Torture

Lietzau will be central to decisions about trying the remaining Guantanamo detainees in reformed military commissions or in federal courts, and to the construction of a new terrorism detention policy.

“If all we’re doing is exporting Guantanamo to Thomson for purposes of military commissions and indefinite detention,” said one civil liberties advocate, “we’re very strongly opposed to that.”

The Christmas-time apprehension after Flight 253 landed in Detroit was more ad hoc and chaotic than the administration has portrayed, according to Dennis Blair.

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 [...]

In a forthcoming Q & A to be published in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo tells Deborah Solomon that he never met President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney, but that he would advise them all over again that they could ignore legal prohibitions on torture [...]

The Wall Street Journal, Pat Buchanan and others are already condemning the Obama administration for treating Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab as a civilian criminal rather than an illegal warrior to whom we can presumably do whatever we please. We are in “a war,” The Journal reiterated today — as did Buchanan, debating my colleague Spencer Ackerman [...]

Late on Friday, the Department of Justice quietly filed an unclassified, heavily redacted version (see below) of its argument why a New York federal court should not dismiss the case of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, an accused conspirator in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Ghailani’s lawyers had argued that the [...]

The government’s “state secrets” argument was back in full force yesterday, this time being made by the Justice Department before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in the ongoing case against Jeppesen Dataplan, a Boeing subsidiary. Jeppesen is accused by five alleged victims of the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program of assisting [...]

In a rare win for the government in a Guantanamo Bay detainee case, a federal judge ruled Monday that it can continue to hold a 28-year-old Yemeni at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Musa’ab Al-Madhwani has been imprisoned at Guantanamo since October 2002. The government claims he was a member of al-Qaeda. On [...]

The Supreme Court today issued a blow to victims of abuse by U.S. officials during the “war on terror.” The high court this morning refused to review a federal appeals court ruling that dismissed a lawsuit by four British citizens who claimed they were wrongly arrested and mistreated at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay. [...]