Russ McBee

This morning, the US Supreme Court handed down its decision in Boumediene v. Bush, holding that Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention in US civilian courts. As SCOTUSblog said: The Court, dividing 5-4, ruled that Congress had not validly taken away habeas rights. If Congress wishes to suspend habeas, it must do so ...

The sham ''trials'' of detainees at Guantanamo have always been legally and Constitutionally invalid, but they were continuing anyway. Now, the process of these show trials has met some blowback from within the Pentagon (in contrast to civilian trials, all of the defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges in these cases are uniformed officers in ...

In August 2002, John Yoo wrote an infamous memo on behalf of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel which attempted to justify the use of torture by the CIA. The memo has since been released (PDF here), widely circulated, and then disavowed by the Bush White House. Another memo accompanied that one which remains secret to this day; this ...

Senators Jay Rockefeller and Patrick Leahy and Congressmen Silvestre Reyes and John Conyers have an op-ed piece in tomorrow's Christian Science Monitor that calls out the White House on its fear-mongering tactics regarding warrantless surveillance: Our country did not ''go dark'' on Feb. 16 when the Protect America Act (PAA) expired. ...

Today's updates on the continuing decline: The six Guantanamo detainees who are slated to be tried by the Bush administration's kangaroo courts are now facing the death penalty; if that's their sentence, they'll be executed at Guantanamo. The charges, the torture-derived evidence, the trials, the rules of procedure, the judge, the jury, the ...

The bombshell du jour should come as no surprise to anyone: The CIA made videotapes in 2002 of its officers administering harsh interrogation techniques to two al-Qaeda suspects but destroyed the tapes three years later, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday. [...] All the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 on the order of Jose A. ...

Michael Mukasey proved on Thursday that he is unfit to serve as Attorney General of the United States: President Bush's choice for attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey, embraced some of the administration's most controversial legal positions yesterday, suggesting that Bush could ignore surveillance statutes in wartime and avoiding a declaration ...

One year ago today, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This malignant, perfidious law gives the president the authority to suspend habeas corpus for anyone he chooses. It also sanctifies the admissibility of evidence obtained through torture. For a full year now, our country has been deprived of one of its most ...

The Bush Administration's use of torture got a big boost from the US Supreme Court today. This afternoon, the court refused to hear the appeal of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen whom the CIA mistook for someone else, kidnapped, and sent off to Afghanistan to be tortured. After five months of torture and confinement, the CIA realized they had the ...

This article in Forbes (via Whitescreek) tells the story of two Americans working in Baghdad who blew the whistle on some nasty illegal activity. After feeding the FBI documentation of illegal arms sales to civilians, the two whistleblowers were kidnapped and taken to Camp Cropper, the US military prison where Saddam Hussein was held. During his ...