Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 166

What the Supreme Court got right

(updated below - Update II)

The Supreme Court yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds) campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for "electioneering" purposes.  The case, Citizens United v. FEC, presents some very difficult free speech questions, and I'm deeply ambivalent about the court's ruling.  There are several dubious aspects of the majority's...

Obama to indefinitely imprison detainees without charges

One of the most intense controversies of the Bush years was the administration's indefinite imprisoning of "War on Terror" detainees without charges of any kind.  So absolute was the consensus among progressives and Democrats against this policy that a well-worn slogan was invented to object:  a "legal black hole."  Liberal editorial pages routinely cited the refusal to charge the detainees -- not the interrogation practices there -- in order to brand the camp a "dungeon," a "gulag," a...

Blame the all-powerful left!

(updated below - Update II)

I have a contribution this morning to the New York Times examining the Scott Brown victory, and I'll post the link to it once it's up.  But for the moment, I want to address two equally moronic themes emerging over the last couple of days which seek to blame the omnipotent, dominant, super-human "Left" for the Democrats' woes -- one coming from right-wing Democrats and the other from hard-core Obama loyalists (those two categories are not mutually...

It's the fault of the all-powerful left

(updated below)

I have a contribution this morning to the New York Times examining the Scott Brown victory, and I'll post the link to it once it's up.  But for the moment, I want to address two equally moronic themes emerging over the last couple of days which seek to blame the omnipotent, dominant, super-human "Left" for the Democrats' woes -- one coming from right-wing Democrats and the other from hard-core Obama loyalists (those two categories are not mutually exclusive but...

The crime of not "Looking Backward"

In early December, a report from Seton Hall University cast serious doubt on the government's claims regarding the alleged simultaneous "suicides" of three Guantanamo detainees in June, 2006.  I wrote about that report here.  Yesterday, Harper's Scott Horton published an extraordinary new article casting even futher doubt on the official version of events, compiling new, stomach-turning evidence (much of it from Guantanamo guards) strongly suggesting that those detainees were, in fact...

Public opinion merits "the profoundest respect"

In his New York Times column today, David Brooks (as he so often does) recites emerging conventional Washington wisdom, demanding that Democrats abandon health care reform if the Republicans today win the Massachusetts Senate seat:

Many Democrats, as always, are caught in their insular liberal information loop. They think the polls are bad simply because the economy is bad. They tell each other health care is unpopular because the people aren't sophisticated enough to understand it...

Congress takes a bold stand against surveillance abuses

Fixating on and condemning abuses of other countries is one of the greatest weapons the U.S. Government wields for distracting attention away from its own transgressions:  like those gossip-obsessed individuals endlessly mucking around in and passing judgment on the personal lives of others as a means of ignoring their own failings:

The San Francisco Chronicle, yesterday:

Few expect Google Inc.'s stare-down with China to usher in a new era of openness across the Asian nation...

Krugman, Gruber and non-disclosure issues

In the midst of my lengthy discussion yesterday of Cass Sunstein's proposal to "cognitively inflitrate extremist groups" by employing covert agents and secretly paying so-called "independent" analysts to tout the government line, I noted the recent controversy surrounding MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber.  Specifically, Gruber was receiveing large, undisclosed payments from the Obama administration at exactly the time when the Obama White House (and Gruber himself) were holding him out as an...

Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal

(updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs."  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly...

The creepy mindset behind Cass Sunstein's creepy proposal

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he "is in charge of "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs."  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of...