executive order

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 latest news on the Guantanamo front is that despite the president’s big promise in January to close Guantanamo Bay within a year, it turns out that just might not be possible, reports The Washington Post with ProPublica. Apparently, it’s been too hard to figure out what to do with the prisoners  the United States [...]

So just who are those “civil liberties groups” that have encouraged the Obama administration to issue an executive order creating a system of prolonged preventive detention?
As Spencer wrote today, someone in the administration told ProPublica’s Dafna Linzner and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn that yes, civil liberties groups support the idea of an order that [...]

Serves me right for not reading my White House briefing transcript until this morning, but here’s Robert Gibbs yesterday talking about what looked on Friday to be a forthcoming executive order authorizing preventive detentions:
I think the President addressed the notion and the very tough issue that the administration is likely to face, and that is [...]

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 has made its feelings on detention known [...]

Huge news from Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn. The Obama administration fears that congressional prerogative is going to get in the way of closing Guantanamo Bay by January. So its answer is to cut Congress out of the decision-making and set up a system of “prolonged detention” for an estimated half of Guantanamo detainees it [...]

The Weekly Standard and Greg Sargent are both reporting that the House Democratic leadership is boldly (my characterization, not the Standard’s) standing up to the White House and the Senate, which last week passed an amendment to the appropriations bill that would allow Obama to keep those much-discussed detainee abuse photos secret.
The Lieberman-Graham Amendment, also [...]

In another slap to the government’s attempts to conceal information about the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, a federal judge ruled today that the Justice Department cannot simply deem unclassified information “protected” and thereby keep it from public view.
Noting that it’s the role of the court — not the executive — to decide which unclassified [...]

Obama’s executive order strengthening the Freedom of Information Act, issued on his second day in office, signaled his intent to open up the federal government to greater public accountability. The harder part will come in delivering results, especially at the CIA.

Capitol Hill Democrats didn’t waste any time in voicing support for President Obama’s first executive orders to close Guantanamo Bay within the year, ban torture and close all secret CIA prisons.