Notwithstanding Rep. Louise Slaughter’s (D-N.Y.) impassioned plea, the House this afternoon passed that amendment to alter the Freedom of Information Act and hide detainee abuse photos — and to keep the question of what’s secret and what’s not away from the courts.
As I reported on Friday, a federal judge had given the Obama administration until yesterday to disclose or cite the reasons for not disclosing hundreds of documents about the CIA’s former “enhanced interrogation” regime, and the administration opted for continued nondisclosure. The Justice Department filed papers to that effect yesterday, More…
Jameel Jaffer, head of the American Civl Liberties Union’s national security project, has a few problems with Defense Department General Jeh Johnson’s speculation yesterday that the Obama administration might detain people even after they’ve been acquitted in a terrorism trial. From a just-released statement:
“Continuing to detain a person
The 2004 report into the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program” from then-Inspector General John Helgerson is becoming something of a white whale for the ACLU. Although the civil liberties group had reached an agreement earlier this year with the Obama administration to release the report — considered a “holy grail” More…
Not content with my confusion over President Obama’s statement that the torture photographs he’s no longer in favor of releasing “are not particularly sensational,” I asked Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, about it. It’s the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request for More…
Something I couldn’t figure out for my piece yesterday on the 2007 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel about CIA interrogations: why didn’t the Obama administration disclose it last week, when it released the 2002 and 2005 OLC memoranda? The Justice Department declined to comment on More…
The Justice Department on Thursday again delayed disclosure of three critical legal memos written by Steven Bradbury, then a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), that reportedly authorized the the CIA to torture prisoners. This is at least the second time that the government More…
In an October 2001 memo released today on Monday, then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo advised the Pentagon’s top lawyer that the president may not only deploy the military within the United States, but it may More…
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