December 6, 2008
President-elect Obama's announcement of his (mostly) stellar national security team coincides with the release this week of a bipartisan commission report with this chilling assessment of the most important challenge that team faces: "Without greater urgency and decisive action by the world community, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist...
November 15, 2008
What should Barack Obama do with the 250 men who are still locked up in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp? Of the many problems the new president will face, this is one of the most difficult, and one he must get right. Along with it, he must answer equally tough questions about how his administration will deal with suspected terrorists in the future: Where will they be held and what...
June 14, 2008
When it comes to national security-fighting wars and defending the nation-the courts have long deferred to the president and Congress. After 9/11, the Bush administration counted on judges staying out of the way as it figured out what to do with suspects rounded up in the War on Terror. The administration built a prison at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, because it was...
May 17, 2008
Now and then events converge to remind us of how often plaintiffs' lawyers pervert our lawsuit industry for personal and political gain, under the indulgent eyes of judges, without rectifying any injustices, at the expense of the rest of us.
We have recently witnessed the spectacle of three of the nation's richest and most famous plaintiffs' lawyers heading to federal prison for various criminal...
April 12, 2008
Among the legal issues over which the Bush administration and its congressional critics are stalemated in the war on terrorism is the so-called state secrets privilege. The case of one Khaled el-Masri illustrates the need for carefully balanced congressional reforms during the next administration to mitigate the privilege's harsh effects on deserving plaintiffs-and on the national image.
In a...
March 8, 2008
Attorney General Michael Mukasey has in most ways been a vast improvement over his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales. But at a time when an unprecedented one in 100 American adults is behind bars -- including one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 -- he has so far been a big disappointment to those hoping for a change in the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key policies on nonviolent drug...
March 1, 2008
A lot of Democrats, editorialists, and others have said not only that waterboarding is torture (as Sen. John McCain has) but also that the CIA's use of that practice on three Qaeda leaders in 2002 and 2003 obviously violated a 1994 law making torture a crime. From that premise, some have said or implied that:
• The administration lawyers who have come to the opposite conclusion -- now...
December 8, 2007
Hillary Rodham Clinton is supposed to be smart. But how smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?
The irony of her potshots at Barack Obama's character has hardly gone unnoticed. Nor has the idiocy of her December 2 press release breathlessly revealing that "in kindergarten, Senator Obama...
December 1, 2007
Lakhdar Boumediene was abducted almost six years ago from his home in Bosnia and flown to Guantanamo. He may be a bad guy. Or he may not be. We have no idea. The reason is President Bush's continuing war on due process, which has blighted the lives of some unknown number of innocent men while doing vast damage to America's standing in the world.
Boumediene's petition for release, and those of 62...
November 10, 2007
"A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. 'The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture, or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists.' " [emphasis added]
Such stuff has long been...
