Former Bush administration officials are urging the Justice Department to soften the criticisms contained in an ethics report examining the work of the lawyers who justified torture and other harsh interrogation techniques, reports The Washington Post.
According to two anonymous sources, lawyers for the subjects of the investigation — More…
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 More…
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) made an eloquent case in The Boston Globe on Sunday for why the United States needs the “commission of inquiry” he’s proposed to get at the truth of how torture and abuse became accepted U.S. policy and practice.
Referring to the abusive interrogation techniques used More…
Facing staunch Republican opposition to a full-fledged investigation of the Bush administration’s torture policies — whether by an independent commission or an independent prosecutor — some senior Democrats are reportedly considering investigations for whether former Bush officials lied to Congress when they reported on the government’s activities, NBC News Capitol More…
According to a recently declassified Justice Department document, the CIA believed that so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques like sleep deprivation worked better when a detainee’s resistance was weakened from hunger. The agency, with the legal approval of the Justice Department, employed a regimen that sharply restricted the caloric intake of detainees More…
Former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s statement to a bunch of Stanford students Monday that “by definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture” — much repeated, analyzed and More…
U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee shocked a lot of people this week when he told The New York Times that has no real regrets about signing off on the Office of Legal Counsel memorandums that have since horrified much of the American public. Sen. Pat More…
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has invited Jay Bybee, the former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer and current judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, reports Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post. Is this the beginning of a broader More…
So in my piece today I wondered how it could be that the CIA could come to view stress positions as a mechanism to induce sleep deprivation in detainees. The obvious culprit is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, because in the May 10, 2005 “techniques” memo, More…
So much for the quid pro quo explanation. Jay Bybee, the former Office of Legal Counsel chief who issued the 2002 torture memos and who has since become a federal judge, issued a statement saying he mostly stands by his work. The New York More…
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