Sorry to get so deep in the weeds on the missing OLC documents, but I wanted to show why this matters, using the example of the Legal Principles (AKA the Bullet Points) documents. As I’ll show below, one of the most sensitive documents involved in the controversy between CIA and OLC on the Legal Principles [...]

I know that Rush Holt has already called for further investigation in the anthrax case, but having a Sub-Committee Chair at HJC make the same call might carry different weight. Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, reiterated his call for an independent investigation [...]

As I reported on Monday, DOJ lost not only John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s emails from the period when they were writing the Bybee Memos. It also lost at least 10 documents on torture, a number of them that went into the development of the torture memos. We first learned these documents had disappeared from [...]

With the quick corporate profit vultures and Wall Street wizards flailing about at GM for immediate returns; Bob Lutz, the last real car guy left in key management, walks away.

A number of you have passed me this breaking news from Germany: Vast amounts of telephone and e-mail data held in Germany must be deleted, the country’s highest court has ruled. The constitutional court overturned a 2008 law requiring communications data to be kept for six months. The law – designed to combat terrorism and [...]

In this post, I’m going to test a hypothesis that OLC may not have included “cramped confinement” in its torture plans until it removed “mock burial.” If I’m right, it means after having been told OLC would not approve mock burial, OLC and CIA instead just renamed what they were doing as “cramped confinement” so [...]

The NYPD is compiling an enormous and permanent computerized database of these encounters between innocent New Yorkers and the police while President Obama has failed to appoint even one person to his Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board designed to investigate such infringements.

At Mary’s instigation, I went back to look at Ibn Sheikh al-Libi’s description of how he was shoved into a coffin-like box in Egypt. (Thanks to burnt for the searchable copy.) According to al-Libi, the foreign government service [redacted] “stated that the next topic was al-Qa’ida’s connections with Iraq. … This was a subject about [...]

As I explained in this post, at least ten documents that OPR should have had to conduct its investigation into the writing of the torture memos disappeared sometime over the course of the investigation (significantly, CIA had an opportunity to come and take all the documents away for a while just after OPR first got [...]

Because so many people like to accuse me of beating up on Toyota: General Motors has recalled 1.3 million Chevrolet and Pontiac models in North America for power steering failures that are tied to 14 crashes and one injury in the United States, the company said Tuesday. The recall affects 2005-2010 Chevrolet Cobalt and 2007-2010 [...]