Category: Salon

When did we become like Syria?

NOV 14, 2007

When visiting my grandmother’s house in Damascus a few years ago, I never could have imagined sitting one day in a U.S. court, listening to the U.S. government defend its covert transfer of a Canadian citizen to Syria to be tortured.

Yet, that’s precisely what happened last Friday in a U.S. circuit court in New York, with the beginning of Maher Arar’s appeal of a decision last year by a district court to throw out his suit against the U.S. government. Arar’s case was the first to challenge in court the Bush administration’s use of rendition — the process of secretly handing over people to other countries where torture is used during interrogations.  [full story]

Bush civil rights nominee under fire

JULY 28, 2007

A deal that would see David Palmer, a Bush administration nominee, quietly confirmed to the powerful Equal Employment Opportunity Commission appears to be faltering. Momentum against Palmer’s confirmation has been building since former Department of Justice employees took the unprecedented step of formally accusing him of having an abysmal professional and personal record on workplace discrimination issues.  [full story]

Bush’s Long History of Politicizing Justice

MAR 30, 2007

The current U.S. attorneys scandal shows that the Bush administration was mistaken in its belief that it could politicize the nation’s top federal law enforcement agency, the Department of Justice, with impunity. The attorney general‘s chief of staff and the director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys have both had to leave their jobs, and Congress has begun grilling DOJ leadership. But having decimated another entire sector of the DOJ in plain sight for six years with little consequence, is it any wonder the Bush White House figured nobody would miss a few prosecutors?  [full story]

How Lebanon Rescued Me

AUG 4, 2006

In March 2003, I fled to Beirut, Lebanon, wanting to escape the made-for-TV war on Iraq, the monotony of Washington, and the man who had become my boss, John Ashcroft.

Naturally, in this era of pretexts, the convergence of those events was itself also just an excuse. Even if my job as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department had not been increasingly meaningless under the Bush administration, I would have been fantasizing about returning to Beirut, as I had ever since it seduced me in the summer of 2000, when I first visited it as an adult.  [full story]