The Pentagon’s report yesterday that the conditions at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp meet all the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, was, not surprisingly, met with a mixture of skepticism and downright hostility.
Adm. Patrick Walsh reported that based on more than 100 interviews over 13 days, inspections of More…
The Obama administration, under pressure to turn over key memos written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, has asked the federal judge in New York for another 90 days to consider its position on a Freedom of Information Act case brought by a coalition of civil liberties advocates. More…
As I reported earlier, President Obama’s Justice Department today stood up in court and asserted the so-called “state secrets” privilege to argue, like the Bush administration before it, that the case of five victims of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” and torture program must be dismissed.
But what is the More…
In a move that’s sure to dismay some of President Obama’s faithful, the new administration today stood up in a federal appeals court and reiterated the Bush administrations’ arguments that victims of “extraordinary rendition” and torture should not be allowed to bring their claims in federal court because doing so More…
President Obama and new Attorney General Eric Holder Monday will face the first public test of their stated commitments to opening government and ending torture.
Since we first reported in January on the pending court case, Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, there’s been growing pressure — both from advocacy More…
Since my story a few weeks ago on the Jeppesen Dataplan case, there’s been growing pressure on the Obama administration to reverse course and stop asserting “state secrets” to thwart the case, which in addition to compensating these victims, could reveal critical information about the Bush administration’s torture and More…
The Obama administration may have just failed the first big test of its promises to end unwarranted government secrecy.
According to a decision issued Wednesday by the High Court in Great Britain, the court will not publish its summary of the alleged torture of Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam More…
The Secrecy News Blog, published by the Federation of American Scientists, notes that Attorney General Eric Holder has made some promising statements on the issue of government secrecy.
In response to questions from Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), Holder wrote:
I will review significant pending cases in which DOJ
President George W. Bush’s former aide and adviser, Karl Rove, has reportedly been instructed to ignore another congressional subpoena, this one issued earlier this week by Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan). According to Newsweek, Bush’s lawyer, former White House counsel Fred Fielding sent a letter Jan. More…
As President Obama talks about building up U.S. forces in Afghanistan, it raises the inevitable question about what he’s going to do with the 600 prisoners the United States is holding at the prison at the Bagram air base – and whether previous plans to build a new More…
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