salon

Much as Barack Obama may deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for changing the climate toward international diplomacy and recognizing the value in cooperating with the rest of the world, the prize seems more about congratulating the United States for breaking with the Bush go-it-alone attitude than for any great achievements or policy changes Obama has [...]

Writing about the role Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan played in the Bush counterterror surveillance program, Marcy Wheeler, blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon today, argues that as NSA adviser, rather than CIA director (a position Brennan was nominated for, but Glenn helped torpedo the nomination by highlighting his previous role in the Bush [...]

One of the many unanswered questions about the current financial crisis is why there haven’t been more criminal investigations into what happened, including the highly suspect actions of the rating agencies, the banks, and mortgage brokers. At Salon, economist Simon Johnson and author and former investment banker John Talbott share a three-part email exchange about [...]

The Weekly Standard and Greg Sargent are both reporting that the House Democratic leadership is boldly (my characterization, not the Standard’s) standing up to the White House and the Senate, which last week passed an amendment to the appropriations bill that would allow Obama to keep those much-discussed detainee abuse photos secret.
The Lieberman-Graham Amendment, also [...]

Carrie Johnson in The Washington Post today picks up on a problem we’ve been writing about at TWI for months now: when it comes to information about crimes committed by the previous administration, President Obama isn’t following through on his big commitments to “open government.”
“Civil liberties advocates are accusing the Obama administration of forsaking campaign [...]

Maybe it’s because I’m relatively new to the immigration beat, but I’m consistently surprised at the twists and turns of immigration policy that lead to absurd and shocking results.
Not only are most immigrants in detention centers imprisoned for months or even years despite not having committed a crime, as I wrote Monday, but, as Glenn [...]

Since posting my story yesterday on how the Obama Justice Department is heading for a showdown with the federal judiciary in the Al-Haramain warrantless wiretapping case, I came across Glenn Greenwald’s excellent post on the case, duly expressing the outrage that I think it deserves.
While everyone’s expressing surprise and disgust at the various John Yoo [...]

Salon notes today that President Bush could decide to pardon himself, his cabinet and anyone else in his administration who may have committed war crimes by torturing and otherwise abusing suspected terrorists, or those known to “pal around with terrorists,” as Sarah Palin might put it. Although that would seem to be a quasi-admission [...]