As I posted earlier, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled against the government in the al-Haramain case today. Basically, Walker ruled that al-Haramain had been illegally wiretapped and the case should move to settlement judgment (corrected per some lawyer). But there’s more to it. I think Walker has crafted his ruling to give the government a big [...]

So al-Haramain, at least for the moment, has won its case against the government. But there’s an aspect of the case that often gets forgotten: al-Haramain argued not just that some of its employees were wiretapped, but that lawyers working for al-Haramain, Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor, were wiretapped. We seem to have forgotten that [...]

Short version: al-Haramain wins! Judge Walker just issued the following ruling in the al-Haramain case: The court now determines that plaintiffs have submitted, consistent with FRCP 56(d), sufficient non-classified evidence to establish standing on their FISA claim and to establish the absence of any genuine issue of material fact regarding their allegation of unlawful electronic [...]

All this talk about Michael Chertoff’s role in refusing CIA an advance declination for torture had gotten me wondering about the status of Chertoff’s biggest policy initiative at the Department of Homeland Security: the fence along the Mexican border. Last I remembered, the Bush Administration was using the fence as an excuse to shred environmental [...]

There’s actually what I think is a big scoop in this weird David Ignatius column on debates over whether we can target Anwar al-Awlaki. The scoop? The Yemeni government approached the US in October asking for help targeting al-Awlaki. Last October, the Yemeni government came to the CIA with a request: Could the agency collect [...]

Newsweek’s Eve Conant, in the guise of writing about progressive media, reviews several descriptions that consider the Hutaree militia a disturbing case of right wing domestic terrorism. She links to a Blue Texan post, quotes Rachel Maddow describing them as “a ‘strange combination of absurd and scary’ with names ‘out of a Calvin and Hobbes [...]

The third sentence of the Bybee Two Memo asserts Abu Zubaydah is “one of the highest ranking members of the al Qaeda terrorist organization.” You have asked for this Office’s views on whether certain proposed conduct would violate the prohibition against torture found at Section 2340A of title 18 of the United States Code. You [...]

As I posted a week ago, in April 2006 Steven Bradbury wrote one of the most egregious of all the egregious torture memos, one approving the new Army Field Manual, including its Appendix M laying out more intense interrogation methods. While the legal analysis of the memo was, itself, fairly nondescript, the analysis in the [...]

Royce Lamberth appears to be having a split the baby moment in the Richard Horn suit. As you recall, back in the Clinton era, a DEA official sued the government for illegal spying on him. He alleged that State and CIA conspired to thwart his efforts to cooperate with the Burmese government on drug eradication [...]

As I pointed out in an earlier post, when Counterterrorism Center lawyer Jonathan Fredman sent the torturers in Thailand a green light for torture in August 2002, he relied on language about intent from a July 13, 2002 fax from John Yoo to John Rizzo rather than the finalized August 1 Bybee Memo. In a [...]