Posts by Spencer Ackerman

So the insult stands, apparently:
In the face of sharp American disapproval of an Israeli plan for an East Jerusalem building project, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu firmly rejected Monday any curbs on new Jewish settlements in and around Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, demonstrating the firm commitment to diplomacy that has become the Netanyahu government’s trademark, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman [...]

A statement just released by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), whose Senate Armed Services Committee discovered widespread fraud in Blackwater’s previous Afghanistan contract, reacting to the news that the Government Accountability Office has, for the moment, scotched a bid for training Afghan police that could have gone to the private security company:
“Too often, unrelated task orders [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. military forces in the Middle East and South Asia, demurred on an attempt by David Gregory to compel him on ‘Meet The Press’ to offer a personal view on whether the military’s ban on open gay service ought to be repealed. “‘I’ll provide [...]

As I reported last week, the Government Accountability Office has been reviewing for months a protest against a contract to train the Afghan police that Blackwater sought to win, even after Blackwater essentially stole weaponry intended for those selfsame Afghan cops. Today, the GAO’s acting general counsel, Lynn H. Gibson, effectively sided against Blackwater.
GAO’s ruling is [...]

After being repudiated by pillars of the GOP legal establishment over a video that calls Justice Department lawyers who represented Guantanamo detainees “the al-Qaeda Seven,” you might think Liz Cheney’s group Keep America Safe would back away from its gutter McCarthyism. But then you don’t know Liz.
Today’s installment comes from Keep America Safe board member [...]

J Street, the progressive pro-Israel/pro-peace lobby group, has issued a statement urging both the Obama administration and the Israeli government to remember that they have a shared goal in “tackl[ing] a core issue at the heart of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians – the need to establish a border between Israel and the [...]

This is Michael D. Furlong, a strategic planner for the Joint Information Operations Warfare Command based in Texas. According to a baroque story in today’s New York Times, Furlong is under criminal investigation for diverting money from a program that hired contractors to gather information about Afghanistan and Pakistan and used it to run what the [...]

A recap: Vice President Biden flies to Israel this week and gets hit with word that Israel will expand settlements into Arab areas of Jerusalem. It’s widely seen as an insult.
This afternoon, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley let it be known that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to say [...]

Few people focus more on the signature weapon of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars — the improvised explosive device, or IED — than Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, who heads the military task force designed to study and defeat the IED threat known as JIEDDO. As is quickly clear from the acronym, IEDs aren’t a kind [...]

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.)  – last seen slandering Justice Department lawyers and then distancing himself from Liz Cheney’s similar slanders — goes way further than Sen. Lindsey Graham’s objections to a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He writes in a New York Daily News op-ed:
According to the 2009 Military Commissions Act, foreign terrorists violating [...]