Lawyers and court-watchers have been eagerly waiting to see how the Obama Department of Justice will define an “enemy combatant” — and wondering whether the new administration will continue to insist that the Pentagon has the right to hold people it suspects of assisting al-Qaeda or the Taliban indefinitely without More…
That’s the claim made by the Wall Street Journal editorial board over the weekend, hammering Obama for his aggressive assertion of executive power to hide evidence of warrantless wiretapping under the Bush administration.
Last night on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” Harper’s writer and lawyer Scott Horton made the astonishing — and very convincing — argument that, while most of us didn’t realize it, over the last eight years President George W. Bush had turned our country into a dictatorship.
Horton, a More…
When the Supreme Court tomorrow considers the government’s motion to dismiss the habeas corpus petition of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, it will find itself in tough position.
Since posting my story yesterday on how the Obama Justice Department is heading for a showdown with the federal judiciary in the Al-Haramain warrantless wiretapping case, I came across Glenn Greenwald’s excellent post on the case, duly expressing the outrage that I think it deserves.
While everyone’s expressing surprise More…
A heated confrontation is brewing between the Obama administration and the federal judiciary.
Late on Friday, the Justice Department’s lawyers filed a brief with a federal district court in California challenging the court’s power to carry out its own order. The government lawyers insisted that the court has More…
As I reported earlier, President Obama’s Justice Department today stood up in court and asserted the so-called “state secrets” privilege to argue, like the Bush administration before it, that the case of five victims of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” and torture program must be dismissed.
But what is the More…
In his op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Congress’s Phony War on Torture,” William McGurn takes congressional Democrats to task for not immediately proposing a law to ban waterboarding. Never mind that President Obama has already banned it and new Attorney General Eric Holder has clarified that it is, More…
I really hate writing posts about the media. It seems to me that complaining about the press is a distraction from engaging with the actual issues at hand. Yes, more often than not the press sucks, everyone knows it, the point is made, we factor it into our reasoning and More…
As I wrote last week, the initial Paulson bailout proposal — granting Treasury Sec. Henry Paulson Jr. absolute power over $700 billion in taxpayer money, unbridled by any pesky congressional oversight or judicial review — had the effect of eviscerating the usual checks and balances that American government was designed More…
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