Deborah Pearlstein

He called Guantanamo a “black eye” but wouldn’t call for its closure. So what is the attorney general nominee’s plan for detaining terrorist suspects?

Gonzales’ worst fault — the inability to separate politics from law — is one that may well plague the administration beyond his resignation.

The U.S. decision five years ago to torture detainees has infected a generation of terrorism cases where it might have once been possible to do justice — but may not be anymore.

Late last month, The Wall Street Journal featured another entry in a series of op-eds from the conservative legal team of David Rivkin and Lee Casey railing against those who would challenge the administration’s policies of detention, interrogation, and trial in the post-9/11 world. This time, Mssrs. Rivkin and Casey accuse lawyers who have opposed […]

The Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, holding that the Guantanamo Bay military commission trials were unlawful by design, is by any standard a blockbuster. In a solid 5-3 majority opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the Court ruled that the commissions violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva […]

Next week, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the legality of a secret domestic surveillance program authorized by President Bush in 2002. Senators are set to examine the Attorney General on the administration’s sweeping theory of its own power, by which the president can ignore acts of Congress when they don’t comport with […]

Over the vigorous opposition of human-rights groups and military leaders, senators passed an amendment to the defense authorization bill last week that purports to limit the rights of detainees held by the United States at its naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to challenge in U.S. federal courts the legality of their prolonged detention on […]

Last week’s vote in the Senate in favor of a measure banning the use of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment by any agency of the United States government was the most dramatic step Congress has taken to rein in executive power since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The amendment, put forward by Senator […]

“[W]hile unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive and legislative branches of the government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of self-restraint.” — Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 467 (1972) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting) (citation omitted) The death of Chief […]