Late in 2008, Mike McConnell, then the director of national intelligence, issued a directive instructing CIA officials at overseas outposts directly responsible to him. It was the first time in the brief history of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that the director had waded a toe into More…
No one who wasn’t employed by Donald Rumsfeld would ever argue that he wasn’t the worst secretary of defense since Robert McNamara, but Robert Draper mines the depths of Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Pentagon in GQ and emerges with new disgraces. Watch Rumsfeld cynically present Bush with briefings on More…
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled today (pdf) that four British men who say they were tortured while imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay have no right to seek damages from U.S. government officials.
Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the ten other senior More…
So it appears from the Senate Armed Services Committee report that in 2002, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was rather interested in “aggressive” interrogations at Guanantamo Bay. Wolfowitz — often described, as he is in this NPR piece in 2007, as “an intellectual heavyweight who believes passionately More…
Word coming down the pike: the Senate Armed Services Committee is gearing up to release a fuller version of its report from last year on how the Rumsfeld-era Defense Department got into the torture business. Last year, you’ll recall, the committee held a series of hearings that provided the More…
Rasmussen Reports gins up the “does President Obama hate America and love Europe” controversy — which doesn’t seem to be, er, denting Obama’s improving poll numbers — by asking whether Americans think they’ve been too arrogant with Europe. Surprise!
Thirty-seven percent of American voters agree that in
While Congress debates whether senior Bush administration officials should be called to account for the torture, humiliation and indefinite detention of prisoners taken during the “war on terror,” some of those prisoners aren’t waiting around for lawmakers to make up their minds. A growing number of private lawsuits brought by More…
Following up on my earlier post about whether the Obama Justice Department really ought to be representing John Yoo — the notorious former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer during the Bush administration — Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a professor at Columbia Law School, More…
One of the major turning points of 2006 with regard to the Iraq war was the so-called “Generals’ Revolt,” in which a group of respected and recently retired Army and Marine generals, many of whom had served in Iraq, lambasted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for mismanaging the war. Since retired More…
There once was a time when former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was considered a visionary. His sweet-tooth for technology in warfare won him sexualized praise from other conservative men’s wives. The trouble is that Rumsfeld, among other things, is a fraud who doesn’t actually understand the first More…
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