enhanced interrogation

Adam Serwer at The American Prospect tears through a weekend dump of torture documents and finds something disturbing in an FBI inspector general’s report about a Guantanamo detainee, Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was tortured in 2003:
[W]e also learned about a proposal advanced by certain officials from the FBI and DoJ in late 2002 to change the [...]

What?
In an interview with the Guardian for the eighth anniversary of 9/11, Pataki criticised current White House policies for sending wrong signals about US intentions around the world. In particular, he attacked the recent decision by the US justice department to launch an official investigation into alleged abuses by CIA agents during the interrogation of [...]

In a section of the 2004 CIA inspector general report about interrogation techniques that were used on detainees by the CIA but never approved by the Justice Department — including mock executions, blowing cigar smoke into someone’s face until he became ill, squeezing a detainee’s neck “to restrict the detainee’s carotid artery … [until he] [...]

Nothing surprising here. Here’s the statement in full:
The President has said repeatedly that he wants to look forward, not back, and the President agrees with the Attorney General that those who acted in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance should not be prosecuted. Ultimately, determinations about whether someone broke the law [...]

Just released by the Department of Justice. He’s calling it a “Preliminary Review” into the interrogation of “certain detainees.” Notice that Holder did not rule out any course of investigative or prosecutorial action, which is exactly civil libertarians hoped:
“The Office of Professional Responsibility has now submitted to me its report regarding the Office of Legal [...]

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 [...]

Read Marcy Wheeler for a blistering takedown of CIA Director Leon Panetta’s Washington Post op-ed yesterday. The short version of Panetta’s argument is that he proved his good faith by informing Congress about the “significant actions” he shuttered, but Congress reacted with “a fresh round of recriminations about the past.” Stop the violence!
The op-ed itself [...]

An official familiar with the task force’s work cautioned that experienced interrogators on the task force believe that a narrow focus missed the point of interrogation work.

OK, so which is more shocking:
1. Aram Rostam’s report for The Huffington Post that the CIA used fire ants on a detainee’s head to “break him”; or
2. The fact that Rostam ran a report based on a second-hand account of a years-old outburst by a CIA “supervisor” (whatever that means) around a bar concerning an [...]

Other judges will not be bound by the decision, but there are reasons for advocates to be hopeful.