state secrets

Anticipating that the debate over reauthorization of the USA PATRIOT Act will soon come to the Senate floor, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday asked Attorney General Eric Holder to declassify key information about how the law’s “business records provision” has been used. They last sent a classified [...]

Although the government has said that warrantless wiretapping under the Terrorist Surveillance Program has stopped, the Obama administration has not said that warrantless wiretapping isn’t ongoing under some other program.

The latest in a string of lawsuits challenging harsh interrogation techniques could fare better than similar cases.

As Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald both pointed out over the weekend, Eric Holder on Friday once again declared that a case charging government lawbreaking must be dismissed because to let it continue would reveal important “state secrets.” That’s despite the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder not long ago announced that he’d be asserting [...]

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed a landmark lawsuit filed by a Canadian victim of “extraordinary rendition” against former U.S. officials, ruling that torture victims have no right to compensation from the U.S. government, even if U.S. officials were complicit in their treatment.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who was seized in 2002 [...]

The Obama administration just won a round in the lawsuit brought by five alleged torture victims against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that allegedly helped the CIA transport detainees to countries where they’ were interrogated under torture, a practice known as “extraordinary rendition.”

The New York Times’ lead editorial today is a powerful indictment of the Obama administration’s continuation of Bush-era efforts to conceal the facts of U.S.-sponsored torture.
Running through the list of situations that we’ve been reporting on in which the Obama administration continues to conceal evidence of torture — from the efforts of British resident Binyam [...]

A British High Court on Friday ordered that previously redacted text concerning the alleged torture of former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed must be made public.
This is a breakthrough for Mohamed, because while he claims that he was tortured while detained in Pakistan and interrogated by U.S. and British agents, he’s never been able to [...]

To follow up on my earlier post about Rep. Louis Slaughter (D-N.Y.) and her speech on her colleagues’ move to amend the Freedom of Information Act to prevent the release of photographs depicting abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, it’s worth looking at the conference report on the bill. The bill is called the “Protected [...]

Much as Barack Obama may deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for changing the climate toward international diplomacy and recognizing the value in cooperating with the rest of the world, the prize seems more about congratulating the United States for breaking with the Bush go-it-alone attitude than for any great achievements or policy changes Obama has [...]