The Washington Independent

Posts Tagged prosecution

Leahy Announces Hearing Next Week on Truth Commission

By | 02.25.09 | 3:15 pm

Picking up on the controversial proposal he made during a Feb. 9 speech at Georgetown University, Sen.Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) today reiterated his call for a “truth commission” on the Senate floor and said the Senate Judiciary Committee would hold a hearing next Wednesday to begin to consider the idea.

The Right Idea on Justice — Mostly

By | 02.24.09 | 10:35 pm

He says all the right things, doesn’t he?  Here’s President Obama from tonight’s speech, on American values, justice and torture:

To overcome extremism, we must also be vigilant in upholding the values our troops defend – because there is no force in the world more powerful than the example of

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McCain Could Be the Key to a Truth Commission

By | 02.20.09 | 12:33 pm

In reporting yesterday on the fallout from Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) proposal last week to create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate the Bush administration’s alleged crimes in connection with its “war on terror,” I neglected to mention that in 2005  Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) had proposed a More…

TWI Drives the Debate on MSNBC

By | 02.20.09 | 7:14 am

If you happened to catch The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC last night, you saw TWI Legal Correspondent Daphne Eviatar breaking down the pros and cons of Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.)  proposed “truth commission” to investigate the Bush administration’s alleged crimes. Daphne also talked about the problem More…

More ‘Damning’ Evidence of Bush Lawbreaking

By | 02.16.09 | 12:35 pm

Jason Leopold at The Public Record has acquired some important inside information about a still-classified report written by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility that provides more evidence of Bush administration lawbreaking.

According to Leopold, OPR director H. Marshall Jarrett reached “damning” conclusions about the advice of John More…

Leahy’s Truth Commission Idea Gaining Steam

By | 02.11.09 | 6:46 am

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has really started something.

He reportedly brought his idea for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the White House Tuesday, talking with President Obama’s new White House Counsel Greg Craig about the proposal. “I went over some of the parameters of it More…

Panetta Hearing: Don’t Prosecute CIA Interrogators for Torture

By | 02.05.09 | 3:28 pm

As expected, CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta says that he doesn’t think anyone in CIA should be prosecuted for torturing detainees since they were told by the Bush administration’s legal experts that such actions were legal. “Waterboarding is torture and it’s wrong,” he told Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich). “Those individuals operated More…

Executive Pay Is One Thing. Next Stop: Immigration

By | 02.04.09 | 1:22 pm

Among the many hot-button issues that President Obama weighed in on during his presidential campaign and followed up on in his first week in office, immigration was decidedly NOT one of them. But as more information comes to light about how the Bush administration used law enforcement to appease the More…

Gonzales: Holder Won’t Prosecute Me

By | 01.26.09 | 4:40 pm

Attorney General-nominee Eric Holder’s hard line on interrogation (“waterboarding is torture“) rattled Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and a few minority Senators enough to delay the vote to send Holder’s nomination to the Senate floor.  After all, if waterboarding is torture, and torture is a crime, who’s to say More…

Is Iglesias’ New Role Already Irrelevant?

By | 01.21.09 | 1:47 pm

If President Obama is drafting an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay, and he has already filed a motion to halt military commission trials, does that make fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias’ new gig as a Gitmo prosecutor irrelevant?

If the Gitmo prosecutions get moved More…