Arar v. Ashcroft

When I watched Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s questioning of the government’s lawyer in the extraordinary rendition case of Arar v. Ashcroft in December, which I wrote about in detail Wednesday, I was struck by Sotomayor’s immediate grasp of the troubling implications of the government’s position.
As Sotomayor put it to Jonathan Cohn, the Justice Department [...]

The media have overlooked substance and context to focus on her style, but Judge Sonia Sotomayor has provided a window into her views on executive power and national security along the way.

As I wrote on Wednesday, there are already several lawsuits from torture victims pending against the United States, and some legal scholars predict many more to come. So what if an Obama-sponsored investigative commission set up a means for compensating torture victims? That could save the government a whole lot of money.
A slew of [...]