Harper’s

Yes, that’s the opera based on the transcripts of the former attorney general’s bumbling testimony about the U.S. attorney firing scandal back in 2007.
A 29-year-old Australian, Melissa Dunphy, wrote the opera in part because she felt sorry for Gonzales, as she tells the Wall Street Journal. It’s called The Gonzales Cantata.
“I wrote the piece as [...]

In the ongoing debate over who ought (or ought not) be prosecuted for the abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. custody, American Civil Liberties Union national security lawyer Alex Abdo, made an important point yesterday that’s been largely overlooked.
“At the end of investigating is the time when you decide who to prosecute. You don’t [...]

Here’s an insightful observation from Harper’s Scott Horton today about Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s latest defense of the academic freedom of John Yoo, who reportedly may be asked to leave his tenured professorship at the University of California at Berkeley if an internal Justice Department report finds him guilty of ethical violations, as is [...]

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 prominent national security and human rights lawyer, [...]

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 in various secret and foreign prisons. He’s been [...]

As every lawyer knows, language matters. Bill Clinton was famously impeached because his definition of “sexual relations” didn’t include oral sex – a definition that Republican lawyers didn’t agree with.
So does it matter if the interrogation techniques that were used, authorized and encouraged by senior officials in the US government for use on suspected [...]

I’m glad to see that somebody isn’t just taking at face value Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s recent statements that Bush administration officials who approved the use of torture shouldn’t be prosecuted and needn’t be pardoned  because they all reasonably believed their actions were lawful.
On Thursday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) and Constitution, [...]

The pressure is ratcheting up on President-elect Barack Obama to do something as soon as he takes office about the Bush administration’s years of law-breaking.
The lawyer and writer Scott Horton, in an excellent feature in the December issue of Harper’s, lays out the Obama administration’s options. Horton points out that there is a long litany [...]