Glenn Greenwald Salon 2/18/11

Yesterday, in South Carolina, an Obama-appointed federal judge dismissed alawsuit brought by Padilla against former Bush officials Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and others.  That suit alleges that those officials knowingly violated Padilla’s Constitutional rights by ordering his due-process-free detention and torture.  In dismissing Padilla’s lawsuit, the court’s opinion relied on the same now-depressingly-familiar weapons routinely used by our political class to immunize itself from judicial scrutiny (more…)