L-3 Communications, through its parent company Engility Holdings Inc, has disclosed in an SEC filing that it has paid over $5 million to victims of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq during the U.S occupation.

The fight over Chuck Hagel’s appointment as Secretary Of Defense has ventured into truly unfortunate terrain with assertions of prejudice and bigotry by Hagel’s opponents.

With the DOJ’s failure to prosecute the Bush Six and other torturers, Spain has a legal obligation to ensure impunity does not cross borders

Probably the most convenient thing about turning one’s political party into a something closer to a religion, as the Republicans have increasingly done, is that your adherents can be relied upon to believe anything you say, no matter how implausible, provably false, or downright cuckoo it happens to be. When you’re talking about a religion, after all, the more improbable the belief is, the more fervently it is held, and for Republicans this tendency is always a bonus, for good reason.

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.”