How did a guy with neither Arabic skills nor expertise on al Qaeda get a hold of al Qaeda training manuals as early as December 2001?

Alright you mopes. There you were buggering up EW’s nice threads, demanding to talk football. Can’t blame ya there. The Motor City Kitties have a new QB, and a good one I think. And now the NY Jets Jets Jets do too, having traded up with KC in order to go full Sanchez.

John Lopresti noted that it might be helpful to have a timeline of all the torture documents released in the last several weeks. And you know I can’t resist requests for timelines.

April 6: NYRB posts the Red Cross report on high value detainees

I wanted to point out two more details from the Pelosi press conference the other day when she made her comments about briefings on torture (the complete transcript of this section is below).

First, Pelosi points out that one thing BushCo did was put intelligence-related appropriations through without telling the intelligence committee what they were putting through.

If the torture program began–as Michael Hayden has said–as a covert op, then it would require Bush to have notified Congress of the plan to torture before it happened. That did not happen. In fact, even according to reports from the CIA, it appears the CIA did not have its presidential finding until a year after the torture started.

Porter Goss apparently believes that by attacking Nancy Pelosi publicly, he can get her to back off her support for a torture investigation. But even in his attack, he makes clear that CIA broke the law.

I’ve been scouring the 9/11 Report to see whether interrogation reports derived from waterboarding provided useful intelligence. It looks like Zelikow will be addressing that issue himself, shortly.

The torture architects received a document that warned that torture–yes, it used that term–was likely to elicit false confessions.

Michael Hayden and the rest of the torture apologists have been wandering around all week claiming that the Administration could have won its FOIA case against ACLU and withheld the torture memos.

If this ruling from Juge Hellerstein is any indication, they couldn’t be more wrong. It did five things:Demanded a full “Vaughn” index for the FOIAed materials, describing the people involved and the dates.Refused the government’s attempt to limit production of

As I noted last night, MiniCheney very pointedly avoided claiming that al-Nashiri provided important intelligence as a result of being waterboarded. In a non-sequitur response to Norah O’Donnell’s assertion that waterboarding is torture, MiniCheney offered this as rebuttal to O’Donnell’s point (at 2:15).

There were three people who were waterboarded, and two of those people are people who gave us incredibly important and useful information, information that saved American lives after