You may have missed it among all the protests and occupations, but last week marked the 10th anniversary of one of the longest wars in American history, the war in Afghanistan. Many of the soldiers now fighting that war were in grade school when it started. And both the US and NATO acknowledge that the [...]

Having proven unable to sway Congress into delaying the rule that will reform debit card swipe fees and end monopolistic practices, the banking industry will do what it normally does as an alternative: they’ll take the issue to court. They will allege that the Federal Reserve, in setting a cap on the fees that banks [...]

We heard from Marcy that John McCain had a decent op-ed today in the Washington Post, denouncing torture and laying out the facts on the role of torture. He affirmed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed lied under torture about key facts related to the courier which harbored bin Laden, and he also provided more information on [...]

The story of the frantic raid on the bin Laden compound in Abbottabad has evolved over the past 24 hours. What was a very crisp narrative full of interesting details has not held up. Here are a few examples: • Initially, the story went that a woman was used as a human shield and was [...]

As soon as we started talking about torture on the level of efficacy, i.e. whether torture “worked,” it was inevitable that we’d have a day like this. The AP reports that intelligence from secret CIA prisons first uncovered the name of the courier which eventually led to the bin Laden compound. The information came from [...]

Just as US Tomahawk missiles rain down on another Muslim nation, we’re about to give the entire Muslim world another reason to distrust and even hate Americans. A cache of photographs published by Der Spiegel show an Army Stryker “kill team” in Afghanistan posing with dead bodies they recently killed. Many of the members of [...]

I know that PJ Crowley violated the 11th Commandment – thou shalt not speak ill of the human rights abuses of a fellow Democrat – and so he had to go. But the dismissal of Crowley by the Obama Administration had a perverse effect – it elevated attention to the issue of Bradley Manning’s confinement. [...]

The Egyptian military would like you to know that they appreciate the revolution and the sale of little Egyptian flags and everything, but if you think you’re getting them out from running the economy, you’re nuts. The Egyptian military defends the country, but it also runs day care centers and beach resorts. Its divisions make [...]

The UN’s special rapporteur for on torture will investigate the treatment of Bradley Manning, the former intelligence analyst accused of leaking classified material and currently held in solitary confinement under the custody of the US Marines. Manning faces a court martial but no criminal charges, and has yet been held in solitary for over seven [...]

As Glenn Greenwald explains today, we’ve had a good deal of official censorship of the Wikileaks cables, not just in the general sense with Joe Lieberman nudging the site off of Amazon’s cloud service, but in the particular. Several of the most sensitive revelations in not only this but a number of Wikileaks releases over [...]

Showing at least a model of what accountability can look like, the British government will pay reparations to victims of torture at Guantanamo Bay, to absolve British intelligence services of their role. The development came only weeks after Sir John Sawers, the head of MI6, Britain’s overseas spy agency, insisted that his operatives did not [...]