The NYT has gotten a lot of press for this story, detailing that Qaddafi’s son, Mutassim al-Qadhafi, paid $1 million to have Mariah Carey to sing four songs at his New Year’s Day party in St. Barts, and, the following year, another $1 million to have Beyonce and Usher sing. While it affords the NYT [...]

Josh Gerstein reports that the government has withdrawn from defending Donald Rumsfeld and others in the Jose Padilla suit Judge Richard Mark Gergel dismissed the other day. (h/t MD) The Justice Department under President Barack Obama has quietly dropped its legal representation of more than a dozen Bush-era Pentagon and administration officials – including former [...]

Glenn and I both complained after the US media admitted yesterday it had been sitting on the very obvious news that Raymond Davis was a spook. But I got a number of questions from people who seem to miss the point. Why did I argue for years that Bob Novak shouldn’t have published Valerie Plame’s [...]

Last week, bmaz (with my kibbitzing) noted how outrageous is it that the federal government is fighting to prevent a government employee who destroyed an entire hard drive of evidence from spending even one day in jail. But given the record of this Administration–from the mantra of “look forward” to the refusal to charge Dick [...]

Gawker has liberated Iraq some of Rummy’s papers on Iraq and Afghanistan. (h/t Rosalind) And while I hope to return to the series on John Walker Lindh (79ff) and the memo, cc’ed to the public affairs people, in which Rummy ordered Jim Haynes to write a memo saying that the way DOD was detaining people [...]

Amidst all the discussion of why the US froze drone strikes after Raymond Davis got picked up, Greg Miller published another important story on drone strikes. Among other things, the story reveals that we’ve spent $118 million in the last year to hit 581 militants, of which just two were on the CIA’s most wanted [...]

What happens with the Raymond Davis case, in the end, will likely not have very much to do with the Vienna Conventions. For that matter, we likely will never have enough of the unadulterated facts to know what should happen under the Vienna Conventions. But let’s suspend reality and see where an examination of the [...]

After the Guardian confirmed for the Anglo-American world what the rest of the world had already concluded–that Raymond Davis is some kind of spook–the government gave the American outlets that have been sitting on this knowledge the go-ahead to publish it. The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis’s ties [...]

All this talk about Hosni Mubarak’s looted billions must really piss off our other client rulers, the ones who have not yet set aside such rich stashes for their retirement. But someone in Iraq has already made the move, disappearing $40 billion from Iraq’s development fund. Around $40 billion are “missing” from a post-Gulf War [...]

From the very first reports of Raymond Davis’ killing of two Pakistanis and subsequent arrest, the insistence he was just a consular employee was obviously just polite fiction. The Guardian has stopped sustaining that fiction. Based on interviews in the US and Pakistan, the Guardian can confirm that the 36-year-old former special forces soldier is [...]