Here's a sampler of the stories:

Eric Holder's lawless legacy

Eric Holder is reaping applause as his six-year reign as Attorney General comes to a close. But Holder's record is profoundly disappointing to anyone who expected the Obama administration to renounce the abuses of the previous administration. Instead, Holder championed a Nixonian-style legal philosophy that presumed that any action the president orders is legal.

Holder championed President Obama's power to assassinate people outside the United States — including Americans — based solely on the president's secret decrees. On March 6, 2012, Holder defended presidentially-ordered killings: "Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, it does not guarantee judicial process." TV comedian Stephen Colbert mocked Holder: "Trial by jury, trial by fire, rock, paper scissors, who cares? Due process just means that there is a process that you do." For Holder and the Obama administration, reciting certain legal phrases in secret memos was all it took to justify executions.

Though Holder had criticized the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps before he took office, he became the key defender of National Security Agency's email dragnet. Even after Edward Snowden had revealed that the NSA was illegally vacuuming up millions of Americans' email and other communications, Holder falsely proclaimed in June 2013 that, "The Government cannot target anyone... unless there is an appropriate, and documented, foreign intelligence purpose for the acquisition (such as for the prevention of terrorism, hostile cyber activities, or nuclear proliferation..." But confidential documents revealed that the NSA's definition of terrorist suspect is so ludicrously broad that it includes "someone searching the web for suspicious stuff."

[And there's more at the link above, it's a big legacy of vile treachery. - js]

Obama still argues that we can't have transparency or the terrorists will win

The Obama administration, self-described Most Transparent Administration in History™, is currently engaged in a multi-pronged legal battle to prevent an iota more transparency related to illegal torture. strong>If there was any lingering hope that the President might use the last two years of his final term in office to bring some accountability to the despicable actions of the CIA or the US military, it appears that he will instead continue to use the power of the office to fight to keep them hidden.

Later today, the government will showcase its latest suppression effort, as the Justice Department will urge a federal judge in New York to keep secret hundreds of photos of torture from Abu Ghraib prison from almost a decade ago. President Obama once promised to release the photos, only to reverse himself months after coming into office – and he’s since been fighting for years to keep them secret.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, wrote recently about how US officials issued a “defiant message” after the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the hacking of Sony Pictures that “terrorists shouldn’t get to decide the boundaries of our political debate.”

Yet time and again, the government claims the exact opposite under oath when arguing against more transparency: in court, the government has continually argued that terrorists would seize upon the photographs of Abu Ghraib, use them as a recruiting tool and provoke a violent reaction overseas. So, the goverment’s logic dictates, despite the fact that the actions of the US military depicted in the photos were illegal, the American public shouldn’t get to see what actually occurred. ...

The government is making a similar argument in their efforts to keep secret Guantánamo force-feeding videos after multiple newspapers, including the Guardian, sued under the Freedom of Information Act to release the videos. A district court judge, in a landmark ruling late last year, ordered the government to make the videos public. Soon after, the UN human rights committee found that “Force feeding of prisoners on hunger strike constitutes ill-treatment in violation of the Convention [Against Torture].” Yet, the Justice Department continues to appeal the ruling.

Obama's surveillance struggle: selling 'weak reforms' to Congress (and Merkel)

President must convince even administration loyalists in light of Tuesday’s proposals that he is still serious about protecting Americans’ privacy

Unfinished surveillance reforms hung over the last Washington visit by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, like a bad smell. This time around, the White House has more than just diplomatic relations with a leading European ally to worry about.

As Merkel prepares to meet with Barack Obama again next week, the US president also has to demonstrate to Congress that he is following through on promises he made last January to tackle the abuses revealed by the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Though reform legislation on Capitol Hill has stalled, the president will need to seek reauthorisation from Congress for the Patriot Act, which gives the NSA much of its existing powers, by 1 June at the latest. ...

With both these foreign and domestic critics in mind, the administration’s office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) released long-awaited reform proposals on Tuesday that appeared long on rhetoric, if short on substance. ...

Even relative administration loyalists on Capitol Hill are far from impressed with the list of mainly superficial measures that tighten disclosure rules and data retention limits rather than curtail the underlining surveillance powers.

“Apart from the changes the administration announced last year which require prior court approval for specific telephone metadata requests and a reduction of the number of ‘hops’, no new reforms are set out under section 215, and no steps appear to have been taken to end bulk collection and transition to a system where the telephone carriers hold on to their own data,” said Adam Schiff, the senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee.

I found this really interesting:

The Hunting of Billie Holiday & the Roots of the U.S. War on Drugs