Posts by Daphne Eviatar

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo has been spewing his grandiose views on presidential power ever since leaving the Bush administration. So although his latest book, “Crisis And Command,” is an unusually ambitious 446-page historical survey of executive power from George Washington to George W. Bush, his thesis will hardly surprise anyone who’s followed [...]

All day, we’re re-running our favorite blog posts of the last year. This post was originally published on March 4, 2009.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s “Getting to the Truth Through a Nonpartisan Commission of Inquiry” convened this morning to consider Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) proposal for a sort of “truth and reconciliation” commission.
The hearing was full [...]

All day, we’re re-running our favorite blog posts of the last year. This post was originally published on May 26, 2009.
One of the things that most infuriates conservative commentators like Michelle Malkin and Stuart Taylor about Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is that in delivering a 2002 speech at UC-Berkeley, the judge said that “our [...]

Following up on my earlier post on the FBI’s longstanding problems with putting terror suspects on its terror watchlist, I just got off the phone with FBI spokesman William Carter, who clarified a few things.
Although Carter couldn’t talk specifically about the case of the failed Northwest Airlines Flight 253 bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, he explained [...]

All day, we’re re-running our favorite blog posts of the last year. This post was originally published on Nov. 8, 2009.
As former Vice President Dick Cheney and some Republican lawmakers continue to debate whether torture works and was a legitimate interrogation technique during the Bush administration, it’s almost jaw-dropping to read some of the memos [...]

While the State Department is fending off questions about why it didn’t revoke Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s visa and points fingers at the National Counterterrorism Center, it’s worth noting that the FBI last year was told, following an in-depth audit by its inspector general, that it had a big problem with failing to place terror suspects [...]

Don’t expect any charitable feelings around the holidays. According to a new Rasmussen national telephone survey, 58 percent of U.S. voters say they’d support using waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques to extract information from the failed Northwest Airlines Flight 253 bomber.
Just 30 percent oppose using such methods on the 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, [...]

All day, we’re re-running our favorite blog posts of the last year. This post was originally published on Sept. 23, 2009.
Just in case he wasn’t familiar with it, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) decided to read the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution to David Kris, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s National Security Division, who [...]

All day, we’re re-running our favorite blog posts of the last year. This post was originally published on July 13, 2009.

The explosive inspectors general report released on Friday makes one thing increasingly clear: the Bush White House knew that it was probably breaking the law.

As the administration stepped up enforcement of immigration laws this year and laid the groundwork for broader reform, these five individuals had the greatest influence on the immigration debate.