bush administration

Mark Leon Goldberg reports that John Bolton, the Bush administration’s former ambassador to the United Nations, has a new book out. It’s called ConUNdrum — get it? — and apparently continues Bolton’s quest to shave several more floors from the U.N.’s Turtle Bay offices. But what’s more interesting, Goldberg reports, is who’s throwing book parties [...]

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed a landmark lawsuit filed by a Canadian victim of “extraordinary rendition” against former U.S. officials, ruling that torture victims have no right to compensation from the U.S. government, even if U.S. officials were complicit in their treatment.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who was seized in 2002 [...]

Perhaps I was too quick to dismiss the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board yesterday. The White House just released a new executive order that gives the board a powerful new institutional tool.

President Obama confirmed Wednesday that he plans to keep the controversial military commissions alive.

Should it really surprise us that Ahmed Wali Karzai, the suspected druglord and brother of President Hamid Karzai, is, as The New York Times reported last night, on the CIA payroll? Remember how the United States entered Afghanistan in 2001. It wasn’t with infantry and air strikes. It was with CIA operatives meeting with Northern [...]

The Washington Post’s story today about liberals who are frustrated that the Obama administration isn’t pressing harder to win confirmation for liberal-leaning judges to the federal courts should also serve as a reminder that there are a whole lot of key Justice Department posts still not confirmed yet, either. Whether that’s because the White House [...]

The administration insists there is no constitutional right to humane treatment by U.S. authorities outside the United States.

Last week I wrote about the serious limitations on President Obama’s new policy on the administration’s use of the “state secrets privilege” to dismiss cases charging the government with torture, warrantless wiretapping and other egregious abuses of executive power. Although the government has said it promises to invoke the privilege more sparingly, it’s still notably [...]

Insanity is the Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded terrorism “alert” system, which tells you nothing except that people are capable of coloring within boxes at airports. DHS empaneled a commission to examine it. Everyone with a fourth-grade education hoped that would lead to some kind of face-saving way of scrapping the system. Because who could [...]

The Obama administration is putting a new plan in place at Afghanistan’s Bagram air field detention facility to bring indefinite detentions there — a practice viewed as a replication of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility’s more noxious functions — to an end. What does it include? Assigning U.S. military officials, who aren’t lawyers, to represent [...]