This is a bit flashbacky, but in June 2002, John Yoo, then the deputy chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, considered the question of what acts a U.S. citizen might commit that would indicate an implicit renunciation of his or her citizenship. Apropos of my More…
On Twitter, Newt insists that he misspoke: It wasn’t would-be-shoebomber Richard Reid (nationality: British) who was an American citizen; he meant Jose Padilla. This is supposed to inspire confidence in his sagacity as a terrorism expert. Not that this makes any more sense. Jon Stewart asked Gingrich about not More…
Building off his Sunday retaliation at Republican critics over the Mirandization and (successful!) interrogation of would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan goes much further in a USA Today op-ed.
It begins as an aggressive defense of the utility of law-enforcement approaches More…
Adam Serwer at The American Prospect gets ahold of a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder responding to some of GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) more fact-averse claims about the Obama administration’s handing of would-be Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. A choice excerpt:
Talk about getting a second bite of the apple. I’ve written before about the problem with the Department of Justice jumping in to defend a lawsuit charging that John Yoo was responsible for torture and abuse of “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla. Given that Yoo is the subject of More…
Buried in a profile of the controversial former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo in today’s Washington Post is the casual mention that the Justice Department is no longer representing Yoo to fight a lawsuit filed against him by Jose Padilla. Instead, GOP-connected lawyer and former Bush appellate court nominee More…
It wasn’t until late Friday afternoon that the Obama Justice Department, after years of wrangling over the fate of Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan boy arrested for allegedly lobbing a hand grenade at U.S. soldiers in 2002, admitted that it does not have enough evidence to continue to hold him More…
Since U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White ruled late Friday in San Francisco that former “enemy combatant” Jose Padilla can proceed with his lawsuit against “torture memo” author John Yoo, the decision has been interpreted by many in the media as a broad vindication of detainees’ rights to sue former Bush More…
Late on Friday, after some of us had long since packed up our computers, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ruled that Jose Padilla, the American citizen declared an “enemy combatant” by President George W. Bush and incarcerated at a U.S. Naval brig in South Carolina, may More…
While Congress debates whether senior Bush administration officials should be called to account for the torture, humiliation and indefinite detention of prisoners taken during the “war on terror,” some of those prisoners aren’t waiting around for lawmakers to make up their minds. A growing number of private lawsuits brought by More…
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