There are more things going on at the Wikileaks Grand Jury than meets the eye. Today Firedoglake found that Lynndie England is there testifying. When the person that told me was asked to go get some coffee, the guards tried to prevent them from leaving with Dan Choi and I.

We’ve been writing a bit about Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the young Oregon man charged on WMD charges for allegedly trying to detonate an inert bomb the FBI helped him get. His attorneys are preparing an aggressive entrapment defense (those defenses almost never work, but there are some interesting factors in his case), arguing that Mohamud refused early entreaties to engage in violence yet the FBI kept pressing him to do so.

These are not the pictures that President Obama tried to block in 2009, because the incidents from this Army Stryker unit Der Spiegel describes in their story are from 2010. So the change in commanders-in-chief has not occasioned a halt to atrocities and war crimes in Afghanistan. While Der Spiegel may publish only three photographs for now, I wouldn’t be surprised if more became available. But there’s plenty of detail in the article, according to the Guardian account, to cause outrage in Afghanistan and throughout the world as well, in addition to the photos. In one incident, a staff sergeant threw a grenade at an Afghan civilian, killing him, then cut off a finger and took a tooth as trophies.

DOD, protecting us from terrorists … and boxer shorts.

In short, a full month after the date when a member of Congress requested a visit with Manning, DOD is still stalling on a real response with bureaucratic buck-passing.

Here’s what I thought when I heard the Conservative Political Action Conference has decided to honor former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with something CPAC calls the “Defender of the Constitution Award.”

As a resident of the ridiculously gerrymandered Sixth Congressional District of Florida, I am subjected to being represented in Congress by wingnut Republican Congressman Cliff Stearns even though the Gainesville area is heavily Democratic. I spent some time during the 2008 campaign cycle writing posts for the blog The Case Against Cliff, and two major themes developed from the research for my writing. First, Stearns appears to be a fan of torture, as seen in the photo on the left of this composite, which was taken from his website in May of 2008, when he visited Guantanamo. He clearly was excited by the visit, even dressing up for it and posing in an Abu Ghraib pose. Second, it was clear from my research that Stearns’ primary source of funding is the telecommunications industry. That was true of the 2008 cycle and is also true of the 2010 cycle. It is little wonder then, that this morning NPR went to Cliff Stearns for quotes about killing net neutrality, as he is the ranking member of the House Telecommunications Subcommittee.

When the votes were tallied on the night of November 2, 2008, I was at a bar in Moab, Utah – the one rabid Democratic stronghold in a rabidly Republican state – to enjoy the hysteria as Barack Obama was summoned to lead the country out of the disaster of eight years of George W. Bush. People shook hands, hooted, clinked glasses, got drunk, raised fists, wept. The good liberals had elected a visionary Democrat to the presidency, who, blessed with a Democratic majority in Congress, would fashion “hope” and “change” into a palpable policy. I was told that in parts of Brooklyn, my hometown, voters ran through the streets banging pots and pans. The feeling was of religious jubilee – the new dispensation was upon us, and 2009 would mark the emancipation from the old rottenness. Corruption and fraud and deceit and war and oligarchy would be washed from the body politic. It was the beginning of the restoration of the republic.

The United States has no record of ever living up to its promises to the victims of torture at Abu Ghraib.

Chickenhawks, while trying to score quick political points with anti-Muslim fearmongering, are playing right into the “trap” Evan Kohlmann described on Monday’s Countdown — fueling the next round of terorist recruitment while destroying the ideals of our country.