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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

On the subject of waterboarding, here's John McCain, who was tortured by the North Vietnamese, last October: Waterboarding is a form of torture no matter how it is done and should be a prohibited among U.S. military interrogation practices, Republican presidential candidate John McCain said today, taking issue with GOP rival Rudy Giuliani’s ...

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 ...

After the revelation that the CIA had destroyed many hours of video proving they had used torture, this story takes on a new urgency: Lawyers for a British resident who the US government refuses to release from Guantanamo Bay have identified the existence of photographs taken by CIA agents that they say show their client suffered horrific ...

The bombshell du jour should come as no surprise to anyone: The CIA made videotapes in 2002 of its officers administering harsh interrogation techniques to two al-Qaeda suspects but destroyed the tapes three years later, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday. [...] All the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 on the order of Jose A. ...