Antonin Gregory Scalia was an American jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. He was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and textualist position in the U.S. Supreme Court's conservative wing. For catalyzing an originalist and textualist movement in American law, he has been described as one of the most influential jurists of the twentieth century, and one of the most important justices in the Supreme Court's history. Scalia was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2018 by President Donald Trump, and the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University was named in his honor.
Judd Alan Gregg is an American politician and lawyer who served as the 76th governor of New Hampshire from 1989 to 1993 and was a United States senator from New Hampshire; in the Senate, Gregg served as chairman of the Senate Health Committee and the Senate Budget Committee. He is a member of the Republican Party and was a businessman and attorney in Nashua before entering politics. He currently serves as the Chair of the Public Advisory Board at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College. Gregg was nominated for Secretary of Commerce in the Cabinet by President Barack Obama, but withdrew his name on February 12, 2009. He chose not to run for reelection to the Senate in 2010, and former State Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, also a Republican, was elected to succeed him. On May 27, 2011, Goldman Sachs announced that Gregg had been named an international advisor to the firm. In May 2013, Gregg was named the CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a Wall Street lobbying group. He later stepped down as CEO in December 2013 and became a senior adviser.
Rasul v. Bush, 542 U.S. 466 (2004), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in which the Court held that foreign nationals held in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp could petition federal courts for writs of habeas corpus to review the legality of their detention. The Court's 6–3 judgment on June 28, 2004, reversed a D.C. Circuit decision which had held that the judiciary has no jurisdiction to hear any petitions from foreign nationals held in Guantanamo Bay.
During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the CIA committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs of the abuse by CBS News in April 2004. The incidents caused shock and outrage, receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.
Alberto R. Gonzales is an American lawyer who served as the 80th United States Attorney General, appointed in February 2005 by President George W. Bush, becoming the highest-ranking Hispanic American in executive government to date. He was the first Hispanic person to serve as White House Counsel. Earlier he had been Bush's General Counsel during the latter's governorship of Texas. Gonzales had also served as Secretary of State of Texas and then as a Texas Supreme Court Justice.
Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 548 U.S. 557 (2006), is a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States held that military commissions set up by the Bush Administration to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay violated both the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and the Geneva Conventions ratified by the U.S.
Extrajudicial prisoners of the United States, in the context of the early twenty-first century War on Terrorism, refers to foreign nationals the United States detains outside of the legal process required within United States legal jurisdiction. In this context, the U.S. government is maintaining torture centers, called black sites, operated by both known and secret intelligence agencies. Such black sites were later confirmed by reports from journalists, investigations, and from men who had been imprisoned and tortured there, and later released after being tortured until the CIA was comfortable they had done nothing wrong, and had nothing to hide.
On October 31, 2005, President George W. Bush nominated Samuel Alito for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Alito's nomination was confirmed by a 58–42 vote of the United States Senate on January 31, 2006.
John B. Bellinger III is an American lawyer who served as the Legal Adviser for the U.S. Department of State and the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration. He is now a partner at the Washington, D.C. law firm Arnold & Porter, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Guantánamo, GTMO, and Gitmo, on the coast of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Of the roughly 780 people detained there since January 2002 when the military prison first opened after the September 11 attacks, 735 have been transferred elsewhere, 36 remain there, and 9 have died while in custody.
David M. Brahms is an attorney and retired Brigadier General who served in the United States Marine Corps.
James P. Cullen was a brigadier general in the United States Army who served in the Judge Advocate General's Corps.
The Military Commissions Act of 2006, also known as HR-6166, was an Act of Congress signed by President George W. Bush on October 17, 2006. The Act's stated purpose was "to authorize trial by military commission for violations of the law of war, and for other purposes".
No-Hearing Hearings (2006) is the title of a study published by Professor Mark P. Denbeaux of the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall University School of Law, his son Joshua Denbeaux, and prepared under his supervision by research fellows at the center. It was released on October 17, 2006. It is one of a series of studies on the Guantanamo Bay detention center, the detainees, and government operations that the Center for Policy and Research has prepared based on Department of Defense data.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" is a euphemism for the program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world, including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
A detailed chronology of events in the dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy.
Steven Gill Bradbury is an American attorney and government official who served as the General Counsel of the United States Department of Transportation. He previously served as Acting Assistant Attorney General (AAG) from 2005 to 2007 and Principal Deputy AAG from 2004 to 2009, heading the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the U.S. Department of Justice during President George W. Bush's second term.
A set of legal memoranda known as the "Torture Memos" were drafted by John Yoo as Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the United States and signed in August 2002 by Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, head of the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice. They advised the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Department of Defense, and the President on the use of enhanced interrogation techniques: mental and physical torment and coercion such as prolonged sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and waterboarding, and stated that such acts, widely regarded as torture, might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority during the "War on Terror".
The Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA) is an Act of the United States Congress that was signed into law by President George W. Bush on 30 December 2005. Offered as an amendment to a supplemental defense spending bill, it contains provisions relating to treatment of persons in custody of the Department of Defense, and administration of detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, including:
Donald Joseph Guter is an American educator, lawyer and former United States Navy rear admiral who was the 10th president and dean of South Texas College of Law Houston from 2009 to 2019. He previously served as the 10th dean of the Duquesne University School of Law from 2005 to 2008, when he was dismissed by Duquesne University president Charles J. Dougherty over a tenure battle.
United States of America
United States Navy 