Various matters: endless war, military detention, the Fed Talking about various matters this morning on Democracy Now

Time constraints may preclude my writing much today, but there are several short items to note:

(1) I was on Democracy Now earlier today discussing several matters I've been covering here, and that discussion can be watched in three segments:

On Pakistan:

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On endless war and the neocon dream:

On WikiLeaks' journalism award:

(2) Numerous people have emailed asking my views on the McCain/Levin bill providing for, among other things, military detention in the U.S. and a much broader explicit scope for the 2001 AUMF; I will perhaps write more about this tomorrow, but my views on it are summarized here and here, as well as in the discussion I had earlier about it on Twitter with Marcy Wheeler and Adam Serwer (which can be read, from the bottom up, here). The Obama White House has suggested (without overtly threatening) that it would veto this bill (primarily on the ground that it unduly restricts Executive power in these areas: if people are going to be militarily detained, it is the President who decides how and who, not Congress), but Jack Goldsmith argues [link fixed] why a veto is unlikely to happen.

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(3) A Bloomberg report yesterday revealed that the Federal Reserve loaned $1.2 $7.7 trillion of previously unknown funds to banks at below-market rates, enabling those banks to earn profits in excess of $10 billion (all of which dwarfed TARP). This was part of the impetus for the joint effort by Alan Grayson and Ron Paul in 2010 to compel an audit of the Fed. In particular, watch this 5-minute video of Alan Grayson from early 2009 grilling the Vice Chair of the Federal Reserve, Donald Kohn, as Grayson demanded to know how much the Fed loaned and to which institutions, while Kohn refused to provide that information (absurdly claiming that such transparency would prevent banks from wanting to borrow in the future: in light of the disclosures today, does anyone believe banks will no longer borrow from the Fed?). A few days after it happened, I interviewed Grayson about that exchange here. Now we know why the Fed was so resistant to transparency: