Convention Against Torture

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 of his own religious awakening, and of the importance [...]

Human rights experts say there is a serious risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could face persecution or torture.

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 say, as Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday, that “I [...]

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 come around to thinking that he can’t avoid the fact that [...]

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 all of our diplomatic missions [...]

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 techniques like slamming, sleep and food [...]

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 the possibility of a Justice Department probe of potential violations of [...]

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 discussed all yesterday afternoon, and for good reason (it’s worth watching [...]

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, 2005 OLC memo signed by Steven Bradbury concluded [...]

In his op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Congress’s Phony War on Torture,” William McGurn takes congressional Democrats to task for not immediately proposing a law to ban waterboarding.  Never mind that President Obama has already banned it and new Attorney General Eric Holder has clarified that it is, indeed, a form of torture.
But what [...]