Back on March 11, in response to Jake Tapper’s question whether he agreed with PJ Crowley’s judgment that Bradley Manning’s treatment was “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid,” President Obama said the Pentagon had assured him that the treatment met DOD standards. Tapper: The State Department Spokesman PJ Crowley said the treatment of Bradley Manning by [...]

Back in January, long-time Pentagon reporter Jim Miklaszewski caused a stir when he published a story with two big scoops. First, that investigators had been unable to tie Bradley Manning to Julian Assange. More importantly, Miklaszewski cited “military officials” saying that Brig Commander James Averhart had improperly put Manning on suicide watch on January 18. [...]

There’s something deeply ironic about the beltway’s most tawdry purveyor of the Village narrative, Politico (“Win the morning™”), treating former State Department Spokesperson PJ Crowley’s investment in a strategic narrative dismissively. Ben Smith seems like he has never heard of something called “a narrative” or, on a larger scale, “ideology” before. Secretary of State Hillary [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

In Charlie Savage’s story from last year on the sidelining of Laurence Tribe as head of an “Access to Justice” program at DOJ, he reported that Tribe originally believed he would serve as counselor for “rule of law” issues in Obama’s Administration. There was also concern over how his presence might play out internally, several [...]

I did a long post yesterday describing how embarrassingly, pathetically bad DOD’s information security was and remains 3 years after a malware attack and a full year after the alleged WikiLeaks leak. Along with DOD’s gaping security problems, I noted that some entities in the intelligence community are still in the process of implementing user [...]

As I have posted several times, the response to WikiLeaks has ignored one entity that bears some responsibility for the leaks: DOD’s IT. Back in 2008, someone introduced malware to DOD’s computer systems. In response, DOD announced it would no longer allow the use of removable media in DOD networks. Yet that is precisely how [...]