Search Results for: cia secret prisons

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 [...]

The US Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a 7-2 decision that information related to torture at CIA “black sites” is protected under the state secrets privilege, which allows the government to bar the release of information when it would endanger national security. Between December 2003 and September 2004, respondent Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn (Zubaydah), a [...]

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 [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in US v. Zubaydah on Wednesday, a case involving a plaintiff’s right to discovery of privileged national security information. The US sought a writ after the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit compelled the US to confirm or deny that it had a CIA facility in [...]

Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah, who has been detained for 19 years without charges or a trial, filed a complaint on Friday with the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions (UNWGAD) requesting intervention in his case. Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan after the September 11 attacks and was held and tortured by the CIA in [...]

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 [...]

The European Court of Human Rights found Thursday that Lithuania and Romania had violated articles of the European Convention on Human Rights by allowing secret CIA prisons. Lithuania violated the article against torture, the right to liberty and security, the right to respect for private life and the right to an effective remedy. Lithuania had [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday that a former CIA officer has been charged with unauthorized possession of classified material and conspiracy to commit espionage. In the indictment by a federal grand jury in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia , Jerry Chun Shing Lee is believed to have [...]

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...