emptywheel

Scott Horton’s revelation that the detainee described as “CAPTUS” in Glenn Carle’s book, The Interrogator, is an Afghan named Pacha Wazir reveals something else: in spite of the fact that Carle realized the CIA had been mistaken about Wazir’s ties to al Qaeda sometime in 2002, Wazir was not released from US custody until February [...]

Amid news that News Corp is playing games with its BSkyB bid (and even that Murdoch might sell News International entirely), the Guardian reports that Gordon Brown, like everyone else in England it seems, was hacked by “journalists across News International.” Journalists from across News International repeatedly targeted the former prime minister Gordon Brown, attempting [...]

Surprise surprise. Getting everyone insurance is not enough to eliminate medical bankruptcies. (h/t Susie) To gauge whether healthcare reform in Massachusetts had eased bankruptcies, the researchers looked at a random sample of Massachusetts bankruptcy filers in July 2009, sending surveys to almost 500 households. They compared their results to national and Massachusetts data collected in [...]

As we hear about how heroic this victory was over the next few days, remember what went into it: first, superior fitness. Thankfully these women did not rest on their reputation for greatness, but instead put in the hours of training to make sure that if they had to, they could beat one of the [...]

Here I was steeling myself for a big rebuttal from Benjamin Wittes to my “Drone War on Westphalia” post on the implications of our use of drones. But all I got was a difference in emphasis. In his response, Wittes generally agrees that our use of drones has implications for sovereignty. But he goes further–arguing [...]

Leon Panetta kicks off his new job as Secretary of Defense with a trip to Afghanistan. On the plane over there this morning, he told reporters that we just need to kill 10 or 20 leaders of al Qaeda and we will “strategically defeat” al Qaeda. (h/t Spencer) Defense Secretary Leon Panetta declared Saturday that [...]

Greg Sargent has a post arguing that complaints about David Plouffe’s comments about unemployment are being distorted. It seems Plouffe was actually asked a question about whether and how the unemployment rate would impact the Presidential race. He replied by claiming that the number itself wouldn’t impact people’s votes. In other words, Plouffe himself didn’t [...]

At today’s press conference responding to the lousy jobs report, Obama offered a few suggestions for how to create jobs: patent reform, infrastructure investment, confidence fairies and … “free trade.” But as the Economic Policy Institute has shown, these trade deals would actually cost jobs, particularly in the manufacturing sector, which has finally begun to [...]

BLS: Total nonfarm payroll employment was essentially unchanged in June (+18,000). Following gains averaging 215,000 per month from February through April, employment has been essentially flat for the past 2 months. Employment in most major private-sector industries changed little in June, while government employment continued to trend down. [snip] Employment in government continued to trend [...]

Well, I guess this will add to the evidence that Visa is refusing to accept donations from DataCell because it works with WikiLeaks. For a few hours on Thursday, credit card donations once again flowed to WikiLeaks through a payment gateway at Icelandic hosting company DataCell. Then Visa shut it down again. DataCell CEO Andreas [...]