Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo has been spewing his grandiose views on presidential power ever since leaving the Bush administration. So although his latest book, “Crisis And Command,” is an unusually ambitious 446-page historical survey of executive power from George Washington to George W. Bush, his More…
The Supreme Court dealt a harsh blow on Monday to victims of abuse by U.S. officials during the “war on terror.” The court announced it would not review a federal appeals court ruling that dismissed a lawsuit by four British citizens who claim they were wrongly arrested, detained More…
I’ve been following the small but growing number of lawsuits brought on behalf of torture victims against U.S. government officials for more than a year now, but the opening statement in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday on behalf of four British former More…
The International Center for Transitional Justice usually focuses on bringing to light and holding perpetrators accountable for such heinous crimes as genocide, mass murder and systematic torture, often in far-off war-torn countries with dismal human rights records.
So it’s significant that today they’ve released a report More…
As former Vice President Dick Cheney and some Republican lawmakers continue to debate whether torture works and was a legitimate interrogation technique during the Bush administration, it’s almost jaw-dropping to read some of the memos that were written by the real experts on interrogation techniques in the U.S. government, warning More…
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 More…
A few more points worth noting about the new Military Commissions Act amendments passed by Congress yesterday: Just as the House bill circulating earlier did, the amendments passed would still allow some coerced testimony to be used in court if the military judge decides it’s reliable and More…
R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Billy Bragg and David Byrne don’t like to think of music as torture, or part of any “enhanced interrogation techniques.” But declassified government documents show that at least some music — notably, Metallica, Britney Spears and some unidentified rap music, according to a 2004 Defense Department report More…
No matter how much former Vice President Dick Cheney insists that torturing prisoners in secret CIA prisons worked (and Spencer has already laid out the huge holes in that argument) — he and his fellow Republicans who still stand by their “enhanced interrogation techniques” can never prove that using More…
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 More…
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