About a million of you, seeing Isikoff and Hosenball’s and Justin Elliott’s coverage of a story about Fitzgerald getting involved in an investigation of how photos of torturers ended up at Gitmo have emailed me the story in alarm. (This is a story I first covered 8 days ago.) I’m going to attribute the alarm [...]

On Friday, former militia leader Mike Vanderboegh called for anti-Democratic vandalism across the country to protest the health care bill. Vanderboegh posted the call for action Friday on his blog, “Sipsey Street Irregulars.” Referring to the health care reform bill as “Nancy Pelosi’s Intolerable Act,” he told followers to send a message to Democrats. “We [...]

Say, have you noticed how often Chuck Schumer has been nuzzling up to Lindsey “Huckleberry” Graham lately? There’s their plan on immigration reform which, among other things, calls for a national biometric ID card. And there’s a bill to pressure China on currency manipulation. I raise this for two reasons. First, Huck’s efforts to institutionalize [...]

Remember Mohamedou Slahi, the Gitmo detainee who they loaded onto a boat and drove around to give him the impression he was being moved? The judge in his habeas case has just ordered him released–though we don’t know why yet. (h/t cs) Slahi is the 34th Guantánamo detainee ordered freed since the U.S. Supreme Court [...]

It looks like the Brits are discovering they were engaged in the same kind of torture we were in Iraq. Fresh evidence has emerged that British military intelligence ran a secret operation in Iraq which authorised degrading and unlawful treatment of prisoners. Documents reveal that prisoners were kept hooded for long periods in intense heat [...]

Jane Mayer has a great general purpose slapdown of torture apologist Marc Thiessen love letter to torture. She hits on most of the weaknesses of Thiessen’s arguments: his false claims about what prevented the 2006 liquid explosive plane plot, apologists’ very selective examination of what counts as an attack on American, the silence about Ibn [...]

On Friday, I pointed out that Eric Holder and Dennis Blair used language in a letter on Gitmo’s detainees that suggests some subset of the detainees at Gitmo is not covered by Obama’s Executive Order requiring some resolution to their status. In recent days, a couple of you have linked to articles about two other [...]

When I asked whether DOD had any authorization for torture after 2004, Jeff Kaye reminded me we just recently saw one new aspect of authorization: an April 2006 Steven Bradbury Opinion authorizing Appendix M of the new version of the Army Field Manual released on September 6, 2006. (As Jeff and Matthew Alexander have shown, [...]

There are a couple of things that have been bugging me about the authorizations DOD got for interrogations.  It’s not clear what kind of authorization DOD used to justify detainee interrogations after the Yoo memo was withdrawn in 2003-2004–they had no overall interrogation approval from OLC. While it’s possible they were just relying on already-existing [...]

John Dingell says he is going to try to persuade Stupak to drop his efforts to sink healthcare with his anti-choice efforts. The Congress is a place where we represent our people and where we serve our conscience. I strongly disagree with Bart, I think he’s wrong. But he was my friend. He is my [...]