Latest in torture
On Friday, Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted government motions to dismiss and for summary judgment in Al Shimari v. CACI, a case brought by plaintiffs who were detained in Abu Ghraib. The full opinion is available here and below.
Germany and France have arrested former members of the Assad regime—including the most senior former official arrested so far—for serious violations of international law, including crimes against humanity.
Since his election, President Trump has been silent on questions of torture and interrogation. What does that mean?
The answer may turn on the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in Munaf v. Geren.
Georgetown's Elizabeth Grimm Arsenault looks at Trump's campaign rhetoric and describes the peril of his position on torture.
General Hayden's reaction to recent comments from presidential candidates opens a broader discussion on when a service member may disobey an order from a superior.
In my view, at least, Justice Scalia's public statements on national security issues and his one majority(-ish) opinion in a "canonical" national security case (in Ashcroft v. al-Kidd) could lead folks reasonably to question just how faithful Justice Scalia was to his first principles where national security was involved. That doesn’t in any way diminish the late Justice’s track record (or Adam’s elegant reflection upon it); it just suggests that, as is so often the case, adding national security-specific considerations to the mix tends to complicate matters.
France raises the stakes for Syrian officials by opening the world’s first criminal investigation into Syrian regime crimes.
A little over a week ago, the law firm Sidley Austin LLP submitted its "Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture" to the APA Board of Directors. Today, the report was released to the public along with a story in the New York Times summarizing its contents. The APA commissioned the report after a heated debate within the organization about whether ethics guidelines developed in 2005 were designed to facilitate toture by the