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 More…
Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wrote to President Obama yesterday urging him to block the impending release of photographs showing detainees abused by U.S. military personnel, reports Secrecy News, the blog of the Federation of American Scientists.
The photos are supposed to be released on May More…
After digging through the newly-disclosed Office of Legal Counsel memos, my friend Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake discovered that CIA interrogators waterboarded 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times in one month. The New York Times piece that follows up today appropriately acknowledges Marcy’s discovery. (Full disclosure: my personal blog More…
Human Rights USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union are expected to make their case why the United States must prosecute former Bush administration officials for war crimes and grave violations of international law before the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights this afternoon in More…
In a rare victory for torture victims, a federal judge yesterday ruled that detainees who claim they were tortured at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq can move ahead with their lawsuit against defense contractor CACI, which t the U.S. government hired to assist in interrogations of Iraqi prisoners. More…
In recent years, when the president of the United States appears on Arab satellite TV, it’s because something bad has happened and an apology is warranted. These days, President Barack Obama appears on al-Arabiya TV specifically to send a gesture of respect and reconciliation to the Arab world, probably More…
I’m glad to see that somebody isn’t just taking at face value Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s recent statements that Bush administration officials who approved the use of torture shouldn’t be prosecuted and needn’t be pardoned because they all reasonably believed their actions were lawful.
On Thursday, House Judiciary Committee More…
Sen. Joe Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, has an important reason for Americans to vote Democratic this year: Accountability for war crimes.
Speaking in Florida on Wednesday, as the political world focused on his Republican counterpart, vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin, Biden said a Democratic administration would use More…
When Joshua Casteel arrived at Abu Ghraib in June 2004 to interrogate detainees, he knew how notorious the Iraqi prison was. He arrived in the wake of a still-notorious scandal. Earlier that spring, CBS News and The New Yorker magazine published the infamous photographs from late 2003, More…
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