U.S. Attorney Became Target After Rebuffing Justice Dept.

The night before the government secured a guilty plea from the manufacturer of the addictive painkiller OxyContin, a senior Justice Department official called the U.S. attorney handling the case and, at the behest of an executive for the drugmaker, urged him to slow down, the prosecutor told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday.

CNN has the latest here. I was particularly surprised to see this:

The trial had dragged on for 12 weeks, with the jury spending almost as much time out the courtroom as in the jury box. The jurors often have been sent out of the room or dismissed early as prosecutors and defense lawyers battle intently over evidence admissibility and the way witnesses are questioned.

One such argument grew so heated late Monday that Cooke ordered a recess, prompting an apology Tuesday from Swor.

"I was, I would say, close to being totally out of control," he said. "I would like to apologize to the court."

Cooke then made Swor say he was sorry to prosecutor John Shipley, the object of his ire, "to complete your atonement process."

"I do apologize to Mr. Shipley. It was unprofessional," Swor said.

Shipley accepted.

2nd Daily Kos Diary plus links inside to other sites.

As I noted at Kos,

Being skeptical and cynical by nature, of the very little I have read, my "gut feeling" (which is more highly tuned then Chertoff's gut feeling), is that there is "there there".  To much knowledge and awareness to not have at least some very detailed knowledge of at minimum, some dirt and skeletons.

We'll see.

VIDEO: Olbermann interviews Thomas Ricks

Supporters of the war in Iraq -- including President George W. Bush -- claim that a withdrawal of US forces would lead to an al Qaeda takeover of Iraq. Yet according to Pentagon war games, this scenario is highly unlikely.

On Wednesday's Countdown Keith Olbermann interviewed Washington Post correspondent Thomas Ricks who discussed his article on Pentagon war gaming for a post-US Iraq.

Pentagon simulations on US withdrawal find the most likely scenario would be a three-way split of the country between Kurds, Shias, and Sunnis. Ricks warns while the breakup would be "very ugly," with possibly "tens of thousands of people dying," an al Qaeda takeover of Iraq would not be possible by "any stretch of the imagination."

that seemed to have everything - including a CIA agent testifying in disguise and a mysterious reference to a female donkey. But the long-awaited court appearance of Jose Padilla, a US citizen once known as America's "dirty bomber", has turned out to be missing a crucial ingredient - evidence that he actually did anything wrong.

Good peg, but I think that Padilla's trial is much more than that:

It is the continuing trial of the government and the Bush Administration, and more specifically it is a trial of George W. Bush, who leads that government, and of Bush's supporters.

It is also a trial of the American system of justice, itself.

Only from the far side of the looking glass can it be considered a trial of Jose Padilla.

A defence application for the case to be dismissed for lack of evidence was rejected by Judge Marcia Cooke, who said it would be up to the 12 federal jurors to decide on the prosecution's claims.

Yet Cooke had earlier told prosecutors that their original indictment was "very light on facts", and the case has begun to attract international attention for the problems the US government has faced in presenting a terrorist prosecution in a civilian court. An acquittal for Padilla, a 36-year-old Muslim convert, would further complicate Wash-ington's efforts to hold Al-Qaeda suspects without proper trials at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba.

On April 24, 2003, a board member of Chiquita International Brands disclosed to a top official at the Justice Department that the king of the banana trade was evidently breaking the nation's anti-terrorism laws.

Roderick M. Hills, who had sought the meeting with former law firm colleague Michael Chertoff, explained that Chiquita was paying "protection money" to a Colombian paramilitary group on the U.S. government's list of terrorist organizations. Hills said he knew that such payments were illegal, according to sources and court records, but said that he needed Chertoff's advice.
[...]
Chertoff, then assistant attorney general and now secretary of homeland security, affirmed that the payments were illegal but said to wait for more feedback, according to five sources familiar with the meeting.