Adam Serwer

Adam Zagorin reports that John Durham, the prosecutor Attorney General Eric Holder assigned to probe the Bush administration’s torturous interrogation program, may be coming back with some indictments: It has been nearly a decade since Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi prisoner known as “the Iceman” — for the bungled attempt to cool his body and make […]

Marriage equality in New York getting more likely. Are we headed for a double dip recession? Investigation of Bush-era torture might actually be going somewhere. Dana Goldstein on the NYC/NAACP charter school lawsuit.

Juan Cole lays out Rep. Anthony Weiner‘s Islamist bonafides: 1. Called for Columbia University professor Joseph Massad to be fired for being critical of Israel; Weiner thus spearheaded a new McCarthyism. 2. On the Israeli attack, in international waters, on the Mavi Marmara relief ship, Weiner sputtered: “”If you want to instigate a conflict with […]

[Obligatory, decade old spoilers alert] Yesterday on Game of Thrones, HBO did something that might come as a surprise to those who haven’t read George R.R. Martin‘s A Song of Ice and Fire series, or who just weren’t paying attention. They killed off the main character. I say “weren’t paying attention” because Ned Stark’s death […]

The New York Times Charlie Savage reports that the FBI is altering its own agency guidelines, relaxing rules about what sort of investigative tools can be used to gather information on a target before they are compelled to document the investigation. WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its […]

Jeffrey Goldberg notes that the Washington Times op-ed page, long a clearinghouse for the anti-Muslim paranoia of Frank Gaffney types, publishes a piece speculating that embattled New York Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner may be a secret Muslim based on his marriage to Huma Abedin, an aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: When looking broadly […]

Stephen Kohn argues that the Founders were aware of the importance of protecting whistleblowers from the beginning. In response to the case of Esek Hopkins, a Commodore in the American Navy who tortured his British captives and was called out by his subordinates, Congress passed the first “whistleblower protection law.” Later that month, without any […]

David Simon makes Eric Holder a counteroffer. Unanimous SCOTUS opinion upholds crack cocaine law. Why hate on liberal organizations when you can just buy them? Reading between rights.

I’ve long tried to explain Italian President Silvio Berlusconi‘s political survival by saying that you’d have to imagine what Richard Nixon would be like if he owned not just Fox News, but MSNBC, CNN, and every network news channel. Nixon didn’t have Berlusconi’s sexual appetites, but he has a similar skill for leveraging cultural resentment […]

After spending weeks trying to convince the country that the U.S. only found Osama bin Laden because Khalid Sheik Mohammed was waterboarded, Senate Republicans finally had an opportunity to demand CIA Director and future Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta talk about how awesome torture is. Only they barely broached the subject, and even then only […]