The US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is set to rehear a civil suit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today. The suit, brought by Donald Vance, a US navy veteran and former defense contractor, and Nathan Ertel, also a former defense contractor, alleges Rumsfeld is responsible for “intentional mistreatment” that occurred when they were tortured in an American-run prison in Iraq for nearly one hundred days. It’s one of several cases brought against Rumsfeld, all of which have been dismissed to avoid courts interfering with the “war on terror.”

Florida’s politicians really just can’t take a hint. After they failed to force widespread privatization on the state’s prison system, against the wishes of the director of their DOC (but at the behest of companies that spent a million dollars lobbying the legislature), the asshats in the state legislature are back at it, this time with a vengeance. Even the fact that the GEO Group is under FBI investigation over a deal that brought a private prison to the state, and the state’s Circuit Court ruling the initial push unconstitutional, have failed to slow down the push to privatize.

At one level, Prouty’s life story—before the FBI targeted a woman who had done so much for the Agency—reads like a classic, exceptional, immigrant success story. But so much of what the government used against her has been used on Muslims and other Arab-Americans without the means to fight back:

Secret evidence
National Security Letters
Threats of deportation (which in her case would have been lethal) and to family members
Border exception searches
Badly managed informants (in this case, Prouty’s own brother)
Trial in the public sphere

If Fannie and Freddie are guilty of misleading investors, they deserve to pay the penalty. And yet, I do sense more enthusiasm to go after these government sponsored enterprises than to go after the private banking firms which were far more responsible for subprime. This feeds a false narrative that government somehow caused the financial crisis by forcing lending to poor people. Fannie and Freddie followed the market in subprime and did not originate it.

As Marcy Wheeler says, this plot has it all – Mexican drug cartels, Iran, assassinations, attacks on the Saudi AND Israeli embassies. You name it, it’s in there.

We still don’t have a sense of how big or consequential this Scott Walker investigation is in Wisconsin, but the news that Walker’s own spokesman has been granted immunity should raise some eyebrows.

All goes back to corruption surrounding Walker’s days as Milwaukee County executive. And this probe has been going on since last year. At that time, reports surfaced that a Walker staffer paid by Milwaukee County was instead sock-puppeting about Walker on blogs during his gubernatorial election. This probe has been widening ever since then. This seems particularly suspicious.

Soufan, a long-time special agent working with the FBI, worked on some of the more notorious terrorist cases post-9/11, including the interrogation of Mohamed Al-Qahtani and Abu Zubaydah. According to Soufan, he was pulled off these interrogations when the CIA or military officials wanted to use torture on the detainees. In these cases, and it turns out others, Soufan and his colleagues were pulled out of interrogations at the behest of the Bush administration or the CIA.

The US has no problem with pressuring, even meddling in a country’s affairs, if only to get the outcome it desires—whatever will be best for US interests. Yet, it knows that it must consider all the variables, stick to talking points and not apply too much or too little pressure in order to achieve success in getting whatever the US wants from a country’s government.

The batch of US State Embassy cables recently published by the media organization WikiLeaks contain a few assessments of how other countries’ governments manage their terrorism watch lists. The assessments reveal much about how countries have tried to implement security regimes for travel in the aftermath of 9/11. And, each assessment is in the form of questionnaire.