Jeremy Scahill has a new piece on Blackwater that is fairly incendiary. Among other things (I’ll have more to say later), he reveals that Blackwater provided Monsanto with security services in 2008-2009. According to internal Total Intelligence communications, biotech giant Monsanto—the world’s largest supplier of genetically modified seeds—hired the firm in 2008–09. The relationship between [...]

ProPublica had an important story a few days ago reporting that the cases of a number of Colombian paramilitaries extradited to the US on drug–not terrorism–charges have been sealed and largely disappeared. Since 2006, more than a dozen of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary leaders have been extradited to the United States to face drug-trafficking charges [...]

PA’s Department of Homeland Security has employed an entity called the Institute for Terrorism Research and Response to monitor the web traffic of anti-drilling activists in that state. The effort was purportedly started to fulfill national requirements to protect critical infrastructure. As more attention was focused on this yesterday, Governor Rendell said he was embarrassed [...]

TPM captures the current state of play of the rumors that the White House will appoint Elizabeth Warren as interim head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau: Reports coming in that President Obama will name Elizabeth Warren as interim director of the consumer protection bureau created by the new financial regulatory law. Late Update: Maybe [...]

Back in January, Dana Priest first revealed that Anwar al-Awlaki was on a JSOC kill list and was being considered for a CIA kill list. Now, eight months later, DOJ is considering charging him. The Obama administration is considering filing the first criminal charges against radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in case the CIA fails to [...]

Mark Hosenball first reported this back in July, then linked back to that report last week. But given yesterday’s post on our what we’ve accomplished in Iraq, I thought it worth noting that the most inflammatory material in the next big Wikileaks dump–which appears to be the Iraq war log Bradley Manning leaked–reportedly pertains to [...]

Turns out “If al-qaida is calling” really meant a tragic game show of “Dialing for Detainees” and taking crank calls from batty old landladies. Based on this atrocious “evidence” human beings were detained without due process, beaten and abused. Right here in the “Homeland”. The new definition of “security”.

As we discuss whether to abandon rule of law in Afghanistan under General Petraeus, we’d do well to consider how the war Petraeus “won” in Iraq turned out: On a dull December day in 2009, Rabiha al Qassab, a 63-year-old Iraqi refugee living in a quiet residential area of north London, received a telephone call that [...]

I’ve been tracking the debate within the Administration over whether we should tolerate corruption in Afghanistan in the name of sustaining a war against someone–anyone–in Afghanistan or not for some weeks. Underlying the entire debate is the fact that our goals in Afghanistan–which started as a pursuit of those who struck us on 9/11 and [...]

Justice, what do you care about justice. You don’t even care whether you’ve got the right men or not. All you know is you’ve lost something and someone’s got to be punished. The Ox-Bow Incident. Nine years after September 11 and eight years after the CIA provided a memorandum to the White House explaining that [...]