Why hasn’t there been more discussion about this article? It is the Wall Street equivalent of a perfect game of baseball — 27 up, 27 down, the final score measured in millions of dollars a day. Despite the running unease in world markets, four giants of American finance managed to make money from trading every [...]

Not gonna happen. I have sent the enclosed notice to the Federal Register for publication, continuing the national emergency with respect to the stabilization of Iraq. This notice states that the national emergency with respect to the stabilization of Iraq declared in Executive Order 13303 of May 22, 2003, as modified in scope and relied [...]

The eye-popping part of this exchange is the news that all the efforts to protect the Gulf Coast are only going to collect a fraction of it from reaching the shore. But the whole comment is worthwhile, because Capps expresses so well the outrage we should all be expressing about the inefficacy of oil spill [...]

Jason Leopold has a long article and videotape of an interview with Jon Kiriakou that you should check out in full. I’ll discuss their conversation about Abu Zubaydah’s torture (and, more interestingly, Kiriakou’s knowledge about who Abu Zubaydah is) later. But I wanted to look more closely at Kiriakou’s description of a June 10, 2003 [...]

One of the key moments of yesterday’s Environment and Public Works hearing on the BP Disaster came when Tom Udall tried to pin the CEOs down on whether, as reported by WSJ, at BP’s direction, Halliburton swapped out the drilling mud for seawater prematurely–something we’ve looked at as well. BP, the well owner, blames the [...]

The House Commerce Committee is holding the third hearing into what went wrong on the BP Deepwater Horizon rig (CSPAN is showing it on CSPAN3). As is typical for a Waxman/Stupak hearing, the Committee has done its homework, advancing the understanding of what went wrong. Henry Waxman’s opening statement reveals that the well failed a [...]

Is the US government prone to using their prohibited terrorist designations in some kind of shell game for political expediency?

I’ve done two posts on John Rizzo’s recent address to ABA’s Standing Committee on Law and National Security. But I wanted to call attention to a few more things he said in his talk. Slightly more than halfway through his talk, he talks about how DOD gets to conduct what seem to him to be [...]

One of the highlights of the first of several Deepwater Horizon hearings in Congress this week came when Maria Cantwell tried to get BP American President Lamar McKay to commit to what BP would pay as “legitimate claims.” She asked about: Long term and short term harms to the fishing industry Business loss to tourism [...]

This is the kind of lede you’d expect from a dirty hippie blogger, not from a septuagenarian TradMed journalist. Who other than the acerbic John A. Rizzo, who served a long tenure as the CIA’s acting general counsel, would use his first talk after retiring from government to lay out a series of ironies that [...]