Everyone needs a Mother Jones subscription. There’s a great deal in this piece, but here’s what really gets my attention:

Last Wednesday afternoon, amid news that Blackwater USA security contractors had killed 11 Iraqi civilians and wounded 12 others in a Baghdad firefight, members of the antiwar group Code Pink gathered outside the Washington office of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade group that represents a who’s who of the private military industry. There to greet them when they arrived was Doug Brooks, the IPOA’s founder and president, who’d been tipped off to the protest earlier that day by an anonymous caller  Read more 

I am shocked, shocked! to find this out:

The FBI repeatedly failed to follow the strict guidelines of the Patriot Act when its agents took advantage of a new provision allowing the FBI to obtain phone and financial records without a court order, according to a report to be made public Friday by the Justice Department’s Inspector General.

The report, in classified and unclassified versions, remains closely held, but Washington officials who have seen it tell ABC News it documents “numerous lapses” and describe it as “scathing” and “not a pretty picture for the FBI.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller is scheduled to brief Congress on the report at noon.

The officials say the inspector general found the FBI underreported by at least 20 percent the use of the controversial provision, known as National Security Letters, NSLs, in required disclosures to Congress.  Read more 

The ever impressive Ms. Rozen comments about an LATimes piece about spying on domestic and peace groups:

Past and present members of the attorney general’s office said they were troubled by a meeting at the security office last September in which federal and state officials discussed ways to prevent Islamic militants from recruiting prison inmates. In attendance were officials from the FBI, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and various local law enforcement agencies, according to documents obtained by The Times.  Read more