emptywheel

While the political elite debate how to fix a nonexistent problem (or at least a non-critical one) the jobs crisis continues unabated. The draconian cuts at the state level public sector are only making things worse.

What do you do when you are facing a law suit that you are going to loose? If you are Visa and Mastercard, you change the policy that you are being sued over. This is what they did with processing donations to Wikileaks.

As we’ve noted a couple times at EW, I will be hosting Glenn Carle to discuss his book, The Interrogator, at Saturday’s FDL Book Salon. As you no doubt know, his book describes his interrogation of what was described as a high level al Qaeda figure (the detainee wasn’t) and his objections to the government’s use of dislocation and other torture methods with him.

Was it just a year ago when we were told it was impossible to hold a civilian terrorist trial in NY?

Rupert Murdoch’s empire was the subject of not one, but two, hacking stories this weekend.

Drones change the relationship between the state and war

If you think about it, the system of sovereignty established by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 has been under increasing threat since World War II, a moment that brought many repressed peoples of the world closer to exercising their own sovereignty. While sovereignty never fully existed in practice, as we began to institute rules to enforce a more humane coexistence among sovereign nations, a number of forces starting chipping away at the concept of sovereignty.

When Anwar al-Awlaki’s family sued for due process, the government invoked state secrets, even as Crazy Pete Hoekstra and a stream of anonymous sources have leaked details of the drone targeting of him for over a year. One of the things Robert Gates specifically invoked state secrets over is whether or not we’re engaged in military operations in Yemen. Another is details of our counterterrorism work with Yemen.

You may have heard that WikiLeaks is suing Visa and MasterCard for refusing to process donations to it.

That’s not actually the case. Forbes has gotten a copy of the complaint, and as it lays out, an Icelandic company called DataCell is suing, and it’s suing in Europe, not the US. DataCell is basically a hosting service for WikiLeaks and “businesses, NGOs, humanitarian organisations and others.”

The investigation into Gul Rahman’s death means there’s a chance–teeny, presumably, but a chance nevertheless–that the investigation might move beyond the formerly-low level people implicated in the death (remember, both the guy who headed the Salt Pit and the station chief have gone onto bigger and better things at the CIA, so if they’re targeted in any case, it would be a bigger deal than any other prosecution).

After the Osama bin Laden killing, Michael Mukasey rather shamelessly took the lead in claiming torture had some role in finding OBL. Unlike most of the other torture apologists, Mukasey was not complicit with the torture itself, but merely with the cover-up.