Despite the Obama administration’s surprisingly vigorous arguments that the case had to be dismissed to prevent disclosure of “state secrets,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today reinstated the case of Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, in which five victims of the CIA’s notorious “extraordinary rendition” More…
With the latest batch of Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel torture memos having revealed more of the intricate, gruesome details of the CIA’s interrogation techniques, how can the government continue to claim that its now-defunct “extraordinary rendition” and torture program is a “state secret”?
That’s the question raised in aMore…
In an interview that aired Wednesday night on the CBS Evening News, Attorney General Eric Holder suggested to Katie Couric that the Obama administration is unlikely to depart dramatically from the Bush administration’s position on the use of the state secrets privilege, noting just one case out of about 20 More…
Carrie Johnson in The Washington Post today picks up on a problem we’ve been writing about at TWI for months now: when it comes to information about crimes committed by the previous administration, President Obama isn’t following through on his big commitments to “open government.”
“Civil liberties advocates are More…
Reading The New York Times’ lead editorial today feels a bit like reading a summary of much of what I’ve been writing for the past two months: that President Obama, despite his impressive pronouncements on closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and ending torture and unnecessary government More…
Scott Horton at Harper’s has posted a helpful roundup of the latest developments in the increasingly bizarre case of Binyam Mohamed in the United Kingdom.
Mohamed, readers will recall, is the British Ethiopian-born Gitmo prisoner first abducted in 2002 in Pakistan and tortured over the next two years More…
In a move that’s sure to dismay some of President Obama’s faithful, the new administration today stood up in a federal appeals court and reiterated the Bush administrations’ arguments that victims of “extraordinary rendition” and torture should not be allowed to bring their claims in federal court because doing so More…
President Obama and new Attorney General Eric Holder Monday will face the first public test of their stated commitments to opening government and ending torture.
Since we first reported in January on the pending court case, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, there’s been growing pressure — both from advocacy More…
Although Leon Panetta hasn’t had so much as a single senator come out against his nomination to become CIA director, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will reconvene at 10 a.m. at the request of Vice Chairman Kit Bond (R-Mo.), who said yesterday that both he More…
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) asks, what about extraordinary rendition? Will the CIA under Leon Panetta continue to seize terrorism suspects and outsource interrogations to foreign governments known to utilize torture?
“No, we will not,” he says, citing President Obama’s recent executive order forbidding the practice. But what about so-called More…
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