Michelle Shephard reports on an effort Omar Khadr’s military lawyers are making to win clemency for their client. (h/t JL) Much of it focuses on the role psychiatrist Michael Welner, who testified that his interview with Khadr proved he’d never give up violence, played. As Jeff Kaye showed at the time, Welner’s report on Khadr [...]

On Saturday, I described how the democratically-elected government of Benton Harbor, a poor, segregated MI city about an hour south of me, lost its power to the city’s Emergency Financial Manager. There are two parts of the story that I didn’t explain, which this post from wizardkitten does well. First, the EFM law goes back [...]

The NYT has what I assume to be a bizarre form of beat sweetener on Goldman Sachs today. It spends most of 1,300 words speculating on who might replace CEO Lloyd Blankfein if he were to step down, exploring three possible candidates in depth. But here’s the explanation for why they think such speculation appropriate: [...]

Apparently, a bunch of people claiming to be interested in jobs inserted an amendment into the FAA bill requiring the FAA to allow for drones in US airspace. (h/t NC) I became aware of the pro-drone legislation from a February 10, 2011, Syracuse Post Standard report that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-New York) was supporting an [...]

In what is likely to be just the first of several dissolutions of democratically elected city governments and school boards in Michigan, the Emergency Financial Manager of Benton Harbor, Joseph Harris, just took away all authority from the city’s elected government. I, Joseph L. Harris, the duly appointed Emergency Manager for the City of Benton [...]

Last night, I was on BlogTalkRadio with former Ambassador to Nigeria John Campbell talking about WikiLeaks, secrecy, and democracy. As a way to illustrate how the secrecy of diplomatic cables hides a great deal of undemocratic ideas, I raised the emphasis State Department Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy placed in a hearing on WikiLeaks [...]

Evan Knappenberger, a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War who served in roughly the same position Bradley Manning did (but several years earlier), was interviewed by his college newspaper about my latest obsession, DOD’s network security. (h/t Asher_Wolf) What kind of access did you have here and in Iraq? Army security is like a [...]

I’ve been bitching and bitching and bitching and bitching about DOD’s refusal to fix the gaping holes in its network security even while it cries that Bradley Manning allegedly downloaded a bunch of cables using those gaping holes. As I point out, if all it took Manning to get all these databases was one Lady [...]

Something funny happened yesterday. The House Armed Services Committee had a hearing on Gitmo Detainee Transfer Policy. According to Carol Rosenberg’s tweeting, up to two hours of the hearing was conducted in closed session before the hearing opened to the public and the witnesses explained that the interesting details–like the “recidivists” names and the amount [...]

Yesterday the Barry Bonds trial ended with a single conviction for obstruction of justice and a mistrial declared due to a hung jury on the other three remaining counts. There were originally five counts in the indictment, but count four was dismissed prior to the case being given to the jury. The case was in [...]