One of many consequences of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan is that those troops are likely to capture many more prisoners that end up at the U.S.-run prison at Bagram air base. That’s raising concerns among human rights groups that the 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…
As the pressure grows on the Obama administration to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by January, so too does the risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could be returned to countries where they’ll face persecution or torture, More…
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on “Face the Nation” Sunday that — like most Republicans and even some Democrats, including some in the president’s cabinet — he thinks President Obama was right when he said “we ought to go forward, not back.”
But then he went on to More…
Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly getting closer to appointing an independent prosecutor to investigate torture under the Bush administration. That’s making some CIA employees nervous.
Greg Miller and Josh Meyer of The Los Angeles Times on Sunday confirmed earlier reports that Holder has reluctantly More…
Marcy Wheeler made a great point on Friday that’s worth following up on. President Obama’s declaration to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture tosses the responsibility for developing “effective policies and programs for stopping torture” to the State Department, asking it to “solicit information from More…
The New York Times’ front-page story Sunday reporting the unanimous agreement among Justice Department lawyers that the “harsh” interrogation techniques approved by the Office of Legal Counsel for use by the CIA were legal relies on the classic journalistic “battle of the experts”: one “outside” expert says the CIA interrogation More…
It’s worth noting that in his speech this morning, while President Obama said he doesn’t think Congress ought to convene a truth commission along the lines of what Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) or Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) have proposed, he did not rule out More…
Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s statement to a bunch of Stanford students Monday that “by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture” — much repeated, analyzed and More…
Assuming for the sake of argument that the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment does apply to U.S. conduct outside of U.S. territory, (though as I noted before the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers thought it did NOT), the May 30, More…
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