OLC

The Justice Department released more documents — or, at least, less-redacted documents — late Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the government’s obligation in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct [...]

The Hill reports today that liberal groups are stepping up their pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to call a vote on Dawn Johnsen, President Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel.
As I reported earlier this week, Republicans have stalled Johnsen’s nomination with their ambivalence about supporting cloture and the leadership’s [...]

Opponents could take up to 30 hours of precious floor time debating her nomination while Congress debates key legislation on health care, climate change and the economy.

A few more points worth noting about the new Military Commissions Act amendments passed by Congress yesterday: Just as the House bill circulating earlier did, the amendments passed would still allow some coerced testimony to be used in court if the military judge decides it’s reliable and it wasn’t obtained using “cruel, inhuman, or degrading [...]

Earlier this year when Arlen Specter was still a Republican, the Pennsylvania senator was among the harshest critics of Dawn Johnsen, the Indiana University law professor who is President Obama’s pick to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The OLC is the office that housed such Bush-era luminaries as John Yoo and Jay Bybee, [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]

In the ongoing debate over who ought (or ought not) be prosecuted for the abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. custody, American Civil Liberties Union national security lawyer Alex Abdo, made an important point yesterday that’s been largely overlooked.
“At the end of investigating is the time when you decide who to prosecute. You don’t [...]

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 [...]