This is a rather interesting pre-holiday document dump: The Pentagon’s war crimes appeals court announced without explanation Friday that the full U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, not a smaller panel, would review the conviction of Osama bin Laden’s driver, now free and living in Yemen. [snip] A three-judge panel heard both sides of the [...]

Here’s how our crack 9th Circuit Judge Jay Bybee played word games so as to consider bottles of water left for migrants traversing the Arizona desert “litter” even if they weren’t “garbage.” (h/t Balkinization) 1The regulation suffers from several grammatical challenges. The regulation begins with three gerunds listed in series—“littering, disposing, or dumping”—followed by an [...]

The White House was okay with Robert Gibbs attacking the Professional Left and their Catfood Commission Co-Chair attacking, well, everyone. But they wouldn’t let Steven Rattner’s claim that Rahm Emanuel had attacked the UAW go unanswered. Rattner depicts White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel as a force to be reckoned with who disparaged unions [...]

At Rosalind’s request, I’m putting up this working thread on the emails that OLC just turned over to CREW. There’s nothing all that exciting there because this search did not include “paper or electronic documents of Mr. Yoo available elsewhere in the Department.” Like on the classified servers. I’m actually on strike until I get [...]

The day after Obama declared victory (sort of) in Iraq, the Administration announced a whole package of sanctions against the Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-e Taliban. The sanctions: Designate TTP as a Foreign Terrorist Organization Designate TTP as a Special Designated Global Terrorist Organization Designate TTP’s two leaders, Hakimullah Mehsud and Wali Ur Rehman, as Special Designated [...]

In honor of Steve Rattner’s revelation that Rahm Emanuel wandered around during the auto bailout saying “fuck the UAW,” I’ve renamed the “Cadillac tax” the “Fuck the UAW” tax. Which is appropriate timing given that the Kaiser Family Foundation is out with a study today they should have done during the health care debate, showing [...]

Following closely on the reporting that Wall Street has resigned itself to having Elizabeth Warren recess appointed to head the Consumer Finance Protection Board, the WaPo reports that she has backed out of teaching a Harvard class at the last minute. “I’m writing to let you know that Professor Jerry Frug will be teaching your [...]

Now that Earl Blumenauer has exposed the craven indemnification agreement the US government under the Bush/Cheney Administration gave to Halliburton/KBR, he should pursue the same types of agreements secretly given to telcom companies participating in the illegal wiretapping program.

In 30 days, changes to Part II (Rules) and IV (Punitive Articles) of the Courts Martial Manual will go into effect. Only, we don’t know what those changes are because the annex that describes them appears to be classified. All we get is this Executive Order noting the change–and explaining that nothing in yesterday’s order [...]

Yesterday, the SEC told ratings agencies they mean business. They will prosecute agencies for fraud. In the future. It did so in a report of investigation into explicit fraud on the part of Moody’s in which the SEC declined to prosecute for jurisdictional reasons. At issue is a programming error that caused Moody’s to give [...]