Success comes from provoking a U.S. overreaction. Like a TSA agent’s hand on a traveler’s genitals and a resultant national freakout. These people, simply put, are fucking with us, and hoping we’ll treat them as a Threat To Civilization. Happy Thanksgiving from al-Qaeda.

The Washington Post and the Obama administration have been busy telling us that it’s legal to kidnap people and send them to countries that torture. They may call it “renditioning” to nations that use “enhanced interrogation techniques,” but a new book details what this means in English.

This is the speech that should have been given to the Muslim world by President John Kerry in 2005.

Among all the other reporting on Rahm’s central position on issues best left to the Attorney General, it appears he’s trying to craft a deal with Lindsey Graham on where and how to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Remind me. Didn’t Rove and the Bush White House get in trouble for this kind of tampering with DOJ issues?

If it wants to win this argument, doesn’t the Obama administration have to make an argument about why the military commissions are inappropriate for the 9/11 conspirators?

A new UN report notes secret detentions “might reach the threshold of a crime against humanity.” Obama’s OLC braintrusts the Detention Task Force’s recommendation of indefinite detention of some Guantanamo prisoners. These actions make sense in the light of a 55 year old report on CIA covert actions.

Anytime a criminal defendant wanted to change the venue of his trial, all he has to do is arrange for a credible threat to the neighborhood around the courthouse. Yeah, that’s really smart.

The neocons and torture lovers tried to justify waterboarding by saying that it saved lives because it got a high-level icky terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, to provide “actionable intelligence”, as they’d claimed with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We already knew it was horsepucky in Mohammed’s case, and now it’s been confirmed to be horsepucky in Zubaydah’s — and by the very man who made the original claim of efficacy to ABC News.

So, Dick Cheney, since you’re speaking about not taking terrorism seriously: Did you read the PDBs that the CIA was frantically lobbing at your administration during the spring and summer of 2001?

The Left at War tells the story of some arguments around the Iraq war that only partly intersected with the fights that were raging in the blogosphere at the same time. The book is less interested in arguments between warbloggers and progressives, or between the center and the left of the Democratic party, than in the battles among left intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Michael Walzer and, indeed, Michael Bérubé himself. Bérubé’s thesis is straightforward. Much of the opposition to the war, from writers like Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn sucked. And it sucked because these people adhered to a simplistic narrative in which the US was always evil, and intervention abroad was always imperialism under a thin facade of respect for human rights. What Bérubé calls the “Manichean Left” actually made it more difficult to mobilize against the Iraq war, because it provided pro-war writers with an excuse to brand all opponents on the war as crazy.