A recently released legal memo describing interrogation techniques showed that Bush Administration lawyers had approved the use of "insects" in interrogations. "You would like to place [Abu] Zubaydeh in a cramped confinement box with an insect," Jay Bybee, then a Justice Department lawyer and now a federal judge, wrote in...

From The National, a strange phenomenon I just wrote about: impoverished Mexican residents trek across the border to sell the plasma in their veins to multinational corporations. The companies set up operations literally within sight of the border crossings:

Here it is.

The United States is the world's leading...

Previously undisclosed documents show that the Bush-era Justice Department promised to take "appropriate investigative steps" concerning possible corruption by now indicted banker Allen Stanford in 2004, but Stanford wasn't shut down until 2009. So what happened?

Stanford, a Texas billionaire, offshore banker, and gargantuan political donor to...

Why wasn't R. Allen Stanford aggressively investigated until this year, in spite of years of red flags? There's been some speculation that he was a protected government informer.

The DEA agent who handled him talked exclusively to GQ Magazine for my story on Stanford for the June issue. Former...

Convicted fraudster Bernard Madoff had a surprising victim in right wing circles in Washington, DC: the Hudson Institute, a think-tank closely allied with the neoconservative cause, according to sources and documents. The previously undisclosed loss by Hudson shows that the economic turmoil and white-collar fraud is apparently taking its toll...

A potential logistical setback for the efforts in Afghanistan can perhaps be traced back to a tangled Bush-era alliance that enriched the family of a dictator in Central Asia. The issue is the US air base in Kyrgyzstan. The Manas base, dubbed the Ganci base by the US, is like...

When a powerful Republican congressman's wife is hired by a bank, and the bank gets a federal taxpayer bailout worth hundreds of millions, what does it mean? That will probably shake itself out. The congressman: House Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA). The wife: Diana Cantor, managing director of the Virginia...

Rakhat Aliyev has had many careers. The 47 year old Kazakh former intelligence chief and self-proclaimed opposition leader has been a medical doctor, an accused kidnapper, a tycoon lording over international holdings, an ambassador, and, finally, a convicted criminal on the run from his own country.
His next role...