So Ari Shapiro’s NPR story yesterday placed then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales — a.k.a. God‘s gift to Talking Points Memo — at the center of the decision to torture Abu Zubaydah in the spring of 2002. Gonzales didn’t respond to Shapiro’s request for comment. But More…
The Arkansas governor-cum-TV host’s poem “Fancy Nancy” gets at how rote the Republican calls for the Speaker of the House to step down are becoming. Huckabee calls for Pelosi to “resign and get out of here.”
If forced to believe whether the CIA and her colleagues in Congress are
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s request to declassify certain documents that he said will show the effectiveness of Bush administration interrogation policies has been denied, reports Cheney biographer Stephen Hayes:
A letter dated May 7, 2009, from the CIA’s Information and Privacy Coordinator, Delores M. Nelson, rejected Cheney’s request
Well, we knew things were bad for newspapers these days, but this is a really sad sign: The Philadelphia Inquirer has hired John Yoo — the notorious former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer and architect of the “torture memos” that not only narrowed the definition of torture to exclude More…
Check out this Bmaz post at Emptywheel about a rumor circulating through Arabic-language media that Ibn Shaikh al-Libi, a member of al-Qaeda who was tortured at the behest of the United States before claiming that Saddam Hussein had lent material support to the terrorist movement, has committed suicide in More…
Greg Sargent mines a Washington Post piece to discover that the Obama administration is looking to declassify a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report that laid out grave doubts about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program. Background on the value of that report — referred to numerous times in the More…
A CIA lawyer implicated in a Senate report as a key figure in the spread of abusive interrogation techniques angrily defended his reputation in a letter to senators — but declined to dispute the key points raised in the report.
Jonathan Fredman, formerly the chief counsel for the CIA’s Counterterrorism More…
Remember when Condoleezza Rice, perhaps the most disastrously inept national security adviser in history, snapped at a Stanford student that the United States hadn’t tortured anyone and that because the president said “enhanced interrogations” were legal they were, in fact, legal? It didn’t work on the Stanford kid. So More…
So in my piece today I wondered how it could be that the CIA could come to view stress positions as a mechanism to induce sleep deprivation in detainees. The obvious culprit is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, because in the May 10, 2005 “techniques” memo, More…
From The Associated Press:
Spain’s top investigative magistrate has opened an investigation into the Bush administration over alleged torture of terror suspects at the Guantanamo prison.
Baltasar Garzon’s move on Wednesday is separate from a complaint by human rights lawyers that seeks charges against six specific Bush
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