Russ McBee

Salim Hamdan was convicted today of providing material support to terrorists in a sham kangaroo court convened at Guantanamo. His ''trial'' included the admission of inflammatory, irrelevant evidence such as the 1998 African embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks, neither of which he was accused of knowing about. Evidence derived through torture ...

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 ...

Throughout the Cold War, propagandists in this country consistently painted the US as the world's champion of human rights and the rule of law, while the Soviet Union and its member states were cast as paragons of evil. Although neither characterization was entirely accurate, the relative comparison between the two did highlight stark differences ...

This week, the UN's Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (the ''Third Committee'') approved a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty; the resolution will go to the full General Assembly for consideration, possibly as soon as next month. Of course, the United States voted with the medieval contingent: 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 ...

Finally: The American Psychological Association ruled Sunday that psychologists can no longer be associated with several interrogation techniques that have been used against terrorism detainees at U.S. facilities because the methods are immoral, psychologically damaging and counterproductive in eliciting useful information. Psychologists who ...