At yesterday’s hearing on the BP Disaster, Peter DeFazio and Jerrold Nadler hammered BP America President Lamar McKay on the relative toxicity and efficacy of the dispersant Corexit as compared to some other dispersants. They pointed out that Corexit is one of the most toxic of the approved dispersants and is not as effective as […]
Noah Shachtman focuses on one troubling part of this long article on the Obama Administration’s fondness for Predator drones: the suggestion that the Administration prefers killing alleged terrorists to capturing them, since we don’t have a good place to hold them. But there’s another aspect I find just as troubling: the other uses for Predator […]
Of course, why anyone would need to introduce legislation to prohibit the killing of US citizens with no due process, I don’t know. Isn’t there already a piece of paper that prohibits such things? Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) announced today that he will introduce legislation that would end the practice of targeting U.S. citizens for […]
Faisal Shahzad rather suddenly got arraigned and got a lawyer yesterday. Josh Gerstein noted that the arraignment happened on the 15th day since Shahzad’s arrest–the lower range of time the Obama Administration has floated for its changes to Miranda. But the LAT reports that Shahzad decided he no longer wanted to be questioned by interrogators. […]
At yesterday’s Environment and Public Works hearing on the BP disaster, Sheldon Whitehouse asked Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Council on Environmental Quality Chair Helen Sutley why BP had been exempted from doing an Environmental Impact Study on the Macondo drilling site. He listed a number of things that should categorically exclude a project from […]
The WaPo reports that the Obama Administration might be impeded from filing a suit against the AZ anti-immigrant law because of a 2002 Jay Bybee Memo holding that local police have the authority to detain people for both civil and criminal violations of Federal immigration law. It pitches the story as the Obama Administration being […]
The Senate Intelligence Committee has just released the Executive Summary of its report on the intelligence failures leading up to the Underwear Bomber’s attempted bombing on a plane landing in Detroit. I’ll have a bit more to say in a bit. But I wanted to focus on point 14, which feels an awful lot like […]
As we go through another round of hearings on the BP disaster today (at the Energy and Natural Resources Committee this morning, Bernie Sanders asked Ken Salazar whether the risk of a disaster like this was worth the $.03/gallon decrease on the price of gas in 2030; Salazar didn’t really answer), Obama has leaked his […]
Mark Hosenball has a post elaborating on something reported elsewhere–that the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) is only marginally involved in Faisal Shahzad’s interrogation. Given a point I tried to make here–namely, that one of the first things that happened after Shahzad’s arrest and seemingly in conjunction with him waiving a number of his […]
Turns out they’re still lost. When we last heard from Libby’s lost emails, CREW and National Security Archive had reached a settlement with the White House to restore 33 days worth of email and examine 21 days of low volume email to see whether prior restorations had really worked (among other things). I’m still reading […]
