Torture // Current

Alleged Torture Vs. Documented Al-Qa'ida Torture

Of course al-Maqtari would have done a better job of depicting torture if he had used the Al-Qa'ida torture manual that... more

doithengiaorg
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Closing Down Gitmo

ANP: An interview with David Cole. Part 1 President-elect Barack Obama says closing down the detainee camp in Guantanamo Bay... more

Vierotchka
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The End Of America: Movie

Its not over yet, as we speak the Bush administration is looting our treasury and our future.

uppityprogressive
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Impeach Bush To Stop Pardons

The Founding Fathers clearly anticipated a corrupt President might pardon his co-conspirators, and specified impeachment as the... more

uppityprogressive
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Indict Bush for his crimes and save the republic

Free speech is no longer a right. Stand alongside the route of a presidential cavalcade with a humble protest sign, and the Secret... more

freeforall2008
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Close Gitmo and end military commissions

Alice Walker is the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But Monday, I called her to talk about a... more

uppityprogressive
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Top Chicago Cop Indicted on Torture-related Charges

In the past three decades hundreds of Black men have accused former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge of torture, but in the end,... more

goldenways
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Impeach Bush and Cheney Now

According to Seymour Hersh there is a conga line of insiders waiting until January 20th to spill the beans on the gross... more

uppityprogressive
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Will Barack Obama undo Bush's legal legacy?

When Barack Obama becomes president in January, he'll confront the controversial legal legacy of the Bush administration.

From expansive executive privilege to hard-line tactics in the war on terrorism, Obama must decide what he'll undo and what he'll embrace.

On one hand, civil libertarians and other critics of the Bush administration may feel betrayed if Obama doesn't move aggressively to reverse legal policies that they believe have violated the Constitution and international law.

On the other hand, Obama risks alienating some conservative Americans and some — but by no means all — military and intelligence officials if he seeks to hold officials accountable for those expansive policies.

These are some of the legal issues confronting him:

* How does he close the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba? He's pledged to shutter it, but how quickly can he do so when it holds some detainees whom no administration would want to release?

* Obama has declared coercive interrogation methods such as waterboarding unconstitutional and illegal, but will his Justice Department investigate or prosecute Bush administration officials who ordered or condoned such techniques?

* Will the new administration press to learn the full extent of the Bush administration's electronic eavesdropping and data-mining activities, and will it curtail or halt some of them?

* The Bush administration exerted tight control over the Justice Department by hiring more Republican-leaning political appointees and ousting those who were viewed as disloyal. Will Obama give the department more ideological independence?

Undoing some policies will take time.

With 316 conservative appointments to the federal courts over the last eight years, Obama could attempt to tilt the courts back to the center or even to the left with his nominees. He could alter the Supreme Court's bent by replacing two or three justices who'll probably retire soon.

Civil libertarians, who feel emboldened by a Democrat in the White House, tick off a long list of what they think Obama should do as soon as he takes office. Not only should Guantánamo be closed, they say, Obama should revoke the immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated with secret eavesdropping, ban the use of secret prisons by the CIA and investigate and perhaps prosecute administration officials for authorizing controversial interrogation methods.

(more at link)When Barack Obama becomes president in January, he'll confront the controversial legal legacy of the Bush administration. ... more