The House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on the Justice Department is off to a good start, with Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) listing the questions he plans to put to the featured witness, Attorney General Eric Holder.
Conyers promised to question Holder about all the hot-button topics that have dominated the More…
David Luban, a law professor and expert on legal ethics at Georgetown University, just called the torture memos written by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel “a legal train wreck.”
“The rules of professional ethics forbid lawyers from counseling or assisting clients in illegal conduct,” Lujan, the first witness More…
While we’re all duly praising Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) for calling a hearing next Wednesday on the torture memos, I’m still puzzled by one thing: why isn’t the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts calling the authors of the memos to explain how and why they More…
Who knew we were supposed to have a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board? Not Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, apparently.
A question about why that board — recommended by the 9/11 Commission and created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 — still doesn’t exist appeared More…
To follow up on my earlier post about Sen. Pat Leahy’s (D-Vt.) refusal to hold hearings on the torture memos as chair of the Judiciary Committee, we now learn, as Spencer just wrote, that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has boldly taken the reins, using the Subcommittee on Administrative More…
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) made an eloquent case in The Boston Globe on Sunday for why the United States needs the “commission of inquiry” he’s proposed to get at the truth of how torture and abuse became accepted U.S. policy and practice.
Referring to the abusive interrogation techniques used More…
In the aftermath of Sen. Arlen Specter’s (D-Pa.) defection from the Republican Party earlier this week, we wondered about Sen. Charles Grassley’s (R-Iowa) plans for leadership slots on the various committees where he sits. Briefly, because of GOP conference rules, Grassley faces the dilemma of either dropping his ranking More…
Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) told reporters Tuesday afternoon that he’s worked out an agreement with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) that will allow the Senate’s newest Democrat to be seated on committees as if he’d entered the upper chamber in 1980 as a Democrat rather than a Republican.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) today issued not one but two press releases responding to the latest batch of Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel torture memos produced yesterday by the Justice Department in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Conyers, More…
The latest batch of torture memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration, which Spencer and I wrote about yesterday, divulged in even more gruesome detail than we’d seen before just how far the previous administration was willing to go to justify More…
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