Russ McBee

As the sun finally begins to rise and banish the darkness of the Bush years, we continue to witness an alarming chain of eleventh-hour regulations emanating from the White House. The latest of those offenses against decency was published today: The Bush administration yesterday granted sweeping new protections to health workers who refuse to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Jose Padilla was convicted yesterday on terrorism support charges, after spending five years in legal limbo. His guilt or innocence long ago stopped being the primary issue in this case; rather, the issue has been whether we as a society are willing to allow United States citizens to be ''disappeared'' into a military gulag and then tortured. The ...