I was eating lunch the other day at a place that had CNN on the tv, and they had some sort of news show where people could post their thoughts on the CNN ticker as the news was discussed.   Someone wrote on the ticker that it was “very telling” that when President Bill Clinton was [...]

Professor Kerr thinks that ABC news’ story on surveillance has been oversold:
But it seems pretty clearly incorrect to say that this story suggests that Bush and the intelligence heads were lying about the Terrorist Surveillance Program the New York Times first reported on in 2005. The problem is that this appears to be a different [...]

Former CIA super-spook Robert Baer was on Fresh Air the other day, I just listened to the podcast today.  I found his account of Iranian politics and the trajectory of our foreign policy highly plausible.  He also mentions something that I hadn’t thought of before: Iran can retaliate against the United States by destroying the [...]

Matt Yglesias writes on Charles Krauthammer’s “Hail Mary” Theory today.  
Krauthammer writes:
Krauthammer’s Hail Mary Rule: You get only two per game. John McCain, unfortunately, has already thrown three. The first was his bet on the surge, a deep pass to David Petraeus who miraculously ran it all the way into the end zone.
Then, seeking a game-changer after the Democratic [...]

While many of the great writers and thinkers of the middle twentieth-century defended the Soviet Union, or gazed upon it with hope, one of the most important figures who effectively killed all of that type of talking once and for all was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn’s stories, particularly The Gulag Archipelago, gave Western audiences a clear [...]

This has been posted a lot of places, but I want to post it here in case someone has not seen it, and also so I can search my own blog to find it. It is two flowcharts that show the changes made to the FISA process in the new compromise bill.

Seymour Hersh’s latest bombshell in the New Yorker.  If this is true, one really has to wonder if the oversight process in our political system is out-and-out broken.
Before anyone responds about Seymour Hersh’s stories, his political views, etc., I don’t want to hear it. Tell my why THIS story is not true. That is what [...]

I’ll tip my hand by the way I frame these quotes in terms of my view of the decision:
Chief Justice Roberts, Dissenting:
It is grossly premature to pronounce on the detainees’ right to habeas without first assessing whether the remedies the DTA system provides vindicate whatever rights petitioners may claim.
Hamdi concluded that American citizens detained as enemy combatants [...]

The framework of the decision:
Based on this language from Eisentrager, and the reasoning in our other extraterritoriality opinions, we conclude that at least three factors are relevant in determining the reach of the Suspension Clause: (1) the citizenship and status of the detainee and the adequacy of the process through which that status determination was made; (2) the nature of [...]

If it was a big deal that President Clinton lied under oath to an independent counsel, which it was, should we not also consider it a big deal that the current head of the Justice Department has been lying to Congress?
The two officials spoke in a telephone call arranged by press officials at the Justice [...]