This week is pretty quiet, what with Congress out of session. Not all that much is happening in Washington, at least not until next week. So here are a few updates on stories previously covered at Homeland Stupidity.

• Three weeks ago I reported to you that Khaled al-Masri was suing the Central Intelligence Agency over his erroneous rendition to Afghanistan. Now the CIA’s inspector general is investigating “fewer than 10 cases” of “erroneous rendition,” according to intelligence officials.
• President George W. Bush has authorized the National Security Agency to intercept overseas communications from Americans, bypassing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Even so, the number of requests for warrants to that court has skyrocketed, with 5,645 applications in 2004, and 3,436 in 2001-2003 combined.
• And that same court didn’t want information from those NSA collections to be used to obtain warrants, but lawyers in some of the largest terrorism cases are questioning whether that’s exactly what happened. If the government did use intelligence from this NSA program to obtain FISA warrants, people like Iyman Faris and José Padilla could walk.