The Washington Independent

Posts Tagged Torture

[Updated] Gitmo Prisoner’s Death: Suicide or Murder?

By | 11.20.09 | 4:19 pm

Jeffrey Kaye at Truthout has a good piece today on the suicide — or murder? — of Yemeni Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi in June. It’s a powerful reminder of why human rights advocates, as well as U.S. military leaders, think it’s important to close that More…

Won’t You Help Jay Bybee Against Those Who Want to Hold Him Accountable for Torture?

By | 11.19.09 | 9:27 am

Michael Isikoff reports:

The federal judge who helped draft Justice Department memos on torture has set up a legal defense fund to pay the costs of defending against possible disciplinary or impeachment proceedings. Jay Bybee, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge in Las Vegas, quietly set up the fund

More…

Holder Says OPR Report Will Be Released by the End of the Month

By | 11.18.09 | 12:56 pm

Responding to a question from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who’s asked frequently when the Justice Department will finally release the repeatedly delayed report by the Office of Professional Responsibility on the conduct of lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel under President Bush, Holder said that he expects it More…

International Justice Group Takes Aim at Bush Officials

By | 11.16.09 | 10:53 am

The International Center for Transitional Justice usually focuses on bringing to light and holding perpetrators accountable for such heinous crimes as genocide, mass murder and systematic torture, often in far-off war-torn countries with dismal human rights records.

So it’s significant that today they’ve released a report More…

Lawyers Allege Ongoing ‘Dragnet’ Surveillance

By | 11.13.09 | 6:00 am

On October 30, the Justice Department for the first time applied its new “state secrets” policy to a case charging the government with breaking the law. Open government advocates hoping for a significant change in the government’s stance toward secrecy in national security cases were sorely disappointed. Attorney General Eric More…

NYT Slams Federal Appeals Court for Rendition Decision

By | 11.11.09 | 11:52 am

Praising an Italian court’s recent ruling that CIA agents broke the law in an extraordinary rendition case, The New York Times today highlights a growing phenomenon that hasn’t received sufficient attention: European courts appear more willing than their American counterparts to enforce the laws protecting basic human and More…

Feinstein’s CIA Inquiry Will Finish ‘Early Next Year’

By | 11.10.09 | 2:14 pm

It may not be the 9/11 Commission, and may not have the force of, say, John Durham’s Justice Department inquiry into prospective CIA illegality in the Bush administration’s so-called ‘enhanced interrogation program.’ But a panel helmed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, has gone More…

Rendition Case Tests FBI Immunity

By | 11.10.09 | 6:00 am

Twenty-four-year-old Amir Meshal, the son of Muslim immigrants from Egypt, was a lifelong resident of New Jersey when, after living briefly in Cairo with extended family members, in 2006 he decided to go to Somalia to study Islam and experience living under Islamic law. The country appeared to have stabilized More…

FBI Interrogators Argued in 2002 That ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Techniques Were Illegal and Ineffective

By | 11.08.09 | 2:03 pm

As former Vice President Dick Cheney and some Republican lawmakers continue to debate whether torture works and was a legitimate interrogation technique during the Bush administration, it’s almost jaw-dropping to read some of the memos that were written by the real experts on interrogation techniques in the U.S. government, warning More…

Declassified Docs Reveal Pentagon Ignored FBI’s Warnings on Abusive Interrogations

By | 11.07.09 | 7:05 pm

The Justice Department released more documents — or, at least, less-redacted documents — late Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the government’s obligation in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the More…