I’m going to have a few posts on answers Eric Holder gave to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Questions for the Record submitted after his last appearance in November 2009. Two of the questions (one from John Kyl and the other from Tom Coburn) asked whether Gitmo detainees brought to the United States for civilian trial [...]

Jeff Sessions has already seized on yesterday’s release of DOJ’s list of 390 terrorist convictions and twisted it to sustain his claim that we need to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a military commission. Much of his response consists of making non-specific claims about individuals on the list in an attempt to minimize the applicability [...]

Cass Sunstein doesn’t really have all that much to do with the content of this post. I named it after him as an excuse to recommend that you read Glenn Greenwald’s take-down of Sunstein as a potential SCOTUS appointee, and particularly to remind you of Sunstein’s paper advocating extensive propaganda to knock down the theories [...]

Since we’ve been talking about domestic right wing terrorism of late, I wanted to elaborate on a point I made here. Today, the Department of Justice released a list of all the terrorist-related individuals it found guilty in civilian courts since 9/11. And Scott Roeder, who was found guilty of killing George Tiller on January [...]

The Department of Justice has just sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee answering early questions about how many terrorists have been convicted or plead guilty in civilian courts. Between those convicted of terrorism-related crimes (150) and individuals with ties to international terrorism convicted of other crimes (like obstruction or perjury–the total here is [...]

This WaPo story–which tells how Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Tariq al-Sawah got special privileges and too much fast food at Gitmo in exchange for cooperation–focuses on the things the detainees get, like Subway sandwiches, their own mint garden, and their own compound. (h/t cs) But it really points to one more reason why civilian trials [...]

Lockheed Martin has been hired by the US government to “train” prosecutors and public defenders in Liberia; what could go wrong?

Bmaz had a post up this yesterday, based on this WaPo story, concluding that we’re not going to have real accountability for the destruction of the torture tapes. (Thanks to bmaz for minding the shop while I feted mr. ew’s birthday.) While I agree with bmaz generally that we’re not going to get real accountability [...]

There is a report out in the Washington Post that John Durham may be winding up his torture tape investigation and that little, if anything, will come from it.

The handwriting for a complete ObamaRhama cave to the neocon howlers on military commissions instead of civilian trials is getting carved awfully deep in the granite wall.