Update: Meanwhile, the Spanish judge threw out the case. A SPANISH judge overnight dismissed a complaint filed against former top US officials over alleged torture at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Judge Eloy Velasco decided to throw out the case as he said the US justice system is competent to handle any such complaint. The [...]

The AP wrote a story on the hoax GE Press Release reprinted in its entirely below; after GE informed them it was a hoax, they withdrew the story. But of the reports on the hoax, few seem to get it. Business Insider notes it “OBVIOUSLY reads like a hoax” because of “comments in there about [...]

There was a weird period last spring, as all the fearmongering in the country focused on the underwear bomber sitting in a jail just nineteen miles from me, after the autopsy of an African American imam in Detroit raised new questions about FBI’s pursuit of him as a terrorist, and after some of the only [...]

The WaPo has an article out that’s causing quite a stir. It bemoans the fact that the CIA has lost much of its top managers since 9/11. More than 90 of the agency’s upper-level managers have left for the private sector in the past 10 years, according to data compiled by The Washington Post. In [...]

Matt Taibbi is out with his take on the Fed’s bailout lending revealed last month. He focuses on how two rich housewives with no apparent business experience got almost a quarter of a billion dollars in the TALF program. In August 2009, John Mack, at the time still the CEO of Morgan Stanley, made an [...]

Josh Gerstein provides the entirety of an exchange between former State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley’s acting replacement, Mark Toner, AP reporter Matthew Lee, and Reuters reporter Arshad Mohammed. At issue is how State can still claim to be transparent when it won’t explain why it refuses to allow the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture to [...]

When the US detained the Kuwaiti-Pakistani Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and interrogated him for years (including at least a month of harsh torture), he revealed a handful of al Qaeda operatives in the US. When Pakistan held the American contractor, Raymond Davis, and–as this NYT article specifies–had Pakistan’s intelligence service ISI interrogate him for 14 days, [...]

Washington DC Mayor Gray and several other DC City Council members have been arrested protesting in the streets over the shabby treatment of the District and its women in the “budget compromise” passed last Friday night. If only other leaders in Washington DC had the guts to stand up for their citizens.

By my count, the OLC memo retroactively authorizing the bombing of Libya mentions the importance of UN or UN Security Council credibility nine times, including these two extended discussions. In prior opinions, this Office has identified a variety of national interests that, alone or in combination, may justify use of military force by the President. [...]

As I was prepping for my panel on Saturday, I was thinking a lot about PJ Crowley. Crowley is, as you’ll recall, the State Department spokesperson who was ousted after he called the treatment of Bradley Manning “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.” In my panel, I quoted Crowley’s comments on American support for unrestricted media. [...]