war crimes

Ahmed al Darbi, the brother-in-law of one of the 9/11 hijackers, supposedly plotted a never-realized 2001-2002 attack on an unnamed ship in the Strait of Hormuz. He also allegedly met Osama bin Laden and trained at an al-Qaeda camp. And he’s been imprisoned by the U.S. military since 2003 waiting to be tried on [...]

New documents obtained by TWI related to the case of Mohammed Jawad, an adolescent tortured by Afghan police and then abused again by U.S. interrogators, suggest that not only certain CIA interrogations, but also interrogations by the Department of Defense demand a broader investigation.

John Yoo should be fired, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes, according to anti-war activists who greeted the University of California at Berkeley law professor when he returned to Boalt Hall, the law school where he has tenure, on Monday.
Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and [...]

The last time I wrote about the case of Guantanamo detainee Mohammed Jawad, the government had just conceded that its primary evidence — his “confessions” — were the product of torture and inadmissible in court. But the government still wasn’t letting Jawad go. Last night I received a copy of the transcript of last Wednesday’s [...]

Speaking at the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing today about torture, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) appeared to confirm reports that the Obama administration is planning to revive the much-criticized military commissions.
After excusing the Bush administration’s torture and abuse policies, Graham noted that he had a meeting yesterday with administration officials about what should be done with [...]

Well, we knew things were bad for newspapers these days, but this is a really sad sign:  The Philadelphia Inquirer has hired John Yoo — the notorious former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer and architect of the “torture memos” that not only narrowed the definition of torture to exclude waterboarding and most other widely recognized [...]

Former Bush administration Office of Legal counsel lawyer John Yoo yesterday told a packed auditorium at the campus of Chapman University School of Law in Orange County, Calif. — where he is a visiting professor (Yoo is on leave from what he called “The People’s Republic of Berkeley”) — that he and his colleagues did [...]

It was an odd but refreshing spectacle, to see U.S.-based human rights lawyers arguing to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the United States has effectively insulated itself from accountability for torture and war crimes, and ought to be pushed by an international body to do better.

You’ve probably heard by now that the five alleged plotters of the 9/11 terrorist attacks have not only admitted to the deed once again, but cackled and boasted about it. As soon as the U.S. military commission approved for release their statement, titled “The Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations,” it was featured in [...]

The CIA today acknowledged in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that it destroyed 92 tapes of harsh interrogations of detainees related to the “war on terror”.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed the lawsuit seeking the information more than five years ago, and more than one year ago, the ACLU tried to hold the [...]