Hamdan attorney and now Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal says that the issue is not Arar’s torture, but narrow questions of whether Arar can even ask for some relief in the US Courts.

Chuck Grassley and Jeff Sessions have led the McCarthyite charge to slander those Justice Department attorneys who defended Guantanamo detainees. And yet, predictably, these shining specimens voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006. You know what one of the provisions of the Military Commissions Act was? The right to defense counsel. Shocked, I know you are.

Phillip Carter helped found Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America after a tour of duty advising the Iraqi police in Baqubah. He wrote amicus briefs in two Supreme Court cases, FAIR v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the Court reined in the Bush Administration’s executive over-reach, and became a leading critic of their methods in the war on terror. When he was hired by the Defense Department in April to coordinate detainee policy and help with the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, civil liberties groups considered that the Obama Administration was moving in the right direction.

He abruptly resigned late last week.