Alvin Hellerstein

The deluge continues. Word comes that in response to pending requests from the American Civil Liberties Union, another tranche of CIA documents about Bush-era interrogations and detentions could be released as early as Monday. That’s on top this week’s release of the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture; two additional documents requested by former [...]

As I will note in a forthcoming piece, Monday is the deadline set by a federal judge for the Obama administration to release a much-anticipated CIA inspector general report about the agency’s detentions and interrogations practices. Only the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued to get the report released, has had to endure four different [...]

You know what Monday is, right? That’s the date, ordered by Judge Alvin Hellerstein, for the government to disclose the CIA inspector general’s 2004 report into the agency’s torture apparatus to the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. That document, which according to reports is filled with grisly tales of [...]

So the Justice Department got most of what it wanted here. Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled this morning that the CIA will have until August 24 to release a declassified version of the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture, a report that documents abuse so disturbing it reportedly brought Attorney General Eric Holder to the [...]

Just a brief no-news update. American Civil Liberties Union national security chief Jameel Jaffer told me on Monday that he hoped to hear from federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein early this week about whether the judge agrees with the Justice Department that the Obama administation ought to get until August 31 to release a CIA inspector [...]

The 2004 report into the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program” from then-Inspector General John Helgerson is becoming something of a white whale for the ACLU. Although the civil liberties group had reached an agreement earlier this year with the Obama administration to release the report — considered a “holy grail” of information about how the program [...]

The Justice Department on Thursday again delayed disclosure of three critical legal memos written by Steven Bradbury, then a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), that reportedly authorized the the CIA to torture prisoners. This is at least the second time that the government has postponed responding to a federal judge [...]