RELATED: When Horrible People Fight: Al Qaeda Wants Ahmadinejad To Stop Being A 9/11 Truther

Beginning her segment with the news that the once rosy relationship between Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Al Qaeda have soured since the former became a 9/11 “truther,” Maddow spent much of her segment discussing the nature of the citizenship of Anwar Al-Awlaki– US citizen by birth, but terror mastermind residing in Yemen for much of his life. Maddow notes that he was never charged with a crime in America, and was killed based on being “put on an assassination list that the President signed off on.” Now many are asking whether this was sufficient due process under the Constitution.

For maddow, the attacks that killed Al-Awlaki et al had two major consequences in terms of policy: highlighting the fact that terror was “not a foreign threat, but a transnational threat,” and bringing up the question of “whether or not US citizenship should protect you from the extraordinary tactics the US has used to fight Al Qaeda.” To explain more on the latter front, Maddow brought on Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, who notes that the law under which the President executed the Al Qaeda leaders gives no special privileges to citizens– “it is an exceptionally broad mandate from Congress” that doesn’t do much to stop the President from unilaterally targeting people.

RELATED: President Obama Comments On Death Of Anwar Al-Awlaki

The segment via MSNBC below:

(Might I be permitted to become very angry for a hot second? Thanks! No, this little airplane stunt doesn’t indicate that “conservatives” are not “over” this “birth certificate thing. “Conservative” still does not equate to “birther.” Or vice-versa, really. What serious people, conservative and liberal alike, care about right now are jobs and avoiding finding ourselves faced with a series of crumpled IOU notes and tumbleweeds when we reach retirement.)

It turns out that the sign — which also appeared at the recent Iowa debate in the form of a large billboard — comes courtesy of the folks over at WorldNetDaily, who are not quite the greatest fans of Obama. Maddow described their mission as essentially “trying to make a buck off the more gullible elements of the conservative base.”

She pointed to some of the group’s previous projects, such as their reports on the need to wage a war on Islam itself rather than on terrorists acting under their own fundamentalist interpretations. Then, onto the real meat of the report: Maddow brought on Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman, who broke a rather amazing series of stories about how the person behind those WorldNetDaily reports regarding Islam has been instructing FBI counter-terrorism officers. Ackerman explains:

What they [the FBI] did tell me is that this was training that agents who had two to three years of experience in counter-terrorism have gone through. And they said to me that this is just the opinions of this one particular author, who you intro’d very well. We’re still trying to find out the extent of this training.

When asked why someone within or close to the FBI is now offering him this information, Ackerman explained that the training has been “deeply upsetting” to counter-terrorism experts inside the FBI concerned over civil rights of Muslim Americans and the impression this sort of attitude might have on their impression of those meant to protect them and all law-abiding Americans.

Have a look at the segment, via MSNBC:

Fortunately, the blogger-set who attended the wedding this weekend have filled out the details of the nuptials, conveniently inviting us along via the hashtag #McSudleman.  Inevitably, the twitterfest at the Cosmos Club has also led to some navel-gazing about the appropriateness of tweeting a wedding and reception.

The couple–who write for Reason and The Atlantic–invited the who’s who of  D.C.’s libertarian and social media “hot-list,” including the Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent and Firedoglake, Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute, Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, Reason’s Kerry Howley, Center for American Prospect’s Matt Yglesias and the Media Consortium’s Brian Beutler.

From reading the tweets, it looked like people were tweeting (and networking) from the moment they walked into the event until they left for the afterparty, the location of which was also tweeted.

Timothy Lee, who is filling in for McArdle while the couple is off honeymooning–can I suggest #McSudlemoon as a hasthtag–says he doesn’t find anything wrong with all the twittering since it didn’t take away from the festivities.

Lee, a tech policy geek at Cato, says:

I think social media actually adds to the richness of a large social gathering like a wedding reception. Real-world interaction is sharply limited in time and space. I only got to sit with 9 other people, and I could only have a conversation with one person at a time. The #mcsudleman hashtag wasn’t so limited. It allowed effortless communication with every (sufficiently nerdy) person who was interested in the wedding, whether there were 10 or 1000 such people. This creates a global conversation to supplement the many local ones. Tweets sometimes became real-life conversation topics.

The inevitable question is whether the D.C. blogger set who have few unblogged thoughts were tweeting to be social or because their fingers were twitching to touch the keyboard. Thankfully, no one was tweeting during the service itself and the wedding wasn’t in a church (I think there’s a real social breach in tweeting during a religious service [which this was] in a place of worship [which it wasn't]).

As Lee points out, the happy couple encouraged the tweeting and they can’t expect the bloggerati to attend an event without commenting and analyzing it.

Still, it does make you nostalgic for the day before cell phones, handheld devices, and wifi where people actually sat and talked, not relying on their iPhones and Blackberrys to fill the void when the person next to you got boring or you lost interest in an event.

In fact, I feel strongly about that. Let me write it up for a news site and then send a tweet about it @Mrtriplett.

Numerous emails, photographs, and videos portray a Lord of the Flies environment. One email from a current guard describes scenes in which guards and supervisors are “peeing on people, eating potato chips out of [buttock] cracks, vodka shots out of [buttock] cracks (there is video of that one), broken doors after drnken [sic] brawls, threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in this activity….”

Disturbing, yes? Mother Jones picked up on the letter yesterday morning and wrote a longish piece about it — that post now has 26 comments. Then, just after 4pm yesterday Gawker published an enormously disturbing slide show of photos (provided by POGO) depicting the “animal house” antics. When I saw the post an hour or so later it had already clocked over 12,000 views. As of this morning 95,000 plus people had seen it. Yesterday evening a State Dept. spokesperson announced that an investigation had been ordered and that “these are very serious allegations, and we are treating them that way.”

So, was Gawker publishing the pics a motivating factor behind the State Dept’s quick response? Hard to say. Clearly that letter and those photos (which POGO also sent to the State Dept.) would have resulted some sort of reaction, though apparently the contractor ArmorGroup has been under some sort of investigation due to its behavior since 2007. But, much like the shots out of Abu Ghraib, the pictures Gawker first pubbed are upsetting, utterly damning, and impossible to ignore, and they’ve now been seen very quickly by a whole lot of people (though not as many as saw McSteamy!).

What may be the most interesting part of all this is that POGO chose to “provide” Gawker with those pictures early on, when no doubt there are plenty of mainstream organizations who would have been happy to pick up. Someone at POGO knows their new media stuff: Gawker is the online tastemaker and is capable of immediately getting a story out to a large, connected audience, who will pay attention and quickly pass it on. Inevitably the MSM will follow sooner or later, and get it out to everyone. Is this a sign of things to come? Maybe Gawker is turning itself into the new media world’s version of Woodward and Bernstein. It’s certainly quickly becoming the MSM of the blogosphere.