SAN FRANCISCO -- A ruling that allowed a prisoner to sue former Bush administration attorney John Yoo for devising the legal theories that justified his alleged torture threatens to "open the floodgates to politically motivated lawsuits" against government officials, Yoo's lawyers say.
In papers filed late Monday with the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, Yoo's new team of private lawyers argued that a judge's refusal to dismiss a suit by inmate Jose Padilla injected the courts into the political arena.
On the night that Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election,
21-year-old Mohammed el Gharani was sitting in a segregation cell in
Guantanamo Bay's high security Echo Block.
He remembers the excitement among his fellow prisoners at the
prospect of an Obama presidency. "Everyone was very hopeful; people
were saying he was going to change things, that he would close the
prison," Gharani, who was released in June, says.
"Even the guards were telling us that if he won, things would improve for us."
"Extraordinary rendition" is White
House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He's a Canadian
citizen who was "rendered" by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured
for almost a year.
NEW YORK - The long road to the proverbial day in court just got longer for five men who claim they were "disappeared" and tortured by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The men, who say they were victims of the extraordinary rendition programme conducted during the administration of President George W. Bush, have been trying since 2007 to get their cases heard on the merits.
The CIA misled Congress about its torture program and other issues, the House Intelligence committee has concluded.
In a hearing of the House Intelligence committee this afternoon,
Reps. Anna Eshoo and Jan Schakowsky, both Democrats, pointed to at
least five instances going back to at least 2001 in which the C.I.A.
withheld information from or lied to Congress.
NEW YORK - The fifteenth anniversary of the U.S. ratification of the United Nations Convention Against Torture passed last week with little fanfare and virtually no press attention from the mainstream media here.
But according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), "U.S. policy continues to fall short of ensuring full compliance with the treaty."
For example, the organisation said that an appendix to the Army Field Manual (AFM) can still facilitate cruel treatment of prisoners and detainees at home and abroad.
It's been said with regards to the Watergate scandal and the
Nixonian presidency that the cover-up was worse than the crime. A month
after Nixon resigned, his successor, President Gerald Ford pardoned
him, and many observers believed his technically-less-than-one-term
administration never recovered from that action.
"The cover-up continues," a New York Times editorial declared on Sunday.
The Obama administration has clung for so long to the Bush administration’s expansive claims of national security and executive power that it is in danger of turning President George W. Bush’s cover-up of abuses committed in the name of fighting terrorism into President Barack Obama’s cover-up.
We have had recent reminders of this dismaying retreat from Mr. Obama’s passionate campaign promises to make a break with Mr. Bush’s abuses of power, a shift that denies justice to the victims of wayward government policies and shields officials from accountability.
The Louisiana Board that licenses psychologists is facing a growing legal
fight over torture and medical care at the infamous Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons.
In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired
colonel Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a U.S. prison camp while an
interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming near-naked man on the
floor.
