Despite President Obama’s previous criticism of former President George W. Bush’s “signing statements” that limit the president’s responsibility to comply with a bill passed by Congress, it turns out Obama has been doing much the same thing since he took office. Charlie Savage reported in The New York More…
OK, so which is more shocking:
1. Aram Rostam’s report for The Huffington Post that the CIA used fire ants on a detainee’s head to “break him”; or
2. The fact that Rostam ran a report based on a second-hand account of a years-old outburst by a CIA “supervisor” More…
The explosive inspectors general report released on Friday makes one thing increasingly clear: the Bush White House knew that it was probably breaking the law.
From the report itself, John Yoo’s Office of Legal Counsel memo — and the lightning-fast reporting of Spencer Ackerman, Marc Ambinder and More…
Huge news from Dafna Linzer and Peter Finn. The Obama administration fears that congressional prerogative is going to get in the way of closing Guantanamo Bay by January. So its answer is to cut Congress out of the decision-making and set up a system of “prolonged detention” for an More…
NPR’s report this morning that the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes has proposed what’s expected to be a highly influential plan for “preventive detention” — which could lock up “dangerous” terror suspects potentially forever without charge or trial — gives even more urgency to the question that Spencer raised More…
Asked this morning when the Justice Department plans to release the highly-anticipated report by its internal ethics office regarding the conduct and legal conclusions of Bush administration Office of Legal Counsel lawyers, such as John Yoo and Steven Bradbury, Holder said they are “pretty close to getting their report More…
Imagine what would happen if Mir Hussein Moussavi disappeared into Evin prison this afternoon and then a few days later Mahmoud Ahmadinejad emerged to say that Moussavi, under the kind of harsh questioning necessary to protect the Islamic Republic from outside subversion, had confessed to being a paid agent of 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…
The New York Times’ front-page story Sunday reporting the unanimous agreement among Justice Department lawyers that the “harsh” interrogation techniques approved by the Office of Legal Counsel for use by the CIA were legal relies on the classic journalistic “battle of the experts”: one “outside” expert says the CIA interrogation More…
The Daily Telegraph reports that some of the photos of prisoner abuse that President Obama has refused to release — after earlier promising to make them public — depict the brutal rape and sexual abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping
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