The Grey Lady treats us to this profile of a man who just won’t go away: Taliban leader Mullah Omar. Omar’s reputation as incorruptible, and a fierce fighter (who, after an eye was wounded during a battle against the Soviets, removed that eye and kept fighting, according to the story anyway)… who has shown a remarkable military sophistication despite being only semi-literate… are all legendary. Omar is either a military genius in his own right, or he has been made one care of friends in the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. The result is the same: a once wildly unpopular...

The flip-side of the failure of “change we can believe in” to actually close Guantanamo Bay on time is that those brave souls who have volunteered to represent GTMO detainees on their own dimes have to put up with not only right-wing abuse, but probable spying on them by our government. Wilner v. NSA is one such case, and quite frankly, as I have communicated with the majority of plaintiffs at some point, maybe I should be a party too (for all I know, the government is spying on me for no other reason… and perhaps you for no other...

I suppose his efforts at commencing the rather long-term prospect for eventual nuclear disarmament are laudable. Then again, his prolongation of not merely two wars, but also his insistence on preserving the unchecked “martial powers” of his predecessor… would seemingly make President Obama a very odd choice to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But he did anyway. Hey, we seem to have “grade inflation” everywhere else… why not this? Assuming unemployment or the federal deficit ever come down, maybe next year he’ll get a Nobel for economic science. Or if he ever fully quits smoking… maybe medicine. Or, perhaps, he...

Salesmanship? Marcy Wheeler tells us its “National Use Zazi to Gain New Surveillance Powers Day.” The recent celebrated terrorism case against Najibullah Zazi who might (or might not) be an extremely dangerous threat is being rolled out for various things– as a demonstration of “the success of Obama’s new terrorist busting program,”or of the new Administration’s humility (it held a press conference to announce that it wasn’t holding a press conference)… or perhaps, just bread and circuses for the rubes to show that it takes terrrrrorism seriously, perhaps as a cover for a sensible path to actually closing Guantanamo… or...

While the decision of the voting members of the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen to award the 2016 summer games to Rio de Janeiro will have many making this about Obama and his decision to foolishly listen to that Valerie Jarrett, who has caused him nothing but trouble take very little time out of his schedule and briefly, albeit unsuccessfully, make a personal pitch to the committee members, Grey Lady sports denizen George Vecsey tells us why there were other very good reasons to award the games to Rio anyway. Look: the USA has already hosted four summer games (1904,...

A.P. reports that 87 House Democrats joined their brethren cavemen on the Republican side of the aisle for a resounding 258-163 non-binding resolution win against transferring Guantanamo-based detainees to the American mainland, even in maximum security prison conditions. Unsurprisingly, the Republican quoted refers to those still held at GTMO as terrrrrrorists. But David Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin believes our prisons are tough enough for “these thugs.” Thing is, even under convoluted rules where any evidence at all and the government wins, GTMO detainees have won 30 out of 38 habeas cases that have gotten that far, with some of...

The Times of London treats us to an interview with Gore Vidal, in which the great American writer says that, as smart as Obama is, he’s not up to the job and Vidal [a relation of Al Gore] says he should have backed Hillary because she at least understands the world at large better… oh, and the United States will likely be a dictatorship soon. Oh… and he’s really bitter. (I was perplexed by mention of his correspondence with Timothy McVeigh, who he called “a patriot”… I suppose it’s like Norman Mailer… American men of letters are supposed to adopt...

Via digby, we learn from this HuffPo piece about the thoughts of Neil Barofsky, the Treasury Department’s man in charge of the Troubled Assets Recovery Program (TARP). You all remember TARP, the much vaunted program by which quite literally all the money in the world was sucked out of possible productive uses to prop up our successful financial system, so that necessary reforms wouldn’t be implemented, we could have “business as usual,” and so that the banking sector, whose problem was the concentration of insanely high market share in a few institutions, would end up being consolidated into even fewer,...

My friend and colleague Thomas Nephew leads off the substantive discussion of Benjamin Wittes’ “Law and the Long War” with this dead-on discussion of the opening introductory section. [Thomas’s introductory post is here; mine can be found here.] Mr. Wittes’s bio makes no indication that he has a law degree or legal training. In that sense, then, he may not quite understand just what he did wrong in the “opening statement” part of his “introduction,” specifically why it’s so disturbing to those of us whose lives are devoted to “the law as it is” on the ground in the courts...

Check out this brilliant exigesis from Club Orlov for unconventional (and hence accurate) observations of the recent Overweight Middle-aged White People’s March on Washington. Dmitri, man, all I can say is “We are not worthy…”