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 ...

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 ...

Gosh, what a surprise: Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Friday he doesn't plan for a special prosecutor to investigate whether the CIA broke the law when it destroyed videotapes of terror interrogations, defying some in Congress who want an independent look at the politically charged case. Mukasey, in a 41-minute briefing with reporters, ...

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 ...

This pretty much says it all: The New York University Center on Law and Security has completed a review of cases classified by the federal courts as terrorism related, starting from September 11, 2001 and going up through September 11, 2006. The report, using data compiled by a team of NYU law student researchers, shows that of the 510 ...

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 ...

Previously, I blogged about the new provisions in the revised Patriot Act which give the attorney general the power to put executions on the fast track. We're supposed to trust Alberto Gonzales with the responsibility of deciding when to short-circuit the legal process in favor of expediency. TruthOut has posted an interview with Paul Charlton, ...

First, we're told that we're supposed to trust Alberto Gonzales to certify that the government's warrantless spying on us is Constitutionally valid and not at all Orwellian. Now, it turns out that the revised Patriot Act requires us to trust Alberto Gonzales with the authority to put certain executions on the fast track: The rules implement a ...