Jose Padilla, the American citizen kidnapped by the Bush administration and detained and tortured for years without charge or trial, has been trying to sue John Yoo for a while now. Yoo of course was in the Bush administration's office of legal counsel who crafted...
Congratulations, Secret Service! No brawls with whores during Obama’s whistle-stop in Kabul. OK, it wasn't an overnight visit... * It was inspiring to hear Obama invoking the usual idealism during his spiel from Bagram Air Base. The event was nicely managed insofar as...
Via Glenn Greenwald, Daneil Denvir writes about former Governor Ed Rendell trying to explain why he shouldn't be indicted for providing "material support" to the Iranian cult terrorist group MEK: One 10-minute speech earned Rendell $20,000, and he frequently flew to...
Adam Serwer in Mother Jones has a nice sum-up of the highlights from the recent declassification of selected documents from the raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan a year ago. The al-Qaeda leader's internal documents and correspondences include asking for...
In Politico, Daphne Eviator of Human Rights First, contests the Obama administration's legal justification for a borderless, undeclared drone war in multiple countries, which is that the AUMF grants them the authority to take lethal action against al-Qaeda and its...
Former Secretary of State under President Clinton Madeleine Albright will be awarded “the highest honor” that America bestows upon civilians — the Presidential Medal of Freedom. No, really. The woman who expressed unapologetic approval of the murder of 500,000...
A couple of hours after Obama's "stay the course" oration from Kabul, the boys at the US Embassy in that city are diving under their desks. Explosions are rocking the city, and the Embassy itself seems to be in the crossfire. Here's the latest, direct from the...
Ben Piven at al Jazeera: From an active-duty force of 1.4 million soldiers, the US has deployed some 350,000 troops to at least 130 foreign countries around the world. Some are at Cold War-era installations, but many are in or near combat zones in the Middle East. At...
It was nice to see Code Pink's Medea Benjamin disrupt a speech on the "secret" drone war by Obama's counterterrorism chief John Brennan. In the brief time before she was carried out, she told the audience about two of the innocent children murdered in the drone war,...
Belligerent foreign policies often end up having the opposite effects than were intended. Economic sanctions are a good example. Robert Pape, of Dying to Win fame, years ago examined 115 cases of economic sanctions over almost 80 years and found only 5 that could be...
