waterboarding

As former Vice President Dick Cheney and some Republican lawmakers continue to debate whether torture works and was a legitimate interrogation technique during the Bush administration, it’s almost jaw-dropping to read some of the memos that were written by the real experts on interrogation techniques in the U.S. government, warning the Defense Department all the [...]

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 possibility prompts fervent opposition from Republicans, who say the 9/11 terrorists should never be allowed anywhere on U.S. soil, let alone in a civilian U.S. court.

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

As Spencer noted, in responding to a federal judge’s order to turn over another batch of documents including President George W. Bush’s authorization of CIA secret prisons, and records of investigations into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, the Department of Justice instead opted to file a document yesterday explaining why it’s actually not [...]

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 [...]

Newly released documents suggest non-abusive tactics worked.

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 more I read the CIA inspector general report released today, the clearer it seems that any real investigation of CIA abuses will have to question the lawyers who approved the interrogation techniques. That’s because the guidelines governing the detention and interrogation of detainees appear to have all been approved by Justice Department lawyers (because [...]

I know Attorney General Eric Holder just announced that he plans to investigate only the CIA interrogators that went beyond what the law allowed, as it was interpreted by the Justice Department’s torture memos, but what will he do about the fact that the Justice Department itself authorized exceeding those guidelines?
That’s what the 2004 CIA [...]