One of the most important ways in which humane societies struggle to deter outbreaks of mass violence is by working to pursue justice, so that would-be war criminals might think twice about their actions after seeing that perpetrators of such crimes are being aggressively pursued and held to account for their crimes. DOJ Criminal Division [...]

Remember the OPR Report? No, not the OPR Report on John Yoo’s laughably bad torture memos. I’m talking about the OPR Report on John Yoo’s even worse memo(s) authorizing domestic surveillance. The Torture OPR Report notes that it was the domestic surveillance memo, and not the torture memos, that first clued Jack Goldsmith into how [...]

I guess, in addition to President Rahm Emanuel and Attorney General Lindsey Graham, Deputy Attorney General Robert Gibbs sees the wisdom in putting aside rule of law for political expediency. Some policy advisers have wondered why the administration’s flack is so often in attendance, but insiders fluent in the administration’s power dynamics know Obama values [...]

I wrote in my last post on David Passaro that he knew precisely how to defend himself (go here for general background on Passaro and his case). Even before he was indicted, Passaro asked for discovery on CIA’s rules of engagement for detainee interrogations, which he tied to SERE techniques well before the connection had [...]

Glenn Greenwald just tweeted this fairly unsurprising article reporting that Anwar al-Awlaki’s family would like the US to take him off their kill lists. His father, Nasser al-Awlaki, a former minister of agriculture and rector at the University of Sanaa, called on the US on Sunday to end the hunt for his son. “If Washington [...]

Aafia Siddiqui has been at the center of one of the many mysteries flowing from the Bush and Obama administrations’ conduct of  intelligence operations. A Pakistani native and former MIT scientist, background on Siddiqui can be found several places, including a Seminal diary by ondelette here. The stories of Siddiqui’s disappearance and  her recent trial [...]

We’ve long known that in February 2005, then-acting head of OLC Daniel Levin contacted DOD General Counsel to remind him that the March 14, 2003 Yoo memo on torture had been withdrawn. But I, for one, had never seen a copy of that letter. It turns out the government included it with their Appeals brief [...]

It was not Ben Nelson who killed the nomination of Dawn Johnsen, nor was it Arlen Specter or Senate Republicans. No, the sole reason Dawn Johnsen is not leading the OLC is that Barack Obama and his coterie of advisors did not want Dawn Johnsen leading the OLC.

As I said in my last post on David Passaro, the only CIA guy to be prosecuted for detainee abuse, Passaro knew (or learned, in anticipation of his indictment) how to defend himself against charges stemming from torture. As I’ll show here, he was trying to expose the tie between SERE and the government’s torture [...]

There was never any question but that the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to be head of the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel would be withdrawn. Now we have confirmation of that fact.