Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo has been spewing his grandiose views on presidential power ever since leaving the Bush administration. So although his latest book, “Crisis And Command,” is an unusually ambitious 446-page historical survey of executive power from George Washington to George W. Bush, his More…
Political candidates often invoke God and spirituality on the campaign trail, but Rev. Richard Killmer, executive director of the National Religious Campaign against Torture, would like more pols to live up to those professed beliefs once they’re in office. President Obama, for example, has spoken eloquently More…
Last week, a federal judge ruled that the government had failed to justify the detention for the last seven years of a 50-year-old Kuwaiti engineer who worked for Kuwait Airlines and had gone to Afghanistan to do charitable work. He was seized by the Northern Alliance, turned over to U.S. More…
Under the auspices of the Center for Victims of Torture, two former officials have compiled a list of questions to set expectations for the Obama administration’s rollout of its new interrogations practices. Will Taft, a former legal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Harry McPherson, a consigliere More…
Anne Kornblut of The Washington Post writes a curtain-raiser on the unveiling of a story I broke about the contours of the Obama administration’s new team for interrogating the highest-value terrorism detainees. To boil the piece down to its essence, the new High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group will be More…
The Obama administration is apparently going to release the 2005-era Office of Legal Counsel memoranda about what torture techniques the CIA could employ. Keep hitting refresh here. MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell had former CIA Director Mike Hayden on to make the case against disclosure of the memos, and for the More…
The Army has taken yet another step toward transforming itself for an era of irregular warfare. A new field manual, released Tuesday, provides a blueprint for training soldiers for “full-spectrum operations” — not just wars between two industrial states’ militaries, but also nation-building, peacekeeping and counterinsurgency operations.
Known as FM More…
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