war on terror

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

I’m already hearing speculative groans that the CIA planted this story with Walter Pincus at The Washington Post today about how a military commander in 2003 did things just as bad as the things the CIA interrogators discussed in the recently-released CIA inspector general report did, so Attorney General Eric Holder’s investigation into CIA actions [...]

As Newsweek reported Friday evening, the CIA inspector general report expected to be released on Monday reveals that the CIA staged mock executions to terrify terror suspects into talking. Regardless of whether interrogators got the information they were looking for, these actions were clearly against the law. It is a violation of both the federal [...]

On Monday a federal court judge ordered the Department of Defense to release a 47-year-old father of two with a heart condition who it has imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay for the past seven years without justification.

This revelation from former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge’s new book, nabbed by Paul Bedard, might shed some light on why Ridge passed on a 2010 U.S. Senate bid.
[He] was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.
That’s a [...]

Writing about the role Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan played in the Bush counterterror surveillance program, Marcy Wheeler, blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon today, argues that as NSA adviser, rather than CIA director (a position Brennan was nominated for, but Glenn helped torpedo the nomination by highlighting his previous role in the Bush [...]

Obama administration officials will tour a Michigan state prison today in the hopes of using it to hold suspected terrorists now imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, The Associated Press reports.
Representatives of the Departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security are scheduled to visit the prison in Standish, Mich., which is slated to be closed soon, to [...]

The New York Times has a blockbuster story this morning about the infamous secret prisons — or “black sites” — operated by the CIA for housing and interrogating high-value terror suspects. The article contains new details about the locations of the sites:
One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the [...]

Here’s another point I should have made in my piece earlier today: Just because President Obama’s Justice Department has been asserting a remarkably broad, Bush-like view of his detention authority pursuant to the laws of war in the Guantanamo detainees’ habeas corpus cases, that doesn’t mean the president has to stick with that definition in [...]

Since my piece on the intensifying battle over “preventive detention” was published, Ken Gude from the Center for American Progress wrote to point out an important distinction that deserves more emphasis.
As I note in my story, Gude and Kate Martin, Director of the Center for National Security Studies, have both written in support of the [...]