In a recent Rolling Stone magazine interview, you spoke of this administrations commitment to civil rights while simultaneously insulting the intelligence of those who are concerned with civil liberties. It is this administrations actual record on civil liberties, a record that is in fact worse than the preceding one, that is both clearly inexcusable and dangerously irresponsible. [...more]
TOMORROW will be one year since President Obama signed an executive order outlawing torture, yet our debate about interrogation methods continues. Though the president deserves praise for improving matters, the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think, and elements of our interrogation policy continue to be both inhumane and counterproductive. [...more]
A study, published in The Journal of Legal Studies, found that between 1985 and 2003, reports of state-sponsored torture collected by the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International increased, even as a growing number of countries signed on to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. [...more]
Just as the volume of calls for investigations into the U.S. torture program reached deafening levels this week, another classified report came out Tuesday that revealed new details about the military's role in torturing detainees. [...more]
In Cambodia they’re once again endeavoring to hold trials to bring some former senior Khmer Rouge officials to justice for their 1975-79 war crimes and crimes against humanity. The current defendant in a United Nations-organized trial, Kaing Guek Eav, who was the head of a Khmer Rouge torture center, has confessed to atrocities, but insists he was acting under orders.1 As we all know, this is the defense that the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected for the Nazi defendants. Everyone knows that, right? No one places any weight on such a defense any longer, right? We make jokes about Nazis declaring: “I was only following orders!” (”Ich habe nur den Befehlen gehorcht!”) Except that both the Bush and Obama administrations have spoken in favor of it. [...more]
The Milgram experiments from the early 1960's are classic (but shocking) studies that demonstrated the "sheeple-ness" of people everywhere. In the experiments -- which have been replicated numerous times across multiple cultures, races and age ranges -- subjects willingly engaged in administering extremely painful electric shocks to other human beings for no reason other than the fact they were ordered to do so by an apparent authority figure. [...more]
Was one of the youngest prisoners at Guantánamo rushed to court by the Bush administration for political reasons? [...more]
The Bush administration's treatment of juvenile prisoners shipped to Guantánamo Bay defies logic as well as international law. [...more]
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) must stop stonewalling congressional oversight committees and release vital documents related to the program of secret detentions, renditions, and torture, three prominent human rights groups said today. Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law (NYU IHRC) reiterated their call for information, following the CIA's filing of a summary judgment motion this week to end a lawsuit and avoid turning over more than 7,000 documents related to its secret "ghost" detention and extraordinary rendition program. This motion is in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in federal court last June by these groups. The organizations will file their response brief next month. [...more]
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request today with the Departments of Justice and Defense for the release of a report on a long-running investigation of the FBI's role in the unlawful interrogations of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. The Justice Department's Office of Inspector General (OIG) launched the investigation after internal government documents - uncovered by an ACLU lawsuit - revealed that FBI agents stationed at Guantánamo Bay expressed concern after witnessing military interrogators' use of brutal interrogation techniques. [...more]
