The Supreme Court has denied cert in two important cases, one an appeal of the dismissal of a suit by Jose Padilla against Donald Rumsfeld for his military detention and one an appeal by a Gitmo detainee who won his habeas corpus hearing at the district court level and had that decision reversed by the …
Category Archive: Torture
Jun 12 2012
Illinois Axes Funding for Police Torture Commission
A few years ago, a Chicago police commander and many officers were accused of torturing suspects to elicit confessions and the state set up a commission to investigate the allegations and refer the findings to a judge. Now that the commission is ready to turn over its first reports, the state legislature is closing it …
May 23 2012
Soufan Debunks Rodriguez on Torture
Ali Soufan, the former FBI interrogator and outspoken critic of the use of torture, is interviewed at the New Yorker and responds to the recent claims of Jose Rodriguez, the former CIA official who has written a book claiming that torture was crucial in the fight against Al Qaeda.
May 17 2012
Appeals Court Allows Private Contractor Suit to Continue
In a very important ruling, an en banc panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that private military contractors working in Iraq are not covered by the immunity given to soldiers, thus allowing a lawsuit against a group of contractor for torture and war crimes to continue. The Center for Constitutional Rights issued …
May 16 2012
Bush Officials Found Guilty of War Crimes. In Malaysia.
George Bush, Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials probably won’t be traveling to Malaysia any time soon. They have been found guilty of war crimes by a tribunal in that country, a ruling that can’t be enforced anywhere else but adds to the record of international condemnation for the crimes those men committed.
May 07 2012
Padilla Case Against Yoo Dismissed
There is nothing remotely surprising about the news that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has dismissed a lawsuit filed by Jose Padilla against former Bush lawyer John Yoo over the illegal detention and torture that Yoo provided legal cover for.
May 03 2012
The Know-Nothing Torture Advocates
As a new book by the man who erased the tapes of 90 CIA interrogations restarts the torture debate, Matthew Alexander — the lead investigator who helped find Zarqawi in Iraq — writes at the Huffington Post about the differences between torture advocates and opponents. Like the fact that the opponents have actually participated in …
May 02 2012
Senate Report Finds No Evidence That Torture Worked
The Senate Intelligence Committee has been investigating the question of whether the use of waterboarding and other forms of torture by the Bush administration was effective in getting useful information from detainees. A report to be released soon will conclude that there is no evidence that it did any good:
Apr 27 2012
Obama’s Astonishing Chutzpah
If you aren’t cynical enough about politics, this will make it worse. President Obama, who has maintained and even expanded the federal government’s illegal surveillance program and steadfastly refused to hold anyone accountable for torture, actually issued an executive order allowing the U.S. to sanction “foreign nationals” who do the same thing he is guilty …
Apr 26 2012
The American Torture Regime
Larry Siems, leader of the team that produced The Torture Report, a book put out by the ACLU, has read some 140,000 formerly classified documents on torture, released after a successful ACLU lawsuit. He reports on the reality of the American torture regime:
Apr 09 2012
Bush State Department Opposed Torture
My former colleague Spencer Ackerman got his hands on a document that a lot of people have wanted for a long time, a legal memo from the State Department’s legal counsel, Philip Zelikow, saying that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” — torture — approved by Bush and the DOJ were illegal and a violation of the …
Apr 09 2012
CIA Agent Blows Whistle on Secret Prisons and Torture
My former colleague Spencer Ackerman has an interview with Glenn Carle, a former CIA operative who has written a new book about his experiences with that agency’s network of secret prisons and how detainees are sent to them with no oversight and tortured.
Mar 01 2012
Greenwald Interviews Feingold
Glenn Greenwald did an interview with former Sen. Russ Feingold, one of the few consistent civil libertarians in Congress (and I mean really few, less than a handful) for the last couple decades. You can listen to it here and read the transcript here. They both point out, as I have, how bad Obama has …
Feb 24 2012
Santorum, Torture and Selective Catholicism
Here’s another example of how Rick Santorum picks and chooses which parts of Catholic doctrine he accepts and which he doesn’t. In May of last year, he came out in support of waterboarding and other forms of torture and said that John McCain just didn’t understand how well they worked.
Feb 13 2012
Obama, Terror Policy and Bipartisan Consensus
A new Washington Post poll finds a significant shift in the views of liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans when it comes to major anti-terror policies. On issues like drone strikes, Guantanamo Bay and the Patriot Act, Democrats are now more likely to support them now that Obama is in office, while Republicans are less likely …
About the Author
Recent Comments