Is the OPR report on torture being held up because of Yoo and/or Bradbury? Or because of John Rizzo?

In my last post, I showed how Section 215 authority grew over time, potentially in response to legal challenges to other domestic surveillance programs. I’m going to look at what that might mean for the expanded use of 215 authority in 2006 in a later post.

But first, I want to look at one passage in the 2007 IG Report on Section 215 that is relevant to current efforts to reauthorize PATRIOT.

I wanted to turn to the two IG Reports Glenn Fine did on the PATRIOT Act’s Section 215, the section that allows investigators to get business records and other tangible items. (2007 report covering 2002 to 2005; 2008 report covering 2006)

Although we were required to review calendar years 2002 through 2004 in this first review, we elected to include data from calendar year 2005.

Another article obediently tying the Zazi investigation to the PATRIOT reauthorization.

Less than a week after the WaPo instituted a new Twitter policy, I’m convinced the new policy has completely protected the rag’s credibility.

To be fair to Obama, his statement at the NCTC focused more on unity of mission than it did on pushing through PATRIOT (as I had feared).

And I think Obama is absolutely justified in thanking the NCTC for the work it has done recently to break up Zazi’s alleged attack.

The Obama Administration boasts that it did not have a big press conference to announce the arrest of Najibullah Zazi. But it does so in one article of several designed to boast of Obama’s approach to terrorism.

I guess I’m not the only one who noticed that DOJ is trying to reauthorize Section 215 without leveling with the American people how they’re using it. John Conyer, Jerrold Nadler, and Bobby Scott have written Eric Holder, requesting that he make more information on the way Section 215 is used public.

How did it happen that, after the entire Senate Judiciary Committee approved limits on Section 215 during the 2005 PATRIOT authorization, the section was blown open during the conference report, effectively allowing the use of Section 215 in data mining?

Did Susan Crawford admit the government had tortured Mohammed al-Qahtani because she knew there were tapes that might come out?