It was a blind quote hitting the civil-libertarian solar plexus. Bad enough that, as ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn reported late on Friday afternoon, the Obama administration was readying an executive order for a system for preventive detention in terrorism cases. President Obama More…
I’m still trying to figure out how the Obama administration could believe that civil liberties groups gave it cover to issue an executive order authorizing “prolonged detention” of suspected terrorists, as Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn reported on Friday. Ginny Sloan, president of the Constitution Project — which More…
The transfer of former “high-level” Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Ghailani to a federal prison in New York on Tuesday highlights the dilemma President Obama faces over what to do with the 240 detainees remaining at the Guantanamo Bay prison, as well as any others he claims More…
President Obama’s statement in his speech at the National Archives that he plans to retain the power to hold some as-yet-unnamed terror suspects indefinitely without charge or trial was quickly overshadowed (perhaps intentionally) by his announcement last week of his first Supreme Court justice nominee.
But More…
President Obama just announced that Harold Hongju Koh, the head of Yale Law School and a human rights official during the Clinton administration, will be the legal adviser to the State Department. That’s big news as the administration proceeds with its review of interrogations, detentions and renditions policy. Koh, More…
In a rare victory for torture victims, a federal judge yesterday ruled that detainees who claim they were tortured at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq can move ahead with their lawsuit against defense contractor CACI, which t the U.S. government hired to assist in interrogations of Iraqi prisoners. More…
He says all the right things, doesn’t he? Here’s President Obama from tonight’s speech, on American values, justice and torture:
To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our troops defend – because there is no force in the world more powerful than the example of
Last week, CIA Director-designate appeared to argue that certain Al Qaeda detainees were too dangerous to stand trial — something that threw civil libertarians for a loop, given the recent executive orders from the Obama administration ordering the closure of Guantanamo Bay, the CIA’s secret prisons and a More…
As President Obama talks about building up U.S. forces in Afghanistan, it raises the inevitable question about what he’s going to do with the 600 prisoners the United States is holding at the prison at the Bagram air base – and whether previous plans to build a new More…
As Adam Liptak wrote in The New York Times on Saturday, the President-elect Barack Obama’s Justice Department is going to have to quickly figure out what positions it will take in some thorny legal cases involving the indefinite detention and torture of “war on terror” detainees.
The Al-Marri case More…
rss