Last year, Republican Senator Arlen Specter slipped a clause into the reauthorized USA Patriot Act that allows Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to appoint U.S. Attorneys without Senate confirmation. Gonzales took advantage of that crafty little provision to fire eight U.S. Attorneys who weren’t goose-stepping to the Bush agenda and replace them with Bush loyalists. Denying… Read more »
Last week, in Boumediene v. Bush, two judges on a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that strips the rights of all Guantánamo detainees to have their habeas corpus petitions heard by U.S. federal courts. If that decision is left to stand,… Read more »
When the Army judge declared a mistrial over defense objection in 1st Lt. Ehren Watada’s court martial, he probably didn’t realize jeopardy attached. That means that under the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Constitution, the government cannot retry Lt. Watada on the same charges of missing movement and conduct unbecoming an officer.Lt. Watada is the… Read more »
In one of the most severe blows the Bush administration has dealt to our constitutional democracy, the Pentagon attacked the lawyers who have volunteered to represent the Guantánamo detainees. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles Stimson threatened corporate lawyers who agree to defend the men and boys imprisoned there. Flashing a list of corporations that… Read more »
As the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and were on the verge of taking over the Senate, George W. Bush announced that Donald Rumsfeld was out and Robert Gates was in as Secretary of Defense. When Bush is being run out of town, he knows how to get out in the front… Read more »
With great fanfare, George W. Bush announced to a group of carefully selected 9/11 families yesterday that he had finally decided to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other alleged terrorists to Guantánamo Bay, where they will be tried in military commissions. After nearly 5 years of interrogating these men, why did Bush choose this… Read more »
They ranged from little babies to adult males and females. I’ll never be able to get that out of my head. I can still smell the blood. This left something in my head and heart.– Observations of Lance Cpl. Roel Ryan Briones after the Haditha Massacre On November 19, 2005, Marines from Kilo Company, 3rd… Read more »
The Moussaoui jury today enters its fifth day of deliberations on whether to execute the self-avowed conspirator in the September 11 attacks. After hours of graphic testimony and videotapes of the horrors on 9/11, as well as Moussaoui’s confession, this should have been an open-and-shut case. Yet the jury cannot ignore the fact that Zacarias… Read more »
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was found dead in his jail cell at The Hague Saturday. Since 2001, he had been on trial for genocide in Bosnia, and war crimes and crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. Although many have already adjudged him guilty, we will never hear the official verdict of the… Read more »
Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Commission reported that the violent force-feeding of detainees by the US military at its Guantánamo prison camp amounts to torture. More than a third of the prisoners held there have refused food to protest being held incommunicado for years with no hope of release. They have concluded that… Read more »