Ronald Rotunda, having received a copy of my post suggesting that he was the professor whom Yoo emailed looking for help on common law defenses, has emailed to say he did not correspond with Yoo at all on these issues. As you’ll recall, last month, I pointed to a section of the report describing Yoo [...]

Since Mark Benjamin has decided to claim–some 300-plus days after I did the first of many posts focusing on the details of waterboarding (to say nothing of posts drational did looking at these descriptions medically)–that, “the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” haven’t been mined for waterboarding details until now,” I thought I’d make another point about [...]

Remember that Richard Shelby hold? Where he was holding the Senate hostage so Airbus could get a tanker refueling contract? Well, given that Airbus withdrew from the competition yesterday, I thought it appropriate to see what Shelby has to say about all this… The Air Force had a chance to deliver the most capable tanker [...]

Yesterday when I raised the question of what techniques DOD wanted to use in spring 2004, I said there was some ambiguity about what DOD was trying to get approved. In this post I’m going to lay out the conflicting sources of information. Given the totality of information, though, it appears that what DOD asked [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that the CIA Memorandum for the Record from their February 4, 2003 briefing of Pat Roberts revealed that Bob Graham, Roberts’ predecessor as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had attempted to institute some oversight over the CIA’s interrogation program in November 2002. After CIA discouraged the idea [...]

Joe Hagan has an epic softball in the New York Magazine describing PapaDick Cheney’s plan to salvage his legacy. Or rather, Liz “BabyDick” Cheney’s plan to salvage Daddy’s legacy, and with it, launch her own career. (At several points, the piece comes close to suggesting PapaDick’s mental acuity is finally going the way of his [...]

On March 13, 2004, according to the OPR Report, Jack Goldsmith and Patrick Philbin went to Jim Comey’s house on a Saturday to alert him of something. The military had contacted Goldsmith, wanting to use a more extreme form of torture against a detainee–something like isolation, waterboarding, water dousing, or death threats.* [Update: In this [...]

Rosalind linked to this LAT article describing Clarence Thomas’ pro-abuse views. According to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a prisoner who was slammed to a concrete floor and punched and kicked by a guard after asking for a grievance form — but suffered neither serious nor permanent harm — has no claim that his constitutional [...]

A bunch of former DOJ bigwigs just wrote a seemingly pointless letter to Pat Leahy to assure him that David Margolis does not have a partisan–and they mean Left-Right partisan–bias. (h/t Main Justice) I say “pointless,” to begin with, because after last Friday’s flaccid hearing on the OPR report, is anyone actually imagining that Pat [...]

Rahm’s mouthpiece is reporting that the White House is all set to cave on civilian trials for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. President Obama’s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney [...]