I hadn’t actually heard about this until Uncle Jimbo tweeted me about it to solicit my opinion, but Silvestre Reyes (he of the immortal confusion between Sunni and Shi’ite) put into the coming year’s intelligence authorization bill a set of specific criminal penalties for anyone in the intelligence community or working for it who tortures [...]

Greg Sargent reports. Is this really such a hard case to make? Experienced counterrorism agents from the FBI interrogated Abdulmutallab when he arrived in Detroit. According to the Justice Department, during this initial interrogation, the FBI “obtained intelligence that has already proved useful in the fight against Al Qaeda.” After the interrogation, Abdulmutallab refused to [...]

Good io9 discussion the other day on the subject. Having read the first two issues, the first two Embedded accompaniments and the early New Avengers, Dark Avengers, Dark Wolverine and Initiative offerings, I’m inclined to say that it doesn’t yet suck but it will suck if it doesn’t pick up the pace soon. Spoilers after [...]

Tom Ricks reports that Gen. O wants to keep a don’t-call-it-a-combat brigade in Kirkuk after August 2010. He says the White House gave Odeirno a “lukewarm” reaction when the general formally requested it. And then he wonders: If the brigade in northern Iraq is indeed kept in Iraq past the deadline, there will be a [...]

This I love: Polish neo-Nazi skin discovers he’s in fact Jewish; becomes Orthodox. For those not steeped in punk-rock history, Jewish skinheads are not particularly unusual, particularly in, say, New York, for all the obvious reasons. Nazi Jewish skinheads — that’s unusual. But most skinheads are anti-racist, and carry with them all the pride in [...]

This excellent New York Times piece about CIA/ISI cooperation does a great job of showing how the case for optimism about the Pakistani arrests of the Afghan Taliban survives its most cynical explanation. Perhaps I’ve gone too far in talking about a “strategic shift” on the part of the Pakistanis toward our way of seeing [...]

I respect Tom Ricks more than I respect most other reporters — I read Fiasco and thought, yeah, this is a model for being a real no-bullshit journalist; when I saw it on the bookshelves of officers in Iraq in 2007 it made me think twice about whether the war was as completely hopeless as [...]

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting it and I am not the only one trying to find out if it’s true. I mean — half! Seriously, if this is true, then the Pakistanis have swung to our side.

I haven’t had this much fun covering crooked security contractors and the knaves who pretend to oversee them since I was at TPM and caught State Department Inspector General Cookie Krongard in a career-ending lie. So today the Senate Armed Services Committee looked at the Blackwater’s subcontract with Raytheon to train the Afghan National Army, [...]

Daily Intel on the Senate passing a “jobs bill”: When the actual bill was voted on this morning, it passed 70–28. Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, Mississippi’s Thad Cochran, Oklahoma’s Jim Inhofe, Florida’s George LeMieux, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and Mississippi’s Roger Wicker voted for the bill after trying, two days ago, to prevent it from being voted [...]