office of legal counsel

The Washington Post’s story today about liberals who are frustrated that the Obama administration isn’t pressing harder to win confirmation for liberal-leaning judges to the federal courts should also serve as a reminder that there are a whole lot of key Justice Department posts still not confirmed yet, either. Whether that’s because the White House [...]

New documents obtained by TWI related to the case of Mohammed Jawad, an adolescent tortured by Afghan police and then abused again by U.S. interrogators, suggest that not only certain CIA interrogations, but also interrogations by the Department of Defense demand a broader investigation.

Documents reveal the CIA was allowed to deny detainees sleep upward of 80 to 180 hours at a time.

As I reported on Friday, a federal judge had given the Obama administration until yesterday to disclose or cite the reasons for not disclosing hundreds of documents about the CIA’s former “enhanced interrogation” regime, and the administration opted for continued nondisclosure. The Justice Department filed papers to that effect yesterday, and now the American Civil [...]

On page 30 of the 2004 CIA inspector general report, the CIA’s interrogation guidelines provided for “standard techniques” of interrogation that include, among other things, “sleep deprivation not to exceed 72 hours.” Clearly the CIA must have told John Helgerson, the inspector general, that those were the limits.
Moreover, in Footnote 34, the IG reports that [...]

No matter how much former Vice President Dick Cheney insists that torturing prisoners in secret CIA prisons worked (and Spencer has already laid out the huge holes in that argument) — he and his fellow Republicans who still stand by their “enhanced interrogation techniques” can never prove that using less abusive techniques would not have [...]

Patrick Appel, who is filling in for Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish, yesterday suggested that I was accusing John Yoo & Co. in the Bush Justice Department of the “crime” of approving vague CIA interrogation guidelines. Appel writes:
This seems more likely to be raised in defense of the CIA interrogators than against the lawyers. [...]

The Justice Department still hasn’t officially announced it, but The Washington Post is reporting this afternoon, based on anonymous sources, that Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to go ahead and open an investigation on those controversial CIA interrogations we’ve been talking about for weeks now.
According to The Post’s Carrie Johnson, Holder is set to [...]

Daphne’s already blown the kazoo and hung the streamers for today’s release of the 2004 CIA inspector general report on the agency’s use of torture “enhanced interrogation” techniques. We’ll be covering this throughout the day. But pay attention as well to what might not get released today: another long awaited report, this time from the [...]

John Yoo should be fired, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes, according to anti-war activists who greeted the University of California at Berkeley law professor when he returned to Boalt Hall, the law school where he has tenure, on Monday.
Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and [...]