The Washington Independent

Posts Tagged office of legal counsel

Documents Suggest DOD Failed to Probe Alleged War Crimes

By | 09.25.09 | 6:00 am

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 interrogations by the Department of Defense demand a broader investigation as well.

Last month, Attorney More…

DOJ Advice on Sleep Deprivation Varied Widely

By | 09.03.09 | 9:07 am

iron shackles
Among the many revelations in the CIA inspector general’s report released last week is this curious fact: the CIA did not have a coherent or consistent policy about the use and legality of sleep deprivation as an interrogation tactic. And it was More…

ACLU Reacts to Obama’s Latest Torture Non-Disclosure

By | 09.01.09 | 2:35 pm

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, More…

Curious Discrepancies in Reports on Sleep Deprivation

By | 08.27.09 | 5:51 pm

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. More…

Cheney’s ‘Torture Works’ Argument Is a Red Herring

By | 08.26.09 | 9:21 am

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 More…

Vagueness Is Not a Crime, But It May Suggest Intent to Commit One

By | 08.25.09 | 9:35 am

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

More…

Holder to Appoint Prosecutor to Investigate CIA Interrogations

By | 08.24.09 | 2:39 pm

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. More…

Happy CIA IG Report Day! But Where’s That Justice Department Report?

By | 08.24.09 | 8:51 am

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 More…

John Yoo Faces Back-to-School Welcome at Berkeley

By | 08.18.09 | 11:12 am

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 More…

Unpopular Photography

By | 08.12.09 | 5:11 pm

Daphne Eviatar is guest-blogging for Glenn Greenwald today. The following is cross-posted at Salon.

If, as the latest reports indicate, Attorney General Eric Holder is serious about prosecuting the worst torture and abuse of “war on terror” prisoners that occurred during the Bush administration, then More…