DOD

The Justice Department released more documents — or, at least, less-redacted documents — late Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the government’s obligation in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct [...]

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog points out that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighur detainees who a judge ordered released into the United States will likely also force the Justices to consider the constitutionality of two bills President Obama signed yesterday.
The issue in Kiyemba v. Obama is whether the [...]

This post has been corrected. Previously, the post was incorrectly based on an earlier version of the bill.
The Military Commissions Act amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 (H.R. 2647) were approved in Congress yesterday and are en route to the President for his signature. The full text of the bill [...]

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 [...]

The donation of an anthology of post-9/11 commentary by Professor Noam Chomsky has been rejected from the library at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, reports The Miami Herald.
While the prison offers inmates books and videos on Harry Potter and the World Cup, which are among the more than 16,000 items it holds, leftist intellectual commentary [...]

The National Defense Authorization Act, passed yesterday by the House of Representatives, includes a largely overlooked provision that modifies the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which allows the government to try certain terror suspects — now called “unprivileged enemy belligerents” instead of the Bush-era term, “unlawful enemy combatants” — in military proceedings rather than Article [...]

House and Senate members today approved language for a homeland security appropriations bill that would give the Pentagon the right to continue withholding photos of the abuse of detainees in its custody, the ACLU reported on Wednesday.
The ACLU has been trying to get its hands on those photos, as well as other records, since 2003 [...]

The Senate Judiciary Committee’s subpanel on human rights and the law is holding a hearing today in which the Justice Department, State Department and FBI have sent officials to boast of their impressive record of prosecuting human rights violators. Really. The subcommittee isn’t addressing the U.S.’ record of prosecuting its own officials who have committed [...]

New documents obtained by TWI related to the case of Mohammed Jawad, an adolescent tortured by Afghan police and then abused again by U.S. interrogators, suggest that not only certain CIA interrogations, but also interrogations by the Department of Defense demand a broader investigation.

The American Civil Liberties Union today asked a Washington, D.C., federal court to require the federal government to release the transcripts of 14 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in which they describe abuse and torture suffered in CIA custody.
The transcripts come from the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, which the military set up to determine whether suspects [...]