When he took office, President Obama made clear that torture is illegal and that the United States would not abuse detainees in its custody. He immediately ordered the CIA as well as the rest of the U.S. government to adhere to the rules set out More…
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
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
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 More…
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 More…
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
Like many in the intelligence community, Tyler Drumheller is waiting to see if his former colleagues will be left holding the bag for the Bush administration.
As early as Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder is expected to announce the More…
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
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