bush administration

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 [...]

Oh, Washington Post editorial board. When Steve Coll left the paper, did he take all his voluminous historical memory about U.S. policy to Afghanistan between the Soviet invasion and 9/11 with him? Because in your editorial today about Afghanistan, arguing against restricting the mission, you write:
But the problem with the critics’ argument is that, while [...]

Here’s another Ted Kennedy video. This is the departed Massachusetts senator in a press conference after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his fateful and now-thoroughly discredited presentation to the United Nations on the “threat” posed by Saddam Hussein. The quaver of his voice testifies to his fears about the consequences of the invasion he [...]

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) didn’t win every fight, as this clip of his January  2007 speech against the troop surge in Iraq at the National Press Club shows. But what’s remarkable about this speech is how, despite the anguished and passionate tone (”We cannot simply speak out against an escalation of troops in Iraq, we [...]

Just released by the Department of Justice. He’s calling it a “Preliminary Review” into the interrogation of “certain detainees.” Notice that Holder did not rule out any course of investigative or prosecutorial action, which is exactly civil libertarians hoped:
“The Office of Professional Responsibility has now submitted to me its report regarding the Office of Legal [...]

Early indications show Attorney General Eric Holder may appoint a special prosecutor only to investigate interrogators, rather than Bush-era policy makers.

This revelation from former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge’s new book, nabbed by Paul Bedard, might shed some light on why Ridge passed on a 2010 U.S. Senate bid.
[He] was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
That’s a [...]

Robert Novak, who died of brain cancer Tuesday at age 78, is being remembered this afternoon for his long career as a hard-nosed journalist; his much-relished Prince of Darkness persona; and his role in the scandal that found the Bush administration outing CIA operative Valerie Plame in order to discredit her diplomat husband, who [...]

John Yoo should be fired, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes, according to anti-war activists who greeted the University of California at Berkeley law professor when he returned to Boalt Hall, the law school where he has tenure, on Monday.
Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and [...]

Chris Christie, the Republican candidate for governor of New Jersey who has ridden his experience as a U.S. attorney to a healthy lead in the polls, is taking hits from last week’s release of White House memos on the politicization of him and other Bush-appointed attorneys. Now Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has [...]