The Nation has a long study on the Army’s Detainee Abuse Task Force, which one of its members described as a “whitewash.” Jon Renaud, a retired Army Warrant Officer who headed the task force as the Special Agent in Charge for the first half of 2005, now says of the DATF, “It didn’t accomplish anything—it [...]

There’s a lot to loathe about the current incarnation of the Senate, that elite club of millionaires where legislation goes to either get rewritten to serve corporate interests or killed. What does that say about DOJ, then, that the Senate is doing such a better job at investigating crimes? In just one month’s time the [...]

Vice Admiral William McRaven, the Commander of the Joint Special Operations Command–which has been celebrated for the last two weeks for its role in getting Osama bin Laden–told Marc Ambinder (who has long been one of the most informative writers on JSOC and wrote a detailed profile of them last week)–that he’d like JSOC to [...]

The National Consumer Law Center just released a report on something that’s been a pet peeve of mine for some years: states’ increasing reliance on pre-paid cards to distribute unemployment compensation, rather than checks. (h/t Susie) As the report explains, issuing funds via a card is much cheaper for the states. But what’s really happening [...]

The most interesting aspect of Michael Mukasey’s retort to John McCain’s op-ed calling him a liar is not the content–that’s the same old trite sophism–but rather the publication details of it. It appears not under Mukasey’s byline, but under Dick Cheney’s speech-writer’s byline, complete with a picture. And when he introduces Mukasey’s words, Marc Thiessen [...]

It’s now a perennial joke. Every time we kill the next Number Three in al Qaeda, we joke about how no one wants to take that guy’s place. Which was my first impression when I read this bit from ProPublica’s review of what the intelligence from Osama bin Laden’s compound has thus far revealed. Bin [...]

It’s a corporate fairy tale: working class boy joins the military, goes into banking, brings the joys of mineral exploitation to exotic locales. From Congo to Colombia, from Iraq to Sierra Leone, [Ian] Hannam [the JP Morgan banker overseeing the development of a gold mine in Afghanistan] and his small team of soldiers-turned-bankers and advisers [...]

Two and a half years after privatized auditors largely signed off on practices that contributed to the collapse of Wall Street, and a year after coziness between government inspectors and the oil industry they regulate allowed a massive oil spill in the gulf, the Obama Administration proposes relying on private auditors to ensure that private [...]

The government’s making outrageous secrecy claims again, this time in the Thomas Drake NSA leak case. As Steven Aftergood first reported, the government is trying to protect unclassified information using the CIPA process, basically making substitutions for information that its own expert says is not classified. They’re doing this by citing the National Security Agency [...]

Spencer had a superb idea: I don’t pretend that anything will produce an end to this new debate over torture. The fact that we’re debating torture diminishes our standing as a civilization. But moving beyond it: perhaps, after the actionable intelligence is drained from the bin Laden documents, it would be useful to reconvene the [...]