This revelation from former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge’s new book, nabbed by Paul Bedard, might shed some light on why Ridge passed on a 2010 U.S. Senate bid.
[He] was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as
Writing about the role Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan played in the Bush counterterror surveillance program, Marcy Wheeler, blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon today, argues that as NSA adviser, rather than CIA director (a position Brennan was nominated for, but Glenn helped torpedo the nomination by More…
Obama administration officials will tour a Michigan state prison today in the hopes of using it to hold suspected terrorists now imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, The Associated Press reports.
Representatives of the Departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security are scheduled to visit the prison in Standish, Mich., More…
The New York Times has a blockbuster story this morning about the infamous secret prisons — or “black sites” — operated by the CIA for housing and interrogating high-value terror suspects. The article contains new details about the locations of the sites:
One jail was a renovated
Here’s another point I should have made in my piece earlier today: Just because President Obama’s Justice Department has been asserting a remarkably broad, Bush-like view of his detention authority pursuant to the laws of war in the Guantanamo detainees’ habeas corpus cases, that doesn’t mean the president More…
Since my piece on the intensifying battle over “preventive detention” was published, Ken Gude from the Center for American Progress wrote to point out an important distinction that deserves more emphasis.
As I note in my story, Gude and Kate Martin, Director of the Center for National Security More…
Underway in southern Afghanistan. There’s not a whole lot I can add from Washington (or, actually, Detroit, where I’m blogging from right now) to Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s on-the-ground report. Brig. Gen. Lawrence Nicholson, the Marine commander in the area, is very well respected by everyone I’ve spoken to, and his admonition More…
The American Civil Liberties Union will file a brief tomorrow urging the federal court to suppress evidence gathered using torture, which the government wants to rely on in the case of Mohammed Jawad, the boy who “confessed” to throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers after being arrested and tortured More…
NPR’s report this morning that the Brookings Institution’s Benjamin Wittes has proposed what’s expected to be a highly influential plan for “preventive detention” — which could lock up “dangerous” terror suspects potentially forever without charge or trial — gives even more urgency to the question that Spencer raised More…
Testifying recently before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder was asked what the Justice Department plans to do with Guantanamo Bay detainees who can’t be sent home, if no other country will take them.
Given that President Obama just signed a law sent to him by Congress that More…
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