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 Study on the Macondo drilling site. He listed a number of things that should categorically exclude a project from [...]

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 violations of Federal immigration law. It pitches the story as the Obama Administration being [...]

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. But I wanted to focus on point 14, which feels an awful lot like [...]

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 the price of gas in 2030; Salazar didn’t really answer), Obama has leaked his [...]

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 of the first things that happened after Shahzad’s arrest and seemingly in conjunction with him waiving a number of his [...]

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 prior restorations had really worked (among other things). I’m still reading [...]

The Old Gluehorse, John McCain, is lost without strategist Hohn Weaver and should be put out to pasture.

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 and to address the needs of its victims. On my third day in office, I issued an [...]

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 offenders who are mentally ill–appear when we replace the term “sexually dangerous person” with “terrorist.” (See Adam B’s [...]

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 diaries were written in multiple voices, but dismisses that by saying they were a [...]