department of justice

Earlier this month, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maine raised plenty of eyebrows when it sued the state for refusing to grant an 18.5 percent premium hike on 12,000 individual policy holders — an increase that would have generated a 3 percent profit margin for the company. Instead, Maine’s insurance superintendent granted a 10.9 [...]

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

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.”

Documents reveal the CIA was allowed to deny detainees sleep upward of 80 to 180 hours at a time.

As Spencer noted, in responding to a federal judge’s order to turn over another batch of documents including President George W. Bush’s authorization of CIA secret prisons, and records of investigations into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, the Department of Justice instead opted to file a document yesterday explaining why it’s actually not [...]

Former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen today commends the Bush administration’s “well-run, highly disciplined CIA interrogation program, where clear guidelines were established and abuses or deviations from approved techniques were stopped, reported and addressed.”
I guess Thiessen didn’t read the same CIA inspector general report that so many of us have been scrutinizing in the [...]

Following up on Spencer’s post, I don’t feel too sorry for Jay Bybee or John Yoo, the lead lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who approved the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” As Spencer writes and Footnote 26 of the newly released Inspector General report makes clear, the DOJ lawyers were not [...]

Late last week, in a decision that got some attention over the weekend, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that a Pakistani man who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison since 2004 has the right to submit written questions to self-described 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After all, the government’s case rests [...]

Early indications show Attorney General Eric Holder may appoint a special prosecutor only to investigate interrogators, rather than Bush-era policy makers.

“They want to kill you; they want to kill me; they want to kill our families,” said the chief steward for the union representing workers at Standish Maximum Correctional Facility in Standish, Mich., referring to Guantanamo Bay detainees. The steward, Tom Kerrins, spoke at a “town hall” meeting held in a local church yesterday to [...]