Charlie Savage has a great piece on the mess that is the DOD’s investigation and trial of those charged with the 2005 massacre of Iraqi civilians in Haditha. Sadly, as Savage points out, the lack of justice in this case is part of a disturbing pattern in the military, where all too often, PR trumps justice.

It’s not new. The Pat Tillman case was the same way, as PR concerns shoved the truth aside. Another example of the ongoing “PR trumps justice” movement in the military is on view at the Sundance film festival with “The Invisible War,” a film that describes itself as “a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of our country’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within our US military.”

Within the military, it seems PR trumps justice, all too often. Our military, and our nation, deserve better.

DOD, protecting us from terrorists … and boxer shorts.

The only evidence to emerge so far against Bradley Manning comes from Adrian Lamo, a hacker who was in a mental institution three weeks before he says Manning contacted him. Charlie Savage reports in the New York Times that Lamo has miraculously “remembered” new evidence from his chat logs that connects Bradley Manning and Julian Assange. But instead of asking Lamo to go back to Wired, or the Washington Post, and get copies of the chat transcripts he gave them, the New York Times says “no problem, we’ll just publish this based on the recollections of someone who was in a mental institution two weeks before all this happened.”

It seems the Administration has declared today “Power Grab Monday.”

A senior United Nations official said on Wednesday that the growing use of armed drones by the United States to kill terrorism suspects is undermining global constraints on the use of military force. He warned that the American example will lead to a chaotic world as the new weapons technology inevitably spreads.

It was not Ben Nelson who killed the nomination of Dawn Johnsen, nor was it Arlen Specter or Senate Republicans. No, the sole reason Dawn Johnsen is not leading the OLC is that Barack Obama and his coterie of advisors did not want Dawn Johnsen leading the OLC.