Human Rights First

A bipartisan group of more than 120 judges, prosecutors, diplomats, former members of Congress and high-level military and government officials yesterday released a proposed plan for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and trying all suspected terrorists in civilian federal court.
“Some have opposed the closing of Guantanamo because they believe there is no viable alternative [...]

The possibility prompts fervent opposition from Republicans, who say the 9/11 terrorists should never be allowed anywhere on U.S. soil, let alone in a civilian U.S. court.

Seven major civil rights and open government organizations today sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees urging them to pass legislation to restrict the government’s ability to use the “state secrets” privilege to dismiss litigation charging government wrongdoing. Although the Obama administration yesterday announced a new policy in which it [...]

Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, for years tried to track the deaths of “war on terror” detainees being held in U.S. custody. The author of the book “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and America’s War on Terror,” published in 2006 [...]

Human Rights First has just released a new report updating its previous study of criminal terrorism cases prosecuted since the early 1990s. Once again, it concludes that the federal courts are fully capable of prosecuting complex and sensitive cases of international terrorism.
The organization’s previous report, issued last year, was written by two former federal prosecutors [...]

Here’s another point I should have made in my piece earlier today: Just because President Obama’s Justice Department has been asserting a remarkably broad, Bush-like view of his detention authority pursuant to the laws of war in the Guantanamo detainees’ habeas corpus cases, that doesn’t mean the president has to stick with that definition in [...]

What I should have written yesterday about Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies is that she supports using an executive order on preventive detentions if and only if it’s a method of forestalling an overbroad legislative proposal to impose them. Even so, that position probably won’t impress Gabor Rona, the international legal [...]

A letter to the White House asks the president not to expand a controversial Bush-era policy.

An anonymous White House quote on preventive detention has put civil liberties advocates on the offensive.

The American Civil Liberties Union will file a brief tomorrow urging the federal court to suppress evidence gathered using torture, which the government wants to rely on in the case of Mohammed Jawad, the boy who “confessed” to throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers after being arrested and tortured by Afghan authorities in 2002, then [...]