Sheldon Whitehouse

During this morning’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) who chaired the hearing, asked Philip Zelikow, the former state department adviser, about the reaction he received when he objected to the interrogation techniques approved by the Office of Legal Counsel. Whitehouse noted that “lawyers love to debate. It’s our nature to [...]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, which is conducting its own investigation into the CIA and torture, appeared to signal her opposition to chartering a separate commission on torture, let alone prosecution. Sticking up for her inquiry, which will wrap up within a year, she said that alongside the six [...]

Live from Dirksen Senate office building 226: you’re not going to see former FBI agent Ali Soufan, one of the two stars of today’s Senate judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture. Over by the far side of the room is a wood-paneled maroon partition — it looks like something behind which a Victorian lady would change [...]

I’ve been asking why the Senate Judiciary subcommittee holding the first congressional hearings on the torture memos this morning aren’t calling the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who wrote the memos, or their clients — the Bush administration’s most senior officials — to testify.
On Tuesday night, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told Keith Olbermann on MSNBC [...]

After Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and his Judiciary subcommittee officially announced its intent to hold a hearing on the Office of Legal Counsel torture memos next week, I asked Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of “The Prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book”, what evidence he would [...]

One thing that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) wants in hand when he calls Philip Zelikow to testify next Wednesday: the memo Zelikow wrote in 2005 as an aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushing back against the Bush administration’s effort at giving torture the cover of law. A Whitehouse staffer says the senator has [...]

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) just released a formal announcement confirming our report Monday that his Senate Judiciary subcommittee would hear testimony on May 13 about torture from former FBI agent Ali Soufan and ex-State Department aide Philip Zelikow. Specifically, a press release says the hearing will focus on “the legal analysis used to authorize harsh [...]

The latest word on the Justice Department’s Office Of Professional Responsibility review of the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted the so-called “torture memos” is that the report concludes that the the lawyers committed “serious lapses in judgment,” as The New York Times puts it in a front page story today, but they should [...]

To follow up on my earlier post about Sen. Pat Leahy’s (D-Vt.) refusal to hold hearings on the torture memos as chair of the Judiciary Committee, we now learn, as Spencer just wrote, that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) has boldly taken the reins, using the Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, which he chairs, [...]

Whether or not House Democrats end up seeing the anti-torture memo that Philip Zelikow wrote while at the State Department in 2005, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee is working out arrangements for Zelikow to testify on May 13 — next Wednesday — about the Justice Department’s Bush-era authorization of torture, according to a Senate staffer. Also [...]