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I’ve been following the small but growing number of lawsuits brought on behalf of torture victims against U.S. government officials for more than a year now, but the opening statement in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday on behalf of four British former Guantanamo prisoners may be the most eloquent statement on [...]

That’s one of the questions coming up in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit being argued today by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of 23 lawyers who believe they may have been wiretapped without a warrant by the National Security Agency during the Bush administration. But the government won’t answer the question.
The NSA [...]

Although there is already criticism of Attorney General Erc Holder’s planned investigation of CIA interrogators, it’s worth noting that former senior FBI and Defense Department interrogators support the criminal probe — and also want a more thorough investigation.
As I noted earlier, the Center for Constitutional Rights and others has criticized the probe for its narrow [...]

The Pentagon’s report yesterday that the conditions at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp meet all the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, was, not surprisingly, met with a mixture of skepticism and downright hostility.
Adm. Patrick Walsh reported that based on more than 100 interviews over 13 days, inspections of all the camps at the prison and [...]

As I reported earlier, President Obama’s Justice Department today stood up in court and asserted the so-called “state secrets” privilege to argue, like the Bush administration before it, that the case of five victims of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” and torture program must be dismissed.
But what is the “state secrets” privilege anyway?

The case of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen arrested in New York and sent to Syria to be interrogated under torture, will be re-heard today by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, sitting en banc.
As I reported earlier, the 34-year-old computer consultant of Syrian descent was apprehended by U.S. authorities in 2002 [...]