international law

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on “Face the Nation” Sunday that — like most Republicans and even some Democrats, including some in the president’s cabinet — he thinks President Obama was right when he said “we ought to go forward, not back.”
But then he went on to say, as Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday, that “I [...]

Throughout the Bush administration, Bush officials — including the president, as you can see here – consistently said that “this government does not torture people.” The Bush administration also promised that it doesn’t send prisoners to be tortured elsewhere.
The Obama administration is now saying the same thing.
Today, it assured reporters in a background briefing with [...]

Daphne Eviatar is guest-blogging for Glenn Greenwald today. The following is cross-posted at Salon.
If, as the latest reports indicate, Attorney General Eric Holder is serious about prosecuting the worst torture and abuse of “war on terror” prisoners that occurred during the Bush administration, then there’s some key evidence he’s going to want to take a [...]

Despite some of the more extreme attacks on Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh, Obama’s nominee for counsel to the State Department, Koh skillfully defended himself at a remarkably respectful hearing on his nomination before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday.
Although he faced tough questions on his views of the applicability of international [...]

It should come as no surprise that President Obama’s nomination of the widely respected human rights expert and dean of the Yale Law School, Harold Hongju Koh, to be the State Department’s legal adviser has gotten conservatives to call out their attack dogs, as FOX News reports.
Koh, as Spencer has written, is a former Clinton [...]

According to news reports over the weekend, the relentless Spanish judge and human rights prosecutor, Baltasar Garzon, who first came to international attention for prosecuting Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, will likely soon charge former high-level Bush administration lawyers for violating international law by providing the legal framework to allow the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo [...]

The U.S. government tried to get Binyam Mohamed — the British resident who was held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay for four years and allegedly tortured in CIA “black sites” — to promise not to speak to the media or sue the United States as a condition of his release, according to documents [...]

“Has the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism,” asked Harvard law professor Noah Feldman in an op-ed in The New York Times today, “or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?”
As I wrote when the administration first announced it would stop using the term [...]

There’s no question that international law is supposed to govern the Israel-Hamas conflict; but the persistent recriminations raise an important question: Does it matter?

The British government has initiated a criminal inquiry of the potential responsibility of CIA and British intelligence officials for detainee interrogation abuse, says Phillipe Sands in an interview with The American Lawyer posted today.
Sands, a professor of international law at University College London and author of “Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American [...]