Who ELSE Can You Target with Predator Drones? Drug Cartels and Pirates?
Noah Shachtman focuses on one troubling part of this long article on the Obama Administration's fondness for Predator drones: the suggestion that the Administration prefers killing alleged terrorists to capturing them, since we don't have a…
Dennis Kucinich Says Targeting US Citizens Should Be Illegal
Of course, why anyone would need to introduce legislation to prohibit the killing of US citizens with no due process, I don't know. Isn't there already a piece of paper that prohibits such things?
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) announced…
Faisal Shahzad Gets a Lawyer
Faisal Shahzad rather suddenly got arraigned and got a lawyer yesterday. Josh Gerstein noted that the arraignment happened on the 15th day since Shahzad's arrest--the lower range of time the Obama Administration has floated for its changes to…
Sheldon Whitehouse Lists the NEPA Exclusions
At yesterday's Environment and Public Works hearing on the BP disaster, Sheldon Whitehouse asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Council on Environmental Quality Chair Helen Sutley why BP had been exempted from doing an Environmental Impact…
The OTHER 2002 Jay Bybee Opinion
The WaPo reports that the Obama Administration might be impeded from filing a suit against the AZ anti-immigrant law because of a 2002 Jay Bybee Memo holding that local police have the authority to detain people for both civil and criminal…
Nine Years after 9/11, Intelligence Community Still Missing Threats to US
The Senate Intelligence Committee has just released the Executive Summary of its report on the intelligence failures leading up to the Underwear Bomber's attempted bombing on a plane landing in Detroit. I'll have a bit more to say in a bit.…
Obama's Commission
As we go through another round of hearings on the BP disaster today (at the Energy and Natural Resources Committee this morning, Bernie Sanders asked Ken Salazar whether the risk of a disaster like this was worth the $.03/gallon decrease on…
Pakistani "Cooperation" on Faisal Shahzad
Mark Hosenball has a post elaborating on something reported elsewhere--that the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) is only marginally involved in Faisal Shahzad's interrogation. Given a point I tried to make here--namely, that one…
Remember Scooter Libby's Lost Emails?
Turns out they're still lost.
When we last heard from Libby's lost emails, CREW and National Security Archive had reached a settlement with the White House to restore 33 days worth of email and examine 21 days of low volume email to see whether…
Tired McCain a Foundering Gluehorse Without Weaver
The Old Gluehorse, John McCain, is lost without strategist Hohn Weaver and should be put out to pasture.
Once Again, Obama Empowers State Department to Lecture Others
Almost a year ago, Obama celebrated the anniversary of the Convention against Torture by promising to have the Department of State look at other countries' use of torture.
My administration is committed to taking concrete actions against torture…
Search and Replace: Sexually Dangerous Person, Terrorist
Just as a little thought experiment, let's look how some passages from SCOTUS nominee Elena Kagan's successful argument in U.S. v. Comstock--in which SCOTUS just voted 7-2 to affirm the federal government's authority to indefinitely detain sex…
Abu Zubaydah's Habeas Doodle
I want to make one more point about the interview Jason Leopold did with Jon Kiriakou last week. Jason asks Kiriakou about Dan Coleman's judgment that Abu Zubaydah's diaries reveal him to be mentally ill. Kiriakou agrees with Coleman that the…
First Arab-American, Rima Fakih, Wins Miss USA
In what has been billed locally as the first Arab-American to win, Michigan's Rima Fakih won the Miss USA pageant tonight.
The 24-year-old brunette from Michigan beat out four blondes and 46 other women for the 2010 Miss USA title after nearly…
When Kagan Defenders Hurt Her Case
Greg Craig, who was ousted from the Obama Administration because he's too much of a purist on archaic things like the Constitution, reassures us that Elena Kagan is largely a "progressive" in the mold of the guy who ousted him.
Spy Contractor v. Spy Contractor
Mark Mazzetti has a follow-up story to his previous expose of a DOD-funded contractor network conducting spying in Pakistan. In an article providing many new details about complaints from CIA about the DOD contractor, he comes pretty close to…
Faisal Shahzad's "Waiver" of His Rights
Faisal Shahzad was arrested just before midnight on May 3.
On May 5, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported that one of Shahzad's friends and his father-in-law, Iftikhar Mian (elsewhere named as Mohammad Asif Mian), had been detained by Pakistani…
Does the Right to a Lawyer Disappear with Miranda?
Charlie Savage has a story explaining what the Administration means when it says it wants to "modernize" Miranda warnings. As he explains, it's not just or even primarily Miranda warnings that are the problem (according to the Administration),…
Elena Kagan and Maher Arar
Remember how I suggested one of the bright sides of Elena Kagen's nomination to SCOTUS would make Republican heads explode when they realize Hamdan lawyer Neal Katyal may be Acting Solicitor General?
Well, keep your eye out for splattered…
DOD's Latest Black Site
Fresh off of the ICRC's confirmation that DOD has a black site in Bagram, Marc Ambinder has a long piece on it, describing it as run by part of the DIA, the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, and downplaying, somewhat,…
