The Boston Globe reported this morning that although Attorney General Michael Mukasey will still speak at this year's Boston College Law School commencement, the school has decided that it would nonetheless "deny Mukasey the Founder's Medal," which celebrates "traditions of professionalism, scholarship, and service which the Law School seeks to instill in its students."

By Harvey Silverglate

It’s unlikely that the pooh-bahs at the Bush Administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ) read any civil liberties column or blog, let alone The Free For All. But I can’t help but think that somehow this blog launched an idea when I suggested on February 8 that the DOJ sic its legal ethics watch-dogs from the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) on the DOJ lawyers who drafted the infamous “torture memos.

By Harvey Silverglate

Last Friday, I wrote in this space that there are ample grounds for launching ethics investigations against the Bush Administration lawyers who wrote formal opinions authorizing various “coercive interrogation” techniques that long ago overstepped the lines – a bit vague here and there, but not altogether unfathomable – the law uses to define torture.

By Harvey Silverglate

So the truth about waterboarding finally comes out, thanks in no small part to the Boston Globe's Charlie Savage among the most astute journalists to chronicle the sins of omission and commission made by the Bush administration and its lawyers over the last seven years. In this morning's Globe, Savage reports that Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to investigate the CIA’s torture practices, in part because investigating those who relied on the advice of legal counsel would undermine the credibility of the government’s lawyers.

By Harvey Silverglate

One of the more silly pieces that I’ve read in recent years appeared in, of all places, the usually polished and interesting "Ideas" section of The Boston Globe, to which I invariably turn every Sunday. In an opinion piece on the first page of that section, Darius Rejali, a political science professor at Reed College and the author of a forthcoming book (Torture and Democracy) argues that while we like to think of torture as “mainly the province of dictators and juntas – the kind of thing that happens behind the iron doors of repressive regimes,” in fact, “it is the democracies that have been the real innovators in 20th century torture,” modern torture “is mainly a democratic innovation,” and we have “exported [new torture techniques] to more authoritarian regimes.

By Harvey Silverglate

Sometimes, as Sigmund Freud put it, a cigar is just a cigar. And, likewise, sometimes words in the Constitution actually mean what they say. Much brainpower, however, has been expended trying to argue that the First Amendment, which admonishes that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” [emphasis added], actually doesn’t mean what it appears to say.

By James F. Tierney

We wanted to post a brief follow-up on Harvey's argument about Michael Mukasey and whether waterboarding is torture (it is). MSNBC host Keith Olbermann explains that Mukasey's dissembling equivocation is a result of Bush's desire to cover his own legacy. Olbermann is right, and it does this while also serving the purpose noted by Harvey -- protecting an "advice of legal counsel" defense in the event of future prosecutions.

By Harvey Silverglate

The media has been abuzz today with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s discomfort with Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey – and his refusal to opine whether waterboarding (the interrogation technique widely reported as used by CIA interrogators to wring information out of suspected terrorists) is illegal or unconstitutional.

The unwarranted uproar among the punditocracy over President Bush’s commutation of part of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sentence is indicative of the sorry state of this nation’s public political discourse. The left is agitated because Bush spared Vice President Cheney’s right-hand man a humiliating prison sentence for lying in an investigation about his knowledge of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s identity.