Adam Serwer

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is currently considering a challenge to “don’t ask, don’t tell” filed by the Log Cabin Republicans, just lifted a stay that allowed the U.S. government to continue enforcing DADT. That means that DADT can no longer be enforced even though it’s on the way out anyway, which is […]

I just wanted to address a few more issues regarding the two-month seaborne detention of terrorism suspect Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame. Legal Authority: The U.S. is arguing that Warsame is subject to military detention under the 2001 Authorization to use Military Force because he is a member of al Shabab. “The detention of an individual covered […]

I’ll just briefly summarize this 2,000-word post from John Aravosis on the Obama administration’s latest gay-rights failure: The Obama administration has not merely ceased defending the discriminatory Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, it has now filed a legal brief supporting a group challenging it in court. This is a “watershed moment” for LGBT rights […]

Josh Rogin has a good roundup of who is advising the GOP candidates on foreign policy, which is a better predictor of what any individual candidates foreign policy might look like than what they say in a presidential debate. Neoconservatives are well represented, but there is one candidate who is openly taking advice from the […]

Dawn Johnsen, the woman who would have been the head of the Obama administration’s Office of Legal Counsel had she not had the gall to vocally oppose torture and the corruption of OLC’s independent role under President George W. Bush, takes a hatchet to Eric Posner’s “defense” of the administration’s process for determining the legality […]

A few weeks ago, during the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the nomination of Vice Admiral William McRaven to run the Joint Special Operations Command, Senator Lindsey Graham put forth a hypothetical. ” If you caught someone tomorrow in Yemen, Somalia — you name the theater outside of Afghanistan — where would you detain […]

It happens alot, whether it’s Angelina Jolie playing the multiracial Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart, Tom Hardy as Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, or nearly the entire cast of The Last Airbender. With some exceptions, nontraditional casting in Hollywood is almost entirely a one way street, with white actors frequently filling roles meant […]

My post at Greg‘s place on Gallup’s latest survey of American Jewish voters, showing that Obama‘s Israel speech was “not a Watershed in Jewish Views.” Republicans have been pushing this meme hard with a series of distortions Greg has been knocking down. First there was the bogus story that Israeli American billionaire Haim Saban had […]

Glenn Greenwald makes a cheeky point about U.S. officials leaking their conclusion that Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad was murdered by Pakistani intelligence because of his reporting on links between the ISI and extremists, a revelation which may inflame tensions between Pakistan and the U.S., a relationship that is already strained: If any leak warrants a […]

Scott Horton interviews former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle, who has become a high profile critic of the Bush administration’s torturous interrogation program. Carle discusses the interrogation of “CAPTUS,” an al Qaeda associate who was put through extraordinary rendition after officials decided he simply wasn’t talking enough: “Enhanced” techniques make it more difficult to ascertain when […]