truth commission

Political candidates often invoke God and spirituality on the campaign trail, but Rev. Richard Killmer, executive director of the National Religious Campaign against Torture, would like more pols to live up to those professed beliefs once they’re in office. President Obama, for example, has spoken eloquently of his own religious awakening, and of the importance [...]

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) issued a strong statement today in response to the release of the CIA inspector general report revealing yet more details of abuses committed by CIA interrogators. Here it is, in part:
The claims of former Vice President Cheney and other Bush administration officials that the authorization of harsh interrogation [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly getting closer to appointing an independent prosecutor to investigate torture under the Bush administration. That’s making some CIA employees nervous.
Greg Miller and Josh Meyer of The Los Angeles Times on Sunday confirmed earlier reports that Holder has reluctantly come around to thinking that he can’t avoid the fact that [...]

Via Zachary Roth at TPMmuckraker, The Huffington Post reports that retired Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, called for a truth commission on torture. He’s the first such Bush-era senior official or military officer who might face sanctions from such a commission to propose creating one.

It’s worth noting that in his speech this morning, while President Obama said he doesn’t think Congress ought to convene a truth commission along the lines of what Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) or Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) have proposed, he did not rule out the possibility of a Justice Department probe of potential violations of [...]

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) made an eloquent case in The Boston Globe on Sunday for why the United States needs the “commission of inquiry” he’s proposed to get at the truth of how torture and abuse became accepted U.S. policy and practice.
Referring to the abusive interrogation techniques used on detainees, Leahy wrote:
The techniques are wrong [...]

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has invited Jay Bybee, the former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer and current judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, reports Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post. Is this the beginning of a broader Senate Judiciary Committee probe?

While much of the mainstream media — Charlie Savage at The New York Times and John MacKinnon at The Wall Street Journal, among others — were reporting yesterday on how it would be virtually impossible to prove that the Bush administration’s lawyers’ approval of torture amounted to a crime (relying in large part on the [...]

Following up on Spencer’s post about CIA Director Leon Panetta’s letter to his employees: Panetta’s statement that CIA officers “should not be investigated, let alone punished,” because this “is what fairness and wisdom require,” is not surprising. But it may not be all that wise, either.

As Daphne wrote earlier, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) reportedly told Charlotte Dennett, writing for Consortiumnews.com, that even he thinks his proposed truth commission to investigate alleged lawbreaking during the Bush administration is “not going to happen,” due to a lack of any semblance of bipartisan support.
Well, maybe the truth commission idea still has some life [...]