Search Results for: CIA secret prison

Here, the author Pitasanna Shanmugathas a graduate from Vermont Law looks at the reprisals faced by prominent whistleblowers in the wake of Julian Assange’s release, and the threat whistleblower prosecutions raise to media freedom and the principles of transparency and accountability in government… The release of Julian Assange after years of legal battles highlights the [...]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found Lithuania liable on Tuesday for assisting the US with the torture of a man from Saudi Arabia at Detention Site Violet, a secret CIA prison in Lithuania, in 2005.  The court found that Lithuania violated several provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights against the applicant [...]

Marjorie Cohn is a professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California. She has authored publications arguing against the legality of the 2003 US military intervention in Iraq as well as the US-led NATO interventions into Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia. Professor Cohn is also a national board member of Assange [...]

North Carolina has an important connection to the “state secrets” at the center of an October 6 US Supreme Court argument. In this case, Guantanamo prisoner Abu Zubaydah seeks testimony from two former CIA contractors, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, on torture he suffered at a secret CIA prison in Poland. The contractors’ evidence would [...]

Army Colonel James Pohl, the US Military judge tasked with overseeing 9/11 cases, announced his retirement Monday before the completion of the trials that began in May 2012 and have seen numerous delays. “I have made a personal decision not to request an additional voluntary retiree recall and thus I will leave active duty after 38 [...]

June 26th is the United Nations’ International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. Its purpose — to denounce the crime of torture and proclaim solidarity with its survivors — is in stark opposition to the policy of my government. As a former Chief Prosecutor of an international war crimes tribunal in West Africa, I walked [...]

Here's the international legal news we covered this week: A group of five UN Human Right's experts on Friday asked Egypt to halt all pending executions following repeated allegations of unfair trials. The experts are concerned with a...

Here's the domestic legal news we covered this week: The Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a statement of interest Thursday on behalf of two conservative student groups at the University of California, Berkeley who are suing...

Military judge James Pohl ruled on Friday that no wrongdoing occurred when the prosecution destroyed a CIA secret prison, or "black site," on Pohl's orders. At the time Pohl gave the prosecution permission to destroy the...

Attorneys for Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah have filed a lawsuit against the two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who developed the harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation. The UK human rights group...