OLC

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 [...]

Commenter Decora points to some references to diapering in the 2005 Office of Legal Counsel memoranda on torture. What’s striking is how the CIA describes the technique — evidently used, according to both the 2004 CIA inspector general report and the 2007 Red Cross report, in support of sleep-deprivation-by-stress-position — to the Justice Department as [...]

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. [...]

Following up on Spencer’s post, I don’t feel too sorry for Jay Bybee or John Yoo, the lead lawyers at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who approved the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” As Spencer writes and Footnote 26 of the newly released Inspector General report makes clear, the DOJ lawyers were not [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 there’s some key evidence he’s going to want to take a [...]