I was (mostly) offline yesterday but saw people on Twitter freaking out over blog posts that compared the CIA to the Nazis because of interrogations. So Jane Mayer has a calm, poignant corrective: she reads the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report and it puts her in mind of a More…
It’s been an amazing thing: faced with hundreds of pages of documents disclosed last week that explicitly state and thoroughly demonstrate that it’s unknown whether “enhanced interrogation” worked, all it takes for the press to ignore the record is for former Vice President Dick Cheney to bluster aggressively. After More…
One more thing from the former vice president’s Fox interview yesterday. Discussing John Durham’s torture probe:
WALLACE: If the prosecutor asks to speak to you, will you speak to him?
CHENEY: It will depend on the circumstances and what I think their activities are really involved in. I’ve been
The former vice president has an interesting standard for what constitutes certainty. Somehow in his hands a CIA inspector general’s report that says repeatedly that it can’t determine if torture techniques like waterboarding added any value to interrogations of top al-Qaeda detainees becomes an occasion for a torture More…
When he goes on Fox News! Yes, the former vice president is going to sit down with Chris Wallace on Sunday to discuss the CIA’s torture disclosures and the discrepancy between what they say and what he said they’d say. Right, Chris? Yeah?
Marcy Wheeler has a typically excellent post going through a remarkable annex to the 2004 CIA inspector general’s torture report: the psychological profile prepared (probably by former SERE psychologist James Mitchell) of Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee to be subjected to what would become the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. More…
It’s getting worse with each hour after Dave’s post. Last night former Vice President Dick Cheney elided the distinction between valuable intelligence that came from detainees and valuable intelligence that came from enhanced interrogation techniques. He did so for a simple reason: he said publicly, for More…
One of the more disturbing appendices to the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture comes from the Office of Medical Services. On September 4, 2003, the office in the CIA responsible for “assessing and monitoring the health of all Agency detainees subject to ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques” issued its More…
Marcy Wheeler may have solved a mystery about the previously unacknowledged CIA “enhanced interrogation” technique of “prolonged diapering.” I wondered in my initial post where the CIA got the legal authorization for the technique from, as the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture says that the CIA withdrew More…
In order to learn more about the mysterious “prolonged diapering” technique formerly employed by the CIA — possibly the technique nebulously referred to in the 2004 inspector general report as an eleventh and previously unacknowledged interrogation method — I turned to the International Committee of the Red Cross’s More…
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