Eric Holder

Since Attorney General Eric Holder announced the alleged masterminds of the 9/11 attacks would be tried in New York, there’s been much speculation about whether they’ll plead guilty, as some have suggested they would before military commissions, or insist on a trial and put on a defense.
Scott Fenstermaker, a lawyer defending one of the men, [...]

Michael Isikoff reports:
The federal judge who helped draft Justice Department memos on torture has set up a legal defense fund to pay the costs of defending against possible disciplinary or impeachment proceedings. Jay Bybee, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge in Las Vegas, quietly set up the fund last July following widespread news reports that [...]

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that one reason he decided to try the five suspected 9/11 co-conspirators in federal court is because that was where he would most likely be able to win a conviction. As he said later in the hearing: “Failure is not an option. These [...]

“This is war,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.). “I think the decision you’ve made to try these cases in federal court represents a policy and political decision.”

Testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this morning, Attorney General Eric Holder promised to produce the evidence, withheld by the Department of Justice, that some Democratic Senators believe is necessary for an informed debate on the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act.
As I reported yesterday, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Richard [...]

Responding to a question from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who’s asked frequently when the Justice Department will finally release the repeatedly delayed report by the Office of Professional Responsibility on the conduct of lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel under President Bush, Holder said that he expects it will be released by the end [...]

Anticipating that the debate over reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act will soon come to the Senate floor, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday asked Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify key information about how the law’s “business records provision” has been used. They last sent a classified [...]

On his MSNBC morning show today, Dylan Ratigan asked me if I thought the decision to bring the suspected 9/11 co-conspirators to trial in a New York federal court was an attempt to “deboogeymanificate” those notorious terrorists we’ve heard so much about. After all, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his alleged al-Qaeda co-plotters have often been [...]

This comes from September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, a survivors’ group that has urged the Obama administration to shut down Guantanamo Bay:
We, the members of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, support the Attorney General’s decision to bring the trials of the five individuals currently accused of plotting the attacks of Sept 11, 2001 [...]

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 calling on the United States to follow its legal obligation [...]