U.S.

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.

And here you thought Bank of America and Merrill Lynch were the bad guys.

The paranoid, mysterious Judson Phillips in the weeks leading up to the National Tea Party Convention gave way to the real, jovial Phillips this weekend.

Ahead of the State of the Union, top aides contend Obama’s first-year task was to revitalize international support for America that waned during the Bush administration.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The New York Times’ editorial board weighs in today in favor of Rep. Jerrold Nadler’s (D-N.Y.) proposed legislation to effectively overturn two recent Supreme Court cases that significantly narrowed the ability of many victims to have their day in court.
Congress has held two hearings already on the cases of Ashcroft v. Iqbal and Bell Atlantic [...]

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 [...]