accountability

Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, for years tried to track the deaths of “war on terror” detainees being held in U.S. custody. The author of the book “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and America’s War on Terror,” published in 2006 [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union will file a brief tomorrow urging the federal court to suppress evidence gathered using torture, which the government wants to rely on in the case of Mohammed Jawad, the boy who “confessed” to throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers after being arrested and tortured by Afghan authorities in 2002, then [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday, along with Alkarama for Human Rights, asked two U.N. special rapporteurs to investigate the “extraordinary rendition,” detention and torture of Abou Elkassim Britel, an Italian citizen and one of the victims suing Jeppesen Dataplan, the subsidiary of Boeing the allegedly helped the CIA carry out the Bush administration’s torture [...]

Facing staunch Republican opposition to a full-fledged investigation of the Bush administration’s torture policies — whether by an independent commission or an independent prosecutor — some senior Democrats are reportedly considering investigations for whether former Bush officials lied to Congress when they reported on the government’s activities, NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Kelly O’Donnell told [...]

It was an odd but refreshing spectacle, to see U.S.-based human rights lawyers arguing to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the United States has effectively insulated itself from accountability for torture and war crimes, and ought to be pushed by an international body to do better.

Picking up on the controversial proposal he made during a Feb. 9 speech at Georgetown University, Sen.Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) today reiterated his call for a “truth commission” on the Senate floor and said the Senate Judiciary Committee would hold a hearing next Wednesday to begin to consider the idea.

Jason Leopold at The Public Record has acquired some important inside information about a still-classified report written by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility that provides more evidence of Bush administration lawbreaking.
According to Leopold, OPR director H. Marshall Jarrett reached “damning” conclusions about the advice of John Yoo and other lawyers in the Office [...]

Amid the Democrats’ boostering and the Republicans’ assaults on the final stimulus package, almost no one is focusing on a key part of the bill that will be critical to making it work: accountability for how that $787 billion is spent. In fact, a look at the final bill reveals that to a large extent, [...]

The consensus seems to be growing that, despite his oft-repeated desire to “look forward rather than backward” when it comes to the Bush administration’s authorization of the use of torture on detainees in American custody, President-elect Barack Obama is going to have to open some sort of official investigation of Bush-era war crimes once he [...]