Russ McBee

Major General Antonio Taguba, who conducted an extensive inquiry into the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, has spoken out again on the Bush regime's lawlessness. In his preface to a new report from Physicians for Human Rights, he says this: In order for [detainees] to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was ...

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 ...

George ''Baby Doc'' Bush vetoed a bill today that would have banned the CIA from torturing people using waterboarding. The bill would have required the CIA and other government agencies to abide by the interrogation guidelines set forth in the US Army Field Manual. One retired general had this to say: Retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, a ...

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. ...

While on a tour of several African countries, George Bush acknowledged Kosovo's recent declaration of independence from Serbia and stated that the US would soon establish reciprocal diplomatic relations: President Bush hailed the newly independent Kosovo and officially recognized it as a state and a ''close friend'' on Monday, expressing strong ...

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 ...

In the span of just a couple of days, the disastrous Bush administration has admitted that it has ordered the use of torture and may do so in the future if it feels like it, whether it's legal or not. And if it's illegal, no one will be prosecuted for doing it, since Bush thinks he's above the law. Oh, and they've admitted to having another ...

Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced today that he has initiated an investigation into potential criminal wrongdoing by the CIA in its destruction of video tapes which showed the torture of detainees by US personnel: ''Following a preliminary inquiry into the destruction by CIA personnel of videotapes of detainee interrogations, the ...