The Cable’s Josh Rogin interviews Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Kit Bond (R-Mo.), who attended this afternoon’s White House meeting on Afghanistan/Pakistan strategy. Not a lot of detail emerged, but this is Bond’s takeaway:
Obama pledged not to return to a counterterrorism approach, where troops “shoot and then
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…
The official readout from yesterday’s White House meeting on Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy was predictably uninformative. (“When it come to decisions as important as keeping this country safe and putting our troops into harm’s way, the President has made it clear that he will rigorously assess our progress,” etc.) But More…
Among the cases the Supreme Court will consider reviewing in its private meeting tomorrow are two controversial cases arising out of the war on terror. Both question whether the president’s authority over detainees and information about their treatment is absolute, or reviewable by the federal courts.
The first More…
Eight years after it was passed, the USA Patriot Act remains among the most controversial pieces of counterterrorism legislation in the so-called “war on terror.” On December 31 of this year, some of its more controversial provisions will expire, forcing Congress to revisit it More…
Last month, a federal court judge ordered the Defense Department to release a 47-year-old father of two with a heart condition who the court ruled had been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the past seven years without justification.
On Monday, the Obama administration said it plans to appeal More…
One of the defining moments of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Afghanistan strategy that I covered yesterday came when Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) asked why we needed to take a counterinsurgency approach to Afghanistan when a commando raid in Somalia, without the aid of a large troop mobilization, More…
In surprising slap-in-the-face order to the government, a federal judge ruled last month that a court can require the government to disclose classified information to an individual with security clearance even if the executive branch doesn’t want to.
Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News reports that Judge Royce Lamberth More…
The news that Mohammed Jawad plans to sue the U.S. government for his unlawful detention and torture raises the question of whether he can get beyond the hurdles so many other torture victims have faced in similar lawsuits.
Previous cases have been dismissed on grounds that government officials More…
Today’s news that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will hear the claims of kidnapping and torture filed against the United States by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen and car salesman subjected to the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program in 2003, More…
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