Investigation

Just released by the White House press office, a memorandum from President Obama. His top intelligence/counterterrorism/homeland security adviser at the White House, former CIA official John Brennan, will direct an investigation that will wrap up at the end of the month to determine what U.S. intelligence knew about “warning signs” from alleged Fort Hood shooter [...]

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 [...]

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the former U.S. Attorney who’s been pointing out for more than a year that waterboarding is and always has been torture, made the key point yesterday (and the same one I made here) that the criminal investigation of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that turned into torture would be an ordinary and obvious [...]

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 [...]

Through the wonders of Twitter, Nick Schwellenbach sends along this piece he wrote way way back in 2007 about the need for a new Church committee. Consider it valuable background for my piece today. Basically, Nick argued, don’t look to the courts to save you:
After years of congressional acquiescence to the executive in many [...]

The Church and Pike committees of the 1970s exposed CIA lawlessness; created modern legal and congressional intelligence oversight structures; and cleaved the CIA’s history into before and after periods.

The New Mexico Independent’s Trip Jennings reports that Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) is getting in on some of that sweet, sweet executive privilege action:
The [New Mexico] Independent sought to view documents from the governor’s office from January through August 2006 that would have divulged with whom he had met in the months prior to the [...]

Although he’s not calling it “torture” anymore, according to Greg Sargent at The Plum Line, President Obama on Tuesday said that he is not opposed to a bipartisan investigation on Capitol Hill of Bush administration officials who devised those torturous tactics.
The president has publicly opposed prosecuting the CIA officers who carried them out, but now [...]

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.) today issued not one but two press releases responding to the latest batch of Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel torture memos produced yesterday by the Justice Department in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Conyers, of course, has been pressing for [...]