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 ...

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 ...

Four stories from today's news have stuck with me. First off, the enduring and irreversible effects of US government torture on Jose Padilla have left him with permanent mental damage: Jose Padilla had no history of mental illness when President Bush ordered him detained in 2002 as a suspected Al Qaeda operative. But he does now. The ...

The Bush administration has expanded the offshoring of torture to include torture dungeons in Ethiopia. This article in Der Spiegel (via True Blue Liberal) says: Terror suspects have been questioned by US officials in Ethiopia after being transferred from Somalia and Kenya. The captives included Europeans who were detained, interrogated ...

That's a quote from a BBC documentary entitled ''Mystery Flights'' on extraordinary renditions into Eastern Europe (via The Agonist). It's an hour long, it's as typically compelling as any BBC documentary, and it would never in a million years be shown on American TV. Watch it all; this is proof that our country has seriously lost its ...