Jane Mayer

This is my favorite rejection under the Freedom of Information Act ever.
In May, following a wealth of disclosures about the role of the Survival Evasion Resistence Escape program, which trains U.S. troops to resist torture, in shaping the Defense Department and the CIA’s interrogation programs under the Bush administration, it appeared that one of the [...]

Yup, that’s what Jane Mayer told Alternet’s Liliana Segura: the Defense Department actually hid prisoners from the International Committee of the Red Cross when the humanitarian group first visited the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in 2002.
“That’s an overt act; lying to the Red Cross, hiding prisoners from them,” Mayer said.
The ICRC is [...]

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 [...]

The case of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen arrested in New York and sent to Syria to be interrogated under torture, will be re-heard today by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, sitting en banc.
As I reported earlier, the 34-year-old computer consultant of Syrian descent was apprehended by U.S. authorities in 2002 [...]