Interrogations

A federal court today ruled that the government can continue to suppress transcripts of former CIA prisoners now being held at Guantanamo Bay talking about abuse and torture they suffered in CIA custody. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to obtain transcripts from the [...]

The conference report to next fiscal year’s defense appropriations bill includes a provision long — and I mean long — sought by Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.): a requirement for military interrogators to videotape their interrogation sessions. (The CIA, which is no longer in the lead on high-value interrogations, has admitted to destroying nearly 100 videotapes [...]

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said on “Face the Nation” Sunday that — like most Republicans and even some Democrats, including some in the president’s cabinet — he thinks President Obama was right when he said “we ought to go forward, not back.”
But then he went on to say, as Glenn Greenwald tweeted yesterday, that “I [...]

The announcement is the result of an Obama administration task force’s proposal — first reported by The Washington Independent.

That’s what I asked Joshua Dratel, Chair of the John Adams Project Advisory Committee and a prominent defense lawyer who has represented numerous terror suspects before. Speaking this morning after the news broke that the Department of Justice is investigating military defense lawyers representing terror suspects, Dratel said he couldn’t talk about the specifics of [...]

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.

And we’re off. Here’s President Obama at the National Archives, talking in broad themes about what comes after Guantanamo Bay. Chris Matthews points out that he’s standing in front of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Will he say anything about preventative detention?
10:31. We’re doing good things out in the world: “For the first [...]

Something I couldn’t figure out for my piece yesterday on the 2007 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel about CIA interrogations: why didn’t the Obama administration disclose it last week, when it released the 2002 and 2005 OLC memoranda? The Justice Department declined to comment on the memo, so I wasn’t going [...]

In a just-released letter urging President Obama not to make any public pronouncements about who should and shouldn’t be prosecuted for torture until the Senate intelligence committee completes its review of the CIA’s interrogation and detention program, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the committee’s chairwoman, released an interesting piece of information:
A study of the first two [...]

Music fan and CIA Director Mike Hayden released this statement to the agency in the wake of President Obama’s interrogations/detentions cataclysm:

President Obama issued an Executive Order today setting out new instructions for the detention, rendition and interrogation of captured terrorists. The legal and policy landscape under which the Agency has conducted itself in the global [...]