By Jason Leopold
While Congress has focused primarily on the country’s economic turmoil and the lavish bonuses paid to Wall Street executives, a Senate Armed Services Committee report currently in the process of being declassified will force lawmakers to shift gears.
The Armed Services Committee will release–possibly as early as next week-its voluminous report on the treatment [...]
March 27, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
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By William Fisher
Human rights lawyers are proving to be a major headache for the new administration of President Barack Obama by stepping up their court challenges on issues of prisoner abuse to test the reality of the president’s pledge to create a “an unprecedented level of openness” in government.
A series of current court challenges [...]
March 26, 2009 | Filed under
Politics |
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By Andrew Lehman
I’m becoming one of those people that believe that there is no such thing as random chance. I don’t believe in god in any of the Western traditional senses. I don’t believe in reincarnation. I don’t believe each person’s life is preordained. I believe in what I’ve personally experienced, and then I take [...]
March 25, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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Spouse and Company Also Plead Guilty to Wire Fraud and Conspiracy
The Associate Director of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacy in Hines, Ill., agreed to plead guilty to being part of a conspiracy to defraud the VA and the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Department of Justice announced Tuesday. His wife [...]
March 24, 2009 | Filed under
Nation |
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By William Fisher
A leading legal rights group charged today that the Obama Justice Department is using immigration law to censor debate by selectively barring U.S. entry to foreign scholars.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) appeared in a federal appeals court in New York City today to argue that a Swiss professor and leading Muslim scholar [...]
March 24, 2009 | Filed under
Law |
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By Jason Leopold
In 2005, after pushing out the Justice Department lawyer who had overturned President George W. Bush’s claimed authority to abuse “war on terror” prisoners, his administration reinstated key elements of the memos granting Bush virtually unlimited powers over the detainees, according to a list of still-secret documents.
I obtained the list of legal memos about [...]
March 24, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
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By William Fisher
As President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice issued sweeping new guidelines to reverse the secrecy policies of former president George W. Bush, Congress weighed in with proposed new legislation to liberalize the Freedom of Information Act, and a federal judge ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to produce unedited summaries of some 3,000 documents [...]
March 24, 2009 | Filed under
Law |
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By William Fisher
A British court ruled yesterday that U.S. authorities asked a Guantanamo Bay detainee to drop allegations of torture in exchange for his freedom.
A ruling by two British High Court judges said the U.S. offered Binyam Mohamed a plea bargain deal in October. Mohamed refused the deal and the U.S. dropped all charges against [...]
March 24, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
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By Rosemary and Walter Brasch
There have now been more than 4,000 deaths and 30,000 casualties of American military in the war in Iraq. More than 100,000 Iraqis and others, most of them civilian, have also been killed in what is now known to be an unnecessary war. But, we as a nation are [...]
March 23, 2009 | Filed under
Commentary |
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By Jason Leopold The Obama administration intends to declassify and publicly release three previously Justice Department memorandums drafted in May 2005 that gave CIA interrogators the legal authorization to torture “high-value” detainees as well as a list of techniques to use against the prisoner, according to a report in Newsweek. According to a list of still secret [...]
March 22, 2009 | Filed under
Torture |
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