rule of law

The influential Center for American Progress, which has close ties to the Obama administration, is now calling on President Obama to push back the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center to July. That’s despite the president’s day-two directive to close the notorious prison by January. Closure has been impeded by the inability to send [...]

What?
In an interview with the Guardian for the eighth anniversary of 9/11, Pataki criticised current White House policies for sending wrong signals about US intentions around the world. In particular, he attacked the recent decision by the US justice department to launch an official investigation into alleged abuses by CIA agents during the interrogation of [...]

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this morning titled “The Legal, Moral, and National Security Consequences of ‘Prolonged Detention,’” it was actually Richard Klingler, a former lawyer in the Office of White House Counsel under President George W. Bush and former general counsel on the National Security Council staff, who presented the dilemma most starkly [...]

The latest word on the Justice Department’s Office Of Professional Responsibility review of the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted the so-called “torture memos” is that the report concludes that the the lawyers committed “serious lapses in judgment,” as The New York Times puts it in a front page story today, but they should [...]

Here’s an unlikely endorsement:  former Independent Counsel Ken Starr — who spent much of the 1990s investigating President Bill Clinton — is backing Harold Koh, Obama’s nominee for legal adviser to the State Department.

Reading The New York Times’ lead editorial today feels a bit like reading a summary of much of what I’ve been writing for the past two months: that President Obama, despite his impressive pronouncements on closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and ending torture and unnecessary government secrecy, hasn’t changed the federal government’s positions [...]

At a call-in “town hall” meeting tonight, the American Civil Liberties Union reiterated its call for the new Obama administration to close the Guantanamo Bay prison on the president’s first day in office. With the help of the filmmaker Robert Greenwald, the ACLU is even distributing a short film to persuade people to join [...]

Remember when George W. Bush was supposed to be considering closing Guantanamo Bay? Explain why anyone ever believed that would happen, please. The New York Times: