I sort of expected the Republicans to abolish labor–or at least its named inclusion among the business of Congressional committees. After all, the GOP really doesn’t like tough things like physical work or the people who do it. But it wasn’t so long ago that the Republican Party–not to mention its newest activist branch, the [...]

Obama has signed the Defense Authorization Act that barred funding for closing Gitmo. And his signing statement–really more of a complaint than an actual signing statement–reads in part: Section 1032 bars the use of funds authorized to be appropriated by this Act for fiscal year 2011 to transfer Guantanamo detainees into the United States, and [...]

Tom Parker, Amnesty International’s Policy Director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights and himself a survivor of an IRA bomb attack, has this to say about Peter King’s hypocrisy about terrorism. (h/t Susie) That problem is simple: if your test for whether or not terrorist violence is acceptable is whether or not you agree with [...]

A radical thought, I know. But still only definitively true in Massachusetts. At issue is a Massachusetts case, U.S. Bank v. Ibanez, which challenged a foreclosure because of processes banks have widely used in securitizing a bunch of loans into something they can sell investors chumps. Here’s how Bloomberg described the case earlier this week: Massachusetts’s [...]

At the beginning of Obama’s term, when he talked about governing as a pragmatist, I perhaps foolishly believed he meant not pragmatism as DC understands it–as a principle-less squishy middle–but as the Pragmatist school of philosophers would mean it–as someone fundamentally open to and respectful of the ideas and viewpoints of all. Mind you, it [...]

John Brennan apparently plays an interesting role in the events surrounding Jeffrey Sterling, whom DOJ indicted for allegedly leaking details of the MERLIN program to James Risen. James Risen first wrote about Sterling–profiling his employment discrimination suit–in March 2002. In it, Risen quotes then CIA Deputy Executive Director John Brennan, denying that Sterling was dismissed [...]

Let me start by pointing to two data points about the case of Jeffrey Alexander Sterling–the apparent (and alleged) source for James Risen’s reporting on MERLIN. First, as DOJ’s press release alleges, Sterling first contacted Risen in February or March of 2003. The press release later reveals he first became aware that the FBI was [...]

Here’s what I think happened with Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, the former CIA officer who just got arrested for leaking classified information to James Risen. As I noted in the timeline, Sterling was assigned to an operation in November 1998. Given that the DOJ press release specifies that Sterling was “the operations officer assigned to handle [...]

DOJ has announced the arrest of James Risen’s source for the MERLIN story (though they don’t admit Risen and MERLIN are the leaks in question). Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, 43, of O’Fallon, Mo., was charged in a 10-count indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on Dec. 22, 2010, and [...]

Glenn Greenwald and Mark Mazzetti tell the story of 19-year old American citizen Gulet Mohamed who was taken into custody by the Kuwaitis after the US, while Mohamed was staying with an uncle in Kuwait, put him on the no-fly list. In the two weeks the Kuwaitis have held him, Mohamed says he was subjected [...]