alberto gonzales

So Ari Shapiro’s NPR story yesterday placed then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales — a.k.a. God’s gift to Talking Points Memo — at the center of the decision to torture Abu Zubaydah in the spring of 2002. Gonzales didn’t respond to Shapiro’s request for comment. But I notice in the Senate intelligence committee’s recently declassified narrative [...]

Whether or not House Democrats end up seeing the anti-torture memo that Philip Zelikow wrote while at the State Department in 2005, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee is working out arrangements for Zelikow to testify on May 13 — next Wednesday — about the Justice Department’s Bush-era authorization of torture, according to a Senate staffer. Also [...]

Spanish prosecutors have decided to go ahead with a criminal investigation of the six senior lawyers — including former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — who allegedly crafted the legal justification for the Bush administration’s torture and abuse of detainees in its “war on terror,” Scott Horton reports today in The Daily Beast.

It should come as no surprise that President Obama’s nomination of the widely respected human rights expert and dean of the Yale Law School, Harold Hongju Koh, to be the State Department’s legal adviser has gotten conservatives to call out their attack dogs, as FOX News reports.
Koh, as Spencer has written, is a former Clinton [...]

If you happened to catch The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC last night, you saw TWI Legal Correspondent Daphne Eviatar breaking down the pros and cons of Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.)  proposed “truth commission” to investigate the Bush administration’s alleged crimes. Daphne also talked about the problem that statutes of limitations on torture may pose [...]

Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales appeared at a forum on Republicans and the Hispanic vote at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, getting a standing ovation from the crowd when he was pointed out by the moderator. As Gonzales left, I asked him whether he would participate in a “truth commission,” as proposed by Sen. [...]

Something that’s gone a bit unremarked upon during last week’s overview of President Obama’s executive orders rolling back the torture policies of the Bush administration is the role of the White House counsel.
Remember that in former President George W. Bush’s first term, his crony and one-time White House counsel Alberto Gonzales — a man out [...]

Attorney General-nominee Eric Holder’s hard line on interrogation (”waterboarding is torture“) rattled Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and a few minority Senators enough to delay the vote to send Holder’s nomination to the Senate floor.  After all, if waterboarding is torture, and torture is a crime, who’s to say that the Justice Department won’t start prosecuting [...]

The confirmation hearings for Eric Holder to attorney general certainly weren’t as acrimonious as many predicted they’d be.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.), who made a kerfuffle over the Marc Rich and FALN pardons prior to the hearing, only touched briefly on Rich in his first round of questioning. And while FALN came up in a number [...]

Although Eric Holder has been careful not to say he made a mistake in recommending a pardon for the members of FALN, a Puerto Rican paramilitary group regarded by many as a terrorist organization, he’s used some pretty interesting terminology to walk around it.