Scott Horton

Yes, that’s the opera based on the transcripts of the former attorney general’s bumbling testimony about the U.S. attorney firing scandal back in 2007.
A 29-year-old Australian, Melissa Dunphy, wrote the opera in part because she felt sorry for Gonzales, as she tells the Wall Street Journal. It’s called The Gonzales Cantata.
“I wrote the piece as [...]

In the ongoing debate over who ought (or ought not) be prosecuted for the abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. custody, American Civil Liberties Union national security lawyer Alex Abdo, made an important point yesterday that’s been largely overlooked.
“At the end of investigating is the time when you decide who to prosecute. You don’t [...]

Seeking to dismiss criminal fraud charges against him, Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager working for an English contractor, has charged that he was seized in Afghanistan and tortured before before being sent to Virginia to face trial.
Scott Horton reports on the case and provides links to all the court documents on The Huffington [...]

Spanish prosecutors have decided to go ahead with a criminal investigation of the six senior lawyers — including former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — who allegedly crafted the legal justification for the Bush administration’s torture and abuse of detainees in its “war on terror,” Scott Horton reports today in The Daily Beast.

Senate Republicans are pressuring President Obama into not releasing the controversial torture memos we’ve all been waiting for (and which the administration again refused to release last week) by threatening to block confirmation of two key Obama Justice Department nominees, Scott Horton reports in The Daily Beast today.
The appointments of Dawn Johnsen, nominated to head [...]

Here’s an insightful observation from Harper’s Scott Horton today about Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz’s latest defense of the academic freedom of John Yoo, who reportedly may be asked to leave his tenured professorship at the University of California at Berkeley if an internal Justice Department report finds him guilty of ethical violations, as is [...]

Last night on MSNBC’s  “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” Harper’s writer and lawyer Scott Horton made the astonishing — and very convincing — argument that, while most of us didn’t realize it, over the last eight years President George W. Bush had turned our country into a dictatorship.
Horton, a prominent national security and human rights lawyer, [...]

As every lawyer knows, language matters. Bill Clinton was famously impeached because his definition of “sexual relations” didn’t include oral sex – a definition that Republican lawyers didn’t agree with.
So does it matter if the interrogation techniques that were used, authorized and encouraged by senior officials in the US government for use on suspected [...]

The pressure is ratcheting up on President-elect Barack Obama to do something as soon as he takes office about the Bush administration’s years of law-breaking.
The lawyer and writer Scott Horton, in an excellent feature in the December issue of Harper’s, lays out the Obama administration’s options. Horton points out that there is a long litany [...]