Last week I wrote about the serious limitations on President Obama’s new policy on the administration’s use of the “state secrets privilege” to dismiss cases charging the government with torture, warrantless wiretapping and other egregious abuses of executive power. Although the government has said it promises to invoke More…
Seven major civil rights and open government organizations today sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees urging them to pass legislation to restrict the government’s ability to use the “state secrets” privilege to dismiss litigation charging government wrongdoing. Although the Obama administration yesterday announced a More…
Ed Brayton at ScienceBlogs (and also of our sister site, The Michigan Messenger) has a thorough analysis of the Obama administration’s new state secrets policy, which I wrote about yesterday.
Ed sums it up: “All of the changes are to the process More…
Although the Obama administration’s much-anticipated new policy on the use of the so-called “state secrets” privilege, announced this morning, has drawn some praise, civil liberties lawyers and other critics of the use of the privilege don’t think it solves the problem.
The state secrets privilege allows the government More…
Today’s news that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will hear the claims of kidnapping and torture filed against the United States by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen and car salesman subjected to the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program in 2003, More…
This case has dropped a off the radar screen lately, but Bob Egelko at the San Francisco Chronicle today reminds us that the Obama administration is still fighting on three different fronts release of information that would likely show that U.S. officials tortured British former Guantanamo detainee Binyam More…
Carrie Johnson in The Washington Post today picks up on a problem we’ve been writing about at TWI for months now: when it comes to information about crimes committed by the previous administration, President Obama isn’t following through on his big commitments to “open government.”
“Civil liberties advocates are More…
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