yoo

A few more points worth noting about the new Military Commissions Act amendments passed by Congress yesterday: Just as the House bill circulating earlier did, the amendments passed would still allow some coerced testimony to be used in court if the military judge decides it’s reliable and it wasn’t obtained using “cruel, inhuman, or degrading [...]

No matter how much former Vice President Dick Cheney insists that torturing prisoners in secret CIA prisons worked (and Spencer has already laid out the huge holes in that argument) — he and his fellow Republicans who still stand by their “enhanced interrogation techniques” can never prove that using less abusive techniques would not have [...]

The latest batch of torture memos written by the Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration, which Spencer and I wrote about yesterday, divulged in even more gruesome detail than we’d seen before just how far the previous administration was willing to go to justify the torture and abuse of detainees in its “war [...]

Spanish prosecutors have decided to go ahead with a criminal investigation of the six senior lawyers — including former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — who allegedly crafted the legal justification for the Bush administration’s torture and abuse of detainees in its “war on terror,” Scott Horton reports today in The Daily Beast.

As part of its “Transitions” series, The New York Times devoted a full page Sunday to op-eds expressing varying viewpoints on what President-elect Barack Obama should do about “the legal legacy of the war on terrorism.”
It’s an odd way of framing the issue — and an inherent concession to the notion that what legal experts [...]

The Department of Justice announced today that Roy Belfast Jr., aka Chuckie Taylor, son of the former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, has been sentenced to 97 years in prison for crimes related to the torture of prisoners in Liberia.
“This sentence sends a resounding message that torture will not be tolerated here at home or by [...]

As every lawyer knows, language matters. Bill Clinton was famously impeached because his definition of “sexual relations” didn’t include oral sex – a definition that Republican lawyers didn’t agree with.
So does it matter if the interrogation techniques that were used, authorized and encouraged by senior officials in the US government for use on suspected [...]

The New York Times’ Sunday lead editorial is devoted to how the new Obama administration can and should close down Guantanamo Bay shortly after Barack Obama assumes the presidency on Jan. 20.
The Times draws on the detailed recommendations of Human Rights Watch, which offers a sensible step-by-step plan for how the notorious prison can [...]

We’ve long known that the CIA waterboarded at least three Al Qaeda detainees.
We’ve also long known that the Justice Dept., at the behest of a Central Intelligence Agency deeply fearful about its legal vulnerabilities, endorsed the torture techniques that CIA leadership desired. And we’ve recently learned that George W. Bush’s principal aides, including Condoleezza Rice, [...]