Adam Serwer

Andrew McCarthy pioneered the smear campaign against Justice Department lawyers who represented Guantanamo Bay detainees as terrorist sympathizers. He now revives his smears, based on the decision of law firm King and Spaulding to drop its defense of DOMA, leading former Solicitor General Paul Clement to resign. Which brings us to the Obama DOJ’s al-Qaeda […]

Over at Greg‘s place, I poke holes in torture aficionado Marc Thiessen‘s complaints about General David Petraeus‘ anti-torture bonifides given his nomination to head the CIA, and the idea that the Obama administration no longer has an interrogation policy: During a Senate hearing in February, Senator Marco Rubio pressed Panetta on whether or not the […]

The Associated Press reports that 247 people on the terror watch list were allowed to buy guns legally in 2010: It is not illegal for people listed on the government’s terror watch list to buy weapons. This has bothered New Jersey Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg for years. He is trying again to change the law […]

Great prison breaks in war on terror history. Against tiny school districts. Tortured confessions and the Gitmo protection orders. Things are getting worse in Syria. Panetta to DoD, Petraeus to CIA.

A lot of people I know regard Parks and Rec as a kind of office ripoff set in a government workplace. But I actually prefer Parks and Rec, and I think part of the reason why is that it’s one of the few shows to actually portray non-law enforcement related government employees as good people. […]

Today the Supreme Court just ruled that companies could essentially ban class-action lawsuits through contract clauses. Ian Millhiser explains: Today, in a 5-4 opinion by Justice [Antonin] Scalia], the Supreme Court effectively eliminated all consumer class actions and left corporate America free to cheat every single one of their customers a few dollars at a […]

Frankly, the president would have been fully justified in responding to the birther controversy like so rather than releasing his original birth certificate: More thoughts at Greg‘s place. One of the weirdest things about birtherism to me is that its an expression of racism that tries to shoehorn itself into an acceptable format in a […]

Yesterday, Attorney General Eric Holder defended former Solicitor General Paul Clement‘s decision to quit his law firm in order to defend the constitutionality of the law barring federal recognition of same-sex marriage. Clement said that he was resigning “out of the firmly held belief that a representation should not be abandoned because the client’s legal […]

Former Chief Prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay military commissions Col. Morris Davis (Ret.), who is currently suing the Library of Congress alleging he was fired for writing op-eds critical of the decision to revive Bush-era military commissions for Gitmo detainees, slams the administration over remarks he argues compromised the integrity of two high-profile trials. President […]

Jamelle Bouie points out that attempts to draw an equivalence between Republican birthers and the comparably smaller number of Democratic truthers are missing an obvious and crucial distinction: Of course, there’s one major distinction between Democratic “trutherism” and Republican “birtherism”: At no point were Democrats demanding trutherism from Democratic congressional candidates, much less presidential candidates. […]