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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
Ever since President Obama said in his speech at the National Archives that he believes there’s a category of people at Guantanamo who can’t be tried in criminal court or by military commission but are too dangerous to release, legal and More…
It was a blind quote hitting the civil-libertarian solar plexus. Bad enough that, as ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn reported late on Friday afternoon, the Obama administration was readying an executive order for a system for preventive detention in terrorism cases. President Obama More…
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 More…
That’s what Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and Gabor Rona, international legal director of Human Rights First, said in a conference call with reporters this afternoon, after meeting with the Department of Justice’s Special Interagency Task Force on Detainee Disposition.
“In order to save its ability to More…
Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ statements yesterday that he expects the United States will have to transfer up to 100 prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to the United States, where they’d be held indefinitely without trial, was an odd juxtaposition with yesterday’s guilty plea of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri. More…
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has really started something.
He reportedly brought his idea for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the White House Tuesday, talking with President Obama’s new White House Counsel Greg Craig about the proposal. “I went over some of the parameters of it More…
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