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 More…
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 More…
For months, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said that two documents prepared by the CIA, one from 2004 and the other from 2005, would refute critics of the Bush administration’s torture program. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity in April:
“I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
For those, like former Vice President Dick Cheney, who want to argue that CIA torture “worked,” a footnote on page six of the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture provides a blueprint for muddying the waters. Rarely if ever, according to the report, did torture occur by itself. More…
There has been some confusion for years over what exactly “waterboarding” has meant in practice. Does it induce the sensation of drowning? Or does it actually replicate it? The differences between the two may seem academic, but the CIA inspector general report on torture says that the way the agency More…
The CIA has already copped to destroying videotapes in 2005 that detail brutal interrogations. All in all, as the American Civil Liberties Union forced the CIA to identify 92 destroyed tapes. That destruction warranted the empanelment of a special prosecutor, John Durham, whose brief Attorney General Eric Holder More…
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. More…
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