Abu Ghraib

To follow up on my earlier post about Rep. Louis Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and her speech on her colleagues’ move to amend the Freedom of Information Act to prevent the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, it’s worth looking at the conference report on the bill. The bill is called the “Protected [...]

House and Senate members today approved language for a homeland security appropriations bill that would give the Pentagon the right to continue withholding photos of the abuse of detainees in its custody, the ACLU reported on Wednesday.
The ACLU has been trying to get its hands on those photos, as well as other records, since 2003 [...]

Although court-watchers were predicting that the Supreme Court would decide yesterday whether to hear the appeal from a group of Chinese Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay claiming the right to be released into the United States, the high court apparently decided not to decide, at least for now. Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog writes that the [...]

Daphne Eviatar is guest-blogging for Glenn Greenwald today. The following is cross-posted at Salon.
If, as the latest reports indicate, Attorney General Eric Holder is serious about prosecuting the worst torture and abuse of “war on terror” prisoners that occurred during the Bush administration, then there’s some key evidence he’s going to want to take a [...]

Strange as it sounds, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was a strong proponent of President Obama’s decision to reverse course and argue in court that photographs depicting torture of Iraqis by U.S. troops ought to be kept private, according to McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef:
The official said Maliki warned that releasing the photos would lead to more [...]

Via Zachary Roth at TPMmuckraker, The Huffington Post reports that retired Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, called for a truth commission on torture. He’s the first such Bush-era senior official or military officer who might face sanctions from such a commission to propose creating one.

Turns out the story from the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph that the photos the Obama administration is refusing to release, despite a court order to do so, are not the same ones that Maj. Gen. Antonia Taguba said depict brutal rapes of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
At least, so says Mark Benjamin at Salon and now White [...]

The Daily Telegraph reports that some of the photos of prisoner abuse that President Obama has refused to release — after earlier promising to make them public — depict the brutal rape and sexual abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner [...]

McClatchy does a good job outlining the “omissions, exaggerations and misstatements” in former Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday. (That’s via Attaturk.) For real granular detail, check out Dan Froomkin’s take at Neiman Watchdog. In particular, Froomkin takes on Cheney’s debunked claim that there can be no parallel drawn between [...]

At the risk of sounding like one of those Obama apologists that Glenn Greenwald effectively pilloried in his post yesterday, I have to say that I’m not as appalled as all my civil libertarian friends — or legal scholars like Jonathan Turley (here on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” last night) — that Obama has [...]