Jane Mayer to Marc Thiessen: Your Guys' Ignorance Got Us Attacked
Jane Mayer has a great general purpose slapdown of torture apologist Marc Thiessen love letter to torture. She hits on most of the weaknesses of Thiessen's arguments: his false claims about what prevented the 2006 liquid explosive plane plot,…
The Prisoner Shellgame
On Friday, I pointed out that Eric Holder and Dennis Blair used language in a letter on Gitmo's detainees that suggests some subset of the detainees at Gitmo is not covered by Obama's Executive Order requiring some resolution to their status.
In…
DOD's Empty Vessel for Torture Authorization
When I asked whether DOD had any authorization for torture after 2004, Jeff Kaye reminded me we just recently saw one new aspect of authorization: an April 2006 Steven Bradbury Opinion authorizing Appendix M of the new version of the Army Field…
Did DOD Have ANY Authorization for Torture after 2004?
There are a couple of things that have been bugging me about the authorizations DOD got for interrogations. It's not clear what kind of authorization DOD used to justify detainee interrogations after the Yoo memo was withdrawn in 2003-2004--they…
Congressman Dingell: Call Bart Stupak on His Lies about Abortion
John Dingell says he is going to try to persuade Stupak to drop his efforts to sink healthcare with his anti-choice efforts.
The Congress is a place where we represent our people and where we serve our conscience. I strongly disagree with Bart,…
The "Detainees Subject to the Review"
MadDog linked to the letter that Dennis Blair and Eric Holder sent the Senate describing the process by which 6 agencies and a 100 staffers meticulously decided the ultimate fate of Gitmo detainees--who could be released or imprisoned elsewhere,…
Steven Bradbury: Breaking His Own Rules Even as He Writes Them
I'm working on a big post on the May 2005 Bradbury Memos. But I wanted to point out this tidbit about them in the interim.
As you might recall, the Jim Comey emails (probably leaked by the torture apologists last summer) provide a few clues…
Random Friday Afternoon Links
I've had a frazzled few days (dealing with stuff like dodgy cars) and I'm about to bury myself deep in the weeds. So I thought I'd throw up a few links to keep you all occupied so as to ensure there's still something left in the likker cabinet…
The Anonymous Coward Calling Holder Weak
Time has another one of those Rahm v. Holder profiles. It is notable from the slew of other ones for two reasons.
The anonymous source calling Holder a coward
First, the story features several main sources for this story: Lindsey Graham, speaking…
Bybee's Circuit: Ashcroft Can Be Sued for Wrongful Detention
The 9th Circuit has ruled that John Ashcroft can be sued for wrongful detention of an American citizen. From an ACLU press release:
The American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit charging that former Attorney General John Ashcroft is personally…
When Lawyers Equate Law with PR
Jack Goldsmith and Ben Wittes have an op-ed up in which, claiming that the PR value to military commissions is minimal, Obama should just not give KSM a trial of any sort. They make a clever move in which they first cursorily dismiss the value…
The Request for Reaffirmation of Torture
This is going to be another weedy post...
I wanted to put two totally bureaucratic pages (PDF 23-24) from the recent FOIA dump into the context of the other known documents in the chronology. The first page is an "Executive Correspondence Routing…
Obama's Intelligence Leaders: For GAO Oversight Before They Were Against It
Yesterday, we talked about how Rahm Emanuel opposed indefinite detention before he started working for it with Lindsey Graham.
Today, Steven Aftergood shows that Obama's two intelligence heads, Leon Panetta and Dennis Blair, supported GAO oversight…
Kiriakou: CIA IG Report Confirmed They Waterboarded Before Getting Approval (?)
I believe Jon Kiriakou is still engaging in disinformation, so while I suppose I'll read his book, I won't accept anything in it without corroboration.
Take this weird tidbit in his appearance on Tweety (just after 2:05). The statement is…
Did Addington Oppose 9/11 Commission Questions to Avoid Independent Evaluation of Torture Program?
Shortly after news broke that CIA destroyed the torture tapes, the 9/11 Commission issued a letter complaining that they had not been told of--much less been allowed to review--the torture tapes.
The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it…
In 2007, Rahm Opposed Indefinite Detention
On June 29, 2007, Congressman Norm Dicks sent George Bush an eloquent letter urging him to close Gitmo. It said, among other things,
Since the time that captured "enemy combatants" were first brought to Guantanamo Bay in 2002, the detainment…
CIA Has No Idea What It Briefed Congress on Torture
The CIA documents released in the latest FOIA batch prove that all the claims that CIA (and Crazy Pete Hoekstra) have made about briefings Congress received on torture are, at best, reconstructions based on years old memories, if not outright…
More Torture Documents
Anyone feel like they drowning under the weight of a really horrible bureaucracy yet.
DOJ IG Documents (1)
DOJ IG Documents (2)
CIA Documents
DOD Documents
OLC Documents
Consider this a working thread.
Jeff Kaye--see the first document…
Would Obama Issue First Veto to Protect Anthrax Whitewash?
Bloomberg is reporting that Office of Management and Budget head Peter Orszag has told the intelligence committees Obama will veto the intelligence authorization because--among other reasons--it calls for re-examining the FBI's conspiracy theory-as-investigation…
Rendering Opinions on Rendering Detainees out of Iraq
This is going to be a really weedy post trying to explore what was going on with just about the only named opinion that Jack Goldsmith wrote at OLC that has gotten focused attention--a March 19, 2004 one cataloging the protected status of different…