On June 29, 2007, Congressman Norm Dicks sent George Bush an eloquent letter urging him to close Gitmo. It said, among other things, Since the time that captured “enemy combatants” were first brought to Guantanamo Bay in 2002, the detainment facility has undermined America’s image as the model of justice and protector of human rights [...]

The CIA documents released in the latest FOIA batch prove that all the claims that CIA (and Crazy Pete Hoekstra) have made about briefings Congress received on torture are, at best, reconstructions based on years old memories, if not outright fabrications. The documents appear to have been a summary of torture briefings CIA Office of [...]

Anyone feel like they drowning under the weight of a really horrible bureaucracy yet. DOJ IG Documents (1) DOJ IG Documents (2) CIA Documents DOD Documents OLC Documents Consider this a working thread. Jeff Kaye–see the first document in the OLC batch, which pertains to Appendix M. In CIA Thread, PDF 3 is a document [...]

Bloomberg is reporting that Office of Management and Budget head Peter Orszag has told the intelligence committees Obama will veto the intelligence authorization because–among other reasons–it calls for re-examining the FBI’s conspiracy theory-as-investigation summary finding that Bruce Ivins acted alone. (h/t fatster) President Barack Obama probably would veto legislation authorizing the next budget for U.S. [...]

This is going to be a really weedy post trying to explore what was going on with just about the only named opinion that Jack Goldsmith wrote at OLC that has gotten focused attention–a March 19, 2004 one cataloging the protected status of different kinds of people captured in Iraq. I will return to the [...]

Several things stuck out for me in the NYT’s big story about DOD’s PsyOp contractors-as-assassination-flunkies. First, the degree to which DOD allegedly hid its assassination program inside a PsyOp venture. As the story reports, Michael Furlong, the guy running this show, was ostensibly engaged in strategic information, collecting information on Afghanistan’s social structure. But in [...]

You know how the Moonie Times let go almost all of its “journalists” last year? Well, apparently they haven’t let go of their CIA mouthpiece (not a surprise, I guess, since MT has always been one big disinfo campaign), Bill Gertz. And he’s out this morning suggesting (though not saying explicitly) that the CIA wants [...]

I just re-read Philippe Sands’ Torture Team and, given the news of disappearing emails and documents, this passage struck me anew: [Mike Dunlavey, who was in charge of Gitmo as they put together the torture plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani] would have liked to have gone back to the daily diaries and schedules that were kept [...]

I’m starting a pool: Who will be the first top leader to be ousted for his role in a corruption scandal? Will it be A, Pope Ratzinger, for sending a pedophile priest for the “gay cure” then back to working with children rather than to prison back when he was an Archbishop? A widening child [...]

Eric Kleefield uncovers a heap of hypocrisy in IN Senate candidate Dan Coats’ lobbying record, but he misunderstands what it means. Former Sen. Dan Coats (R-IN) is running for his old Senate seat, apparently on a platform of opposing government takeover of the private sector. But as it turns out, in 2008 he lobbied the [...]