counter-terrorism

Jesselyn Radack at Daily Kos has a nice roundup of yesterday’s Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, called and led by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who opened the morning session with an announcement that the shootings of 13 soldiers on the U.S. Army base was a “terrorist” attack as opposed to a mass-murder. Never mind that [...]

I know Attorney General Eric Holder just announced that he plans to investigate only the CIA interrogators that went beyond what the law allowed, as it was interpreted by the Justice Department’s torture memos, but what will he do about the fact that the Justice Department itself authorized exceeding those guidelines?
That’s what the 2004 CIA [...]

Throughout the Bush administration, Bush officials — including the president, as you can see here – consistently said that “this government does not torture people.” The Bush administration also promised that it doesn’t send prisoners to be tortured elsewhere.
The Obama administration is now saying the same thing.
Today, it assured reporters in a background briefing with [...]

Writing about the role Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan played in the Bush counterterror surveillance program, Marcy Wheeler, blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon today, argues that as NSA adviser, rather than CIA director (a position Brennan was nominated for, but Glenn helped torpedo the nomination by highlighting his previous role in the Bush [...]

Human Rights First has just released a new report updating its previous study of criminal terrorism cases prosecuted since the early 1990s. Once again, it concludes that the federal courts are fully capable of prosecuting complex and sensitive cases of international terrorism.
The organization’s previous report, issued last year, was written by two former federal prosecutors [...]

Here’s another point I should have made in my piece earlier today: Just because President Obama’s Justice Department has been asserting a remarkably broad, Bush-like view of his detention authority pursuant to the laws of war in the Guantanamo detainees’ habeas corpus cases, that doesn’t mean the president has to stick with that definition in [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union just issued this report (with this neat YouTube video accompanying it) on the range of problems created by the U.S. government’s crackdown on Muslim charities suspected of supporting terrorism since 9/11.
The report, “Blocking Faith, Freezing Charity” picks up on a point that President Obama made in his recent speech in [...]

Muslim groups are rethinking their previous commitments to work with the FBI in light of growing concerns that mosques and other Islamic centers are under surveillance or being infilatrated — without any evidence they’ve participated in a crime, The Associated Press reports.
That decision should come as little surprise to the Justice Department, given that, as [...]