, any and every case that is even remotely politically associated will be inherently tainted by this mess, and until they admit it and change it, they have no legal credibility, and their charges are questionable) and constitute desperate measures by desperate defendants. But the affair has given defendants and their lawyers some new energy, which is complicating life for the prosecutors.
"It provides defendants an opportunity to make an argument that would not have been made two years ago," said Daniel J. French, a former U.S. attorney in Albany, N.Y. "It has a tremendously corrosive effect."
B. Todd Jones, a former U.S. attorney in Minneapolis, said such arguments are now "given credence in the public eye because they are seeing that maybe there were political decisions made. Any defense lawyer worth their salt (I think that is exactly how I first described it, verbatim!) is going to say this is a political prosecution that shouldn't have been brought."
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-na-usattys18jun18,0,97628.story?page=1&track=ntothtml&coll=la-tot-topstories
Bush Wars;
Forget those September Deadlines, think "Decades" instead!
Petraeus: Iraq 'Challenges' to Last for Years
(you mean the "challenges" WE created by attacking another sovereign nation in the first place?)
Conditions in Iraq will not improve sufficiently by September to justify a drawdown of U.S. military forces, the top commander in Iraq said yesterday. Asked whether he thought the job assigned to an additional 30,000 troops deployed as the centerpiece of President Bush's new war strategy would be completed by then, Gen. David H. Petraeus replied: "I do not, no. I think that we have a lot of heavy lifting to do." So much for Bush's Surge...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/17/AR2007061700830.html?referrer=email
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