The death of former CIA “ghost prisoner” Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, aka Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, is beginning to make some serious waves in the press. The story was initially broken in the U.S. on May 10 by Andy Worthington. Now Newsweek is reporting (H/T, again, the redoubtable Mr. Worthington) that al-Libi was “healthy and had no apparent physical ailments” when Human Rights Watch (HRW) visitors met him on April 27, only days

Lawrence Wilkerson says Dick Cheney ordered Ibn Sheikh al-Libi to be waterboarded in February 2002.

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act, desperate in their efforts to kill the proposed legislation that would level the playing field for workers seeking to form unions, have come up with another line of attack. They are making a lot of noise over the bill’s arbitration provision. The argument is just another straw-man attempt at gutting legislation that would enable more workers to have a voice on the job.

As we have been saying here for months, a whole lot of GM debt is protected by credit default swaps. It turns out that CDSs are playing a huge role in the decision about whether GM will have to file bankruptcy, with all the risks and losses that will mean.

Bob Graham says that when he asked when CIA briefed him on torture, they gave him two briefing dates when no briefing had even occurred.

The National Review discovers a compelling reason for the GOP to block meaningful health care reform: no one wants it!

Well, hats off to Chris Dodd and Harry Reid. Unlike Pelosi and Frank who bowed to the caucus and wouldn’t let a vote on credit card interest rate caps come to the floor lest anyone have to take an embarrassing vote, Reid and Dodd allowed a vote on the Bernie Sanders bill to cap them at 15%.

Now we know who thinks the banks who created this mess should be bailed with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, and be able to turn around and soak the public with usurious interest rates:

TARP II Vote — January 15, 2009 (S.J. Res. 5) The vote was to block the release of the funds, so to reduce confusion a “no (don’t block the release)” is counted as a “yes” (approve the funds) in the chart.

In a just-completed Capitol Hill press conference, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said without equivocation that the CIA is lying when it implies that she was briefed in on the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. Pelosi stated that the CIA told her, in September 2002, that waterboarding was not among the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on high value detainees. Reporting by Marcy—among others—now shows that the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah started at least a month earlier.

Stage, television, and screen actors have been famously unionized for decades, and the Screen Actors Guild just resolved a messy contract dispute with producers. So, it makes perfect sense that a new online campaign features forty-seven award-winning actors in support of the Employee Free Choice Act.

Yesterday, it was announced that Marcy Wheeler won the Hillman Award for her investigative online work. NOI said they would match any donation dollar for dollar up to $5000, so we set out to raise $5000. Instead, we raised $13,000. Woo hoo! Many, many thanks to everyone who donated. I’ve added the total to the thermometer.

We’re really proud of Marcy and her much-deserved honor.  If you’d still like to contribute to the Marcy fund so she can have the resources to do what she does full-time, you can still do so.

Donate to the Marcy Wheeler Fund