Dan Froomkin | Richmond, VA | May 18

Huffington Post - The Obama administration Friday morning continued its headlong attack on the right of reporters to protect their confidential sources in leak investigations.

Before a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, a Department of Justice lawyer argued that New York Times reporter James Risen should be forced to testify in the trial of former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling, who is charged with leaking classified information to Risen about a botched plot against the Iranian government.

Barack Obama taking on Mitt Romney's abysmal job creation record is a little like critiquing Stalin's abysmal human rights record:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is casting Mitt Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate titan with little concern for the working class in a new, multi-pronged effort that seeks to undermine the central rationale for his Republican rival's candidacy: his business credentials.

At the center of the push — the president's most forceful attempt yet to sully Romney before the November election — is a biting new TV ad airing Monday that recounts through interviews with former workers the restructuring, and ultimate demise, of a Kansas City, Mo., steel mill under the Republican's private equity firm.

Some may think Barack Obama's hand was forced.

Some may think it was a cynical ploy to garner Gay Money campaign contributions or to pander to the youth vote.

Some may simply shoot themselves and the right wing in the foot, talking about distractions that their own party has raised in the middle of a recovery.

BBC Newsnight, By Peter Taylor, May 9

Secret CIA video tapes of the waterboarding of Osama Bin Laden's suspected jihadist travel arranger Abu Zubaydah show him vomiting and screaming, the BBC has learned.

The tapes were destroyed by the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, Jose Rodriguez.

In an exclusive interview for Newsnight, Rodriguez has defended the destruction of the tapes and denied waterboarding and other interrogation techniques amount to torture.

The CIA tapes are likely to become central to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, at Guantanamo Bay.

After reading this column, I have to scratch my head a little.

Check out Chuck Todd, NBC's chief White House correspondent, openly speculating that President Obama is going to embrace same-sex marriage because he needs money from gay people. "Gay money in this election has replaced Wall Street money," he reported. NBC's David Gregory agreed. For some reason, neither man seemed to think this theory reflects poorly on the president.

The formerly-gagged FBI translator-turned-whistleblower's new memoir is 'a masterpiece revealing corruption and unaccountability in Washington, D.C.' and 'a rotten barrel of toxic waste that will sooner or later infect us all'...

The Brad Blog, By David Swanson, May 2

Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as "page-turners" and "gripping dramas," but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now...

Killing the messenger may (still) be an ineffectual means of addressing and mitigating serious problems. But, as a recently-unearthed internal Pentagon report from May 2011 notes, career-killing reprisals on Defense Department whistleblowers are all-too common. R. Jeffrey Smith and Aaron Mehta of the Center for Public Integrity explain how Defense Department officials charged with investigating reprisal claims showed "persistent sloppiness and a systematic disregard for Pentagon rules meant to protect those who report fraud, abuses and the waste of taxpayer funds":

A three-person team of investigators, assigned to review the performance of the Directorate for Military Reprisal Investigations, concluded that in 2010, the directorate repeatedly turned aside evidence of serious punishments inflicted on those who had complained.

The actions included threatened or actual discharges, demotions, firings, prosecutions and a mental health referral. At least one of the alleged reprisals was taken because the complainer had written to Congress, an act that Pentagon regulations say is a “protected communication” immune from retaliation. Some of the other whistleblowers had alleged discrimination, travel violations and “criminality,” the report states.

In all, investigators disputed the directorate’s dismissal of more than half of the 152 whistleblowing cases it reviewed and called for it to revamp its procedures and start enforcing the protective rules.

Related: Paul Harris outlines what he contends is a sharp escalation under Obama in the war on whistleblowers:

Over the past three and a half years the Obama White House has instead shown a ferocious hostility to many whistleblowers and earned itself the ire of progressive columnists like Salon's Glenn Greenwald and whistleblower defence groups like the Project on Government Oversight and the Government Accountability Project.

Danielle Brian, of the PGO, has said the US department of justice in the Obama administration "sent a clear of message of fear and intimidation" to whistleblowers in the national security field. This is how the GAP's Jesselyn Raddack – herself a former whistleblower at the DoJ – put it: "While the Bush administration treated whistleblowers unmercifully, the Obama administration has been far worse. It is actually prosecuting them," she wrote recently.

To do that it is using the bluntest of tools: the Espionage Act, a first world war-era law intended to combat the threat from spies, not internal dissenters. So far six whistleblowers have been charged under the draconian law with the last one – CIA veteran John Kiriakou – being indicted on 3 April.

Flashback: Jane Mayer on Obama's aggressive contribution to the seemingly neverending quest for tighter secrecy in DC -- and what it all means for American democracy.

Sonia Verma offers a decent (if somewhat cursory) outline in today's Globe and Mail of the actually-existing geopolitical landscape post-OBL (which stands in contrast to Peter Bergen's recent proxy-Obama2012 victory lap breathlessly commemorating POTUS' alpha-male action movie moment):

One year after Operation Neptune Spear, al-Qaeda still exists, though in a more fractured form. The group’s ability to carry out large-scale attacks has been compromised. Meanwhile, America’s counterterrorism campaign is gradually shifting from Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan to Yemen and the Horn of Africa. The shaky alliance between the West, led by the United States, and Pakistan, has been plunged into a crisis from which it has not yet recovered. Since Mr. bin Laden’s death, each side has viewed the other with simmering suspicion. But perhaps the most enduring legacy of Mr. bin Laden’s killing is that no one who helped him hide for so long, essentially in plain sight, has been held accountable – and that may have poisoned relations between Pakistan and its Western allies for the foreseeable future.

Standard read-the-whole-damn-thing rules apply.

Related: Navy SEALs for Truth? C'mon. You knew it was coming.

Update: CFR's Linda Robinson further unpacks lingering OBL blowback, specifically re: US/Pakistan relations.

The most direct impact of bin Laden's death on Afghanistan was actually the crisis the Abbottabad raid caused in the already troubled U.S.-Pakistan relationship, and the spillover effects from that. It threw the Pakistan military and the political system into crisis, causing Pakistan to react with more anti-Americanism and more hostility and suspicion along the border. Attacks from Pakistan into Afghanistan quadrupled last year, though they are down again now. So the net effect was to make cross-border cooperation more difficult and increase Pakistan's tendency to pursue its own agenda. That includes things like the Haqqani network's attacks in September in Kabul on ISAF and the U.S. embassy, and the giant truck bomb in Wardak against the U.S. coalition base in Sayed Abad.

[...]

U.S. officials estimate that maybe 100 AQ fighters come and go from Afghanistan across the Pakistan border. Afghanistan is not much of a safe haven for al-Qaeda, though it still has some distance to go to become stable and capable of defending itself against attempts to reestablish an al-Qaeda safe haven. Most Taliban fighters on the ground are not directly connected to the al-Qaeda organization, and it is possible that at some point the Taliban senior leadership will find it in its interest to repudiate its formal ties to al-Qaeda. It is Pakistan that is the cause for greatest concern because al-Qaeda there is mixed up with a stew of various insurgent groups that do actively combine forces and cooperate on an operational level.

Nothing really all that new here. Still, the ugly (if familiar) truth certainly bears repeating, especially in light of the empty football spike sloganeering ("...and GM is alive!") that dominates the campaign discourse.

The Efficacy and Ethics of U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy

Remarks of John O. Brennan – As Prepared for Delivery
Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Monday, April 30, 2012

Now, I want to be very clear. In the course of the war in Afghanistan and the fight against al-Qa’ida, I think the American people expect us to use advanced technologies, for example, to prevent attacks on U.S. forces and to remove terrorists from the battlefield. We do, and it has saved the lives of our men and women in uniform.

What has clearly captured the attention of many, however, is a different practice, beyond hot battlefields like Afghanistan—identifying specific members of al-Qa’ida and then targeting them with lethal force, often using aircraft remotely operated by pilots who can be hundreds if not thousands of miles away. This is what I want to focus on today

60 Minutes, By Leslie Stahl, April 29

Jose Rodriguez has no regrets about the CIA using "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- methods that some consider torture - on suspected al Qaeda members detained and questioned after 9/11. Lesley Stahl interviews the former head of the CIA's Clandestine Service about waterboarding and other methods he says were essential to getting information from suspected terrorists, and he denies claims that these harsh measures caused detainees to provide false or unreliable information that misled the CIA. In fact, Rodriguez says that high-level detainees Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah provided their best information only after harsh treatment, a claim that the CIA's own investigator general has challenged.

Video and transcript at the link.

Declan Welsh, Eric Schmitt & Steven Lee Myers | Apr 28

NYT - The latest high-level talks on ending a diplomatic deadlock between the United States and Pakistan ended in failure on Friday over Pakistani demands for an unconditional apology from the Obama administration for an airstrike. The White House, angered by the recent spectacular Taliban attacks in Afghanistan, refuses to apologize.

idjits, two lousy words

The silly season, of polling and speculation and outright lunacy, starts.

Altho I have to admit, the most intriguing name popped up on the trial balloon the Romney campaign floated yesterday: Condoleeza Rice.

She's actually not a bad choice for Romney: it would mitigate his problems with women, or at least give him some political cover, she has experience in the White House, and she's a bright and articulate person.

There are, however, enormous downsides too, not least of which is it will remind everyone of the name you will never hear in convention at Tampa: George W. Bush.

We've all seen how...ugly...Mitt Romney is as a Presidential candidate, so it's no surprise this same EPIC FAIL! trope is to be found in a close examination of his career as a parasite capitalist:

In the midst of that 1994 campaign, one of Romney's companies, American Pad & Paper, bought a plant in Marion, Indiana. At the time, it was prosperous enough to be running three shifts.

Bain's first move was to fire all 258 workers, then invite them to reapply for their jobs at lower wages and a 50 percent cut in health care benefits.

David S. Cloud & Kathleen Hennessey | Washington | April 16

LAT - The Pentagon is investigating 10 U.S. military members in a widening probe into whether an advance team of Secret Service and military personnel hired local prostitutes or engaged in other misconduct before President Obama visited Colombia for a summit last week, U.S. officials said.

The Pentagon investigation is focusing on five Special Forces Army soldiers, two Marines, two Navy personnel and one member of the Air Force, a U.S. military official said. The Navy and Air Force personnel are members of explosive detection unit, the official said.

Authorities originally said only five service members were under investigation but later widened the inquiry after a preliminary probe by a military officer from the U.S. Embassy in Bogota found that more people may have been involved, officials said.

Well, no surprise here. I bet Bush's White House hired most of these clowns:

President Barack Obama came to Colombia seeking to erase an image of the U.S. in Latin America as overassertive Yankees who exploit the region at will. He left with the stereotype reinforced.

The sixth Summit of the Americas that concluded yesterday in the Caribbean city of Cartagena was supposed to focus on trade in the Western Hemisphere. Instead, 11 U.S. Secret Service agents became the center of attention after they were sent home for allegations of misconduct involving a prostitute.

Juan A. Lozano | Houston | April 3

AP - A federal appeals court judge on Tuesday seemed to take offense to comments President Barack Obama made earlier this week in which he warned that if the Supreme Court overturned his signature health care overhaul it would amount to overreach by an "unelected" court.

The Supreme Court is set to issue a ruling later this year on whether to strike down some or all of the historic health care law.

During oral arguments in Houston in a separate challenge to another aspect of the federal health care law, U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jerry Smith said Obama's comments troubled a number of people who have read them as a challenge to the authority of federal courts.

Jason Leopold & Jeffrey Kaye | Washington | April 3

Truthout - In May of 2002, one of several meetings was convened at the White House where the CIA sought permission from top Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to torture the agency's first high-value detainee captured after 9/11: Abu Zubaydah.

The CIA claimed Zubaydah, who at the time was being held at a black site prison in Thailand, was "withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions," according to documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009.

So, "attorneys from the CIA's Office of General Counsel [including the agency's top lawyer John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S."

Ewen MacAskill | Washington | Mar 31

The Guardian - President Barack Obama gave the go-ahead Friday for the tightest sanctions yet against Iran's oil industry, a move that risks pushing fuel prices even higher ahead of the November elections and raising tensions even further with Tehran.

The US will take punitive measures against any country that fails to reduce oil imports from Iran. These countries include China.

The sanctions were passed by Congress in December, but the lawmakers left Obama to make the final judgement about the impact a reduction in Iranian oil would have on the US and the world economy. The deadline was Friday.

In a statement from the White House, Obama said he decided that though oil supplies are tight, there are enough non-Iranian supplies to allow countries to reduce imports from Iran.

In a briefing by the administration ahead of the announcement, an official said these amounted to the toughest sanctions yet against Iran.

It is an extremely dangerous move by the White House, one acknowledged by vice-president Joe Biden who, speaking at an election fundraiser in Chicago on Thursday night, said that Obama's re-election chances could be scuppered by events in the Gulf.

"I don't think we'll be beaten by those [Republican] candidates," Biden said. "I think we'll be beaten – if we are – by something happening in the Eurozone or something happening in the Gulf, which could be difficult for us … But even with that I feel good."

Lisa Mascaro | Washington | March 29

LAT - In a rare sign of bipartisan cooperation, the Senate approved dozens of President Obama's nominees as leaders sought to temper the brinkmanship that had developed after the president made a recess appointment earlier this year over GOP objections.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and the Republican leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, reached an agreement with the White House that allowed dozens of nominees to clear the Senate on the promise that Obama would not attempt more recess appointments as lawmakers prepare to leave for a two-week spring recess.

So how bad is it for the eventual Republican nominee?

Well, first, on Super Tuesday, receiving more votes than any Republican that day was President Obama, who ran unopposed.

You read that right.

It seems likely, particularly given his favorite son status in Illinois, that Obama will outpoll the Republicans on a combined basis today.

Worse news for the putative nominee, Mitt Romney, Obama now outpolls him by 8 percent in the erstwhile battleground state of Virginia. Romney won Virginia an overwhelming majority, with 60% of the vote, against a field that did not include either Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich, both of whom blundered in filing for the primary.

Glenn Greenwald | Mar 14 | SALON

Jeremy Scahill, The Nation‘s national security correspondent, is easily one of America’s best and most intrepid journalists. He spends his time in dangerous places in order to uncover what the U.S. Government is doing around the world. He often produces vital scoops that, during the Obama presidency, are — for reasons often recounted here — largely ignored by the American establishment media and both political parties. In July of last year, he returned from Mogadishu and documented the Obama administration’s maintenance and proxy operation of secret CIA-run prisons in Somalia of the type that caused so much controversy during the Bush administration and which Obama supporters like to claim the President ended, and last month he returned from tribal regions in Yemen and detailed how U.S. civilian-killing drone strikes (along with its support for Yemeni despots) are the single most important cause fueling Al Qaeda’s growth in that country. But his newest article – describing President Obama’s personal, direct role in ensuring the ongoing imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist – may be his most important one yet; even for those inured to the abuses of the Obama administration, it’s nothing short of infuriating.

read more at link

Colin Perkel | Toronto | March 12

The Canadian Press - Former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney has cancelled a Canadian speaking appearance due to security concerns sparked by demonstrations during a visit he made to Vancouver last fall, the event promoter said Monday.

Cheney, whom the protesters denounced as a war criminal, was slated to talk about his experiences in office and the current American political situation at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on April 24.

Joanne Kenen | 3/7/12 | Politico

Sarah Palin had the “death panels.”

Will Michele Bachmann have the “birth panels"?

The Minnesota congresswoman said the Obama administration’s contraception coverage mandate could be a slippery slope to a point where a “health dictator” decrees that women could only have one or two children.

Bachmann, in an appearance on Glenn Beck’s online television venture GBTV that was picked up by media watchdogs and liberal websites, said “it isn’t beyond the pale” to move from the birth control policy to a government-mandated childbirth policy.

“Going with that logic, according to our own Health and Human Services secretary, it isn’t far-fetched to think that the president of the United States could say, we need to save health care expenses — the federal government will only pay for one baby to be born in the hospital per family, or two babies to be born per family. That could happen. We think it couldn’t?”

Helene Cooper & Jonathan Weisman | Nashua, NH | Mar 1

LA Times - With his re-election fate increasingly tied to the price Americans are paying at the gas pump, President Obama asked Congress on Thursday to end $4 billion in subsidies for oil and gas companies and vowed to tackle the country’s long-term energy issues while shunning “phony election-year promises about lower gas prices.”

Mr. Obama, in an appearance at Nashua Community College here, took a page out of his jobs strategy of last year, calling on Americans to contact their Congressional representatives and demand a vote on the oil subsidies in the next few weeks.

“You can either stand up for the oil companies, or you can stand up for the American people,” Mr. Obama said. “You can keep subsidizing a fossil fuel that’s been getting taxpayer dollars for a century, or you can place your bets on a clean-energy future.”

The president criticized Republicans who have called for the country to increase its own oil production, declaring that “anyone who tells you we can drill our way out of this problem doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” With the United States consuming more than 20 percent of the world’s oil while having only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, Mr. Obama said “we can’t rely on fossil fuels from the last century.”

Calling for renewed investment in alternative energy, he vowed to make a “serious, sustained commitment to tackle a problem that may not be solved in one year or one term or even one decade.”

Yawn, it must be an election year

With his narrow win in Michigan, Mitt Romney has all but sewed up the Republican nomination. Intrade puts the odds at 85-15 for a Republican ticket headed by Romney now. Nate Silver isn't quite so optimistic and points out any number of scenarios where Mitt could actually lose the nomination but they're based on machinations that will make your brain sore.

So, Quo vadis, Mitt? Where are you going? You're already handicapped in the general by a nasty, brutish primary that has had more negative advertising (SuperPACS included) than most general elections, and will likely not end anytime soon.