emptywheel

Scarecrow, Digby, and Jon Walker rightly took David Plouffe’s promises that a 9% unemployment rate won’t hurt Obama’s reelection chances to task. But I’m at least as appalled by this part of Plouffe’s statement: The White House’s top political adviser, downplaying the significance of the unemployment rate in the 2012 election, said the Republican candidates [...]

The Guardian is reporting that former News of the World editor and David Cameron flack Andy Coulson received notice today to show up at a London police station to be arrested tomorrow. Andy Coulson has been told by police that he will be arrested on Friday morning over suspicions that he knew about, or had [...]

Remember that suit Wikileaks’ hosting company, DataCell was about to file? Today was the day they were planning to do so. And surprise surprise, Visa and MasterCard have suddenly decided to start processing payments from DataCell again. Late last week, WikiLeaks and DataCell gave me a copy of a legal complaint the group had planned [...]

When the Brits announced a year ago they’d hold an inquiry into torture, I suggested it was an attempt to get torture victims like Binyam Mohamed to settle so the British government could conduct a sham investigation. In November, Mohamed and others agreed to a settlement. And today we discover (shock!) that the investigation is [...]

As we’ve noted a couple times at EW, I will be hosting Glenn Carle to discuss his book, The Interrogator, at Saturday’s FDL Book Salon. As you no doubt know, his book describes his interrogation of what was described as a high level al Qaeda figure (the detainee wasn’t) and his objections to the government’s [...]

The government has now responded to Risen’s attempt to quash his subpoena in the Jeffrey Sterling case. I fear the government will succeed in at least getting Risen to the stand, not least because of the gimmicks they’ve used to claim they need information not protected by any confidentiality agreement Risen might have had with [...]

Was it just a year ago when we were told it was impossible to hold a civilian terrorist trial in NY? Because that seems to be what DOJ and the NYPD have in mind with alleged -Shabaab leader, Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame, who is accused of multiple counts of material support for terrorism. Our government’s refound [...]

How interesting that Rupert Murdoch’s empire was the subject of not one, but two, hacking stories this weekend. You probably heard how, in the US, someone hacked Fox News’ Twitter account in the middle of the night leading into Fourth of July. Shortly thereafter, that thread posted a series of three tweets reporting that Obama [...]

I wrote a snippy post yesterday attacking Benjamin Wittes’ claim that we’ve had a public debate about drones. But I wanted to do a more substantive post about something missing from the drone debate. I believe that drones are a tool that presents a heightened threat to the concept of sovereignty, for better or worse. [...]

While I often disagree with Benjamin Wittes, I rarely think the stuff he writes is sheer nonsense. This post, which attempts to rebut Eugene Robinson’s column on Assassination by Robot, is an exception. I disagree, respectfully, with most of his post. But this bit I find just mindboggling. My former colleague Eugene Robinson has a [...]