A Federal Court in Washington DC has issued a very hard slap down by of the government’s continued use of bogus evidence obtained by brutal torture to try to justify continued detention of detainees at Guantanamo.

Spencer’s got one of the big scoops of the day: that Philip Mudd left the FBI about six weeks ago (so early March). Philip Mudd, one of the intelligence community’s leading al-Qaeda analysts, has quietly retired from the FBI, where he was associate executive director of the National Security Branch. Mudd confirmed in an email [...]

Michael Isikoff reports that–as I suspected–DOJ would very much like to accept the Vaughn Walker ruling and be done with George Bush’s illegal wiretap program. But the Department of Justice led by a guy who got paid a lot of money to help Chiquita’s rich white Republican executives avoid criminal liability for their support of [...]

I talked yesterday about one of the puzzling documents in last week’s FOIA dump. In this post, I wanted to try to figure out why the most puzzling document–the Interview Questions from PDF 106-108. The document has no date nor any office information–it’s just a 3-page list of questions marked Top Secret. Given how little [...]

Two of the guys in the Company depicted in the Wikileaks video–including the medic guy who pulled the girl from the van–recently wrote a letter apologizing for their role in the events depicted in the video. Here’s how it starts: Peace be with you. To all of those who were injured or lost loved ones [...]

One of the most curious documents turned over in last week’s FOIA dump is the last one, titled “The CIA Interrogation of Abu Zubaydah” (PDF 110-122). While these are just wildarsed guesses, I suspect it may either have been a summary developed for the CIA Inspector General’s office for use in its review of the [...]

Three significant pieces of news, taken together, show that the Courts continue to chip away at Bush-and-now-Obama’s domestic surveillance programs. FISA Court Encourages Government to Stop Collecting Some Metadata First, and potentially most importantly, the FISA Court, after learning more about what the collection of telecom metadata entailed, raised some concerns with the government, leading [...]

One of the potential bombshells in last week’s FOIA dump appears in a CIA discussion about a potential statement in response to NYT’s breaking of the torture tape story (PDF 86). The document notes that the videotapes would have shown the sheer number of times the torturers waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, and suggests that that may [...]

Glenn Greenwald has been attacked for making the case against Elena Kagan as a nominee for the Supreme Court on policy and ideology grounds. But neither Greenwald nor the Kagan supporters have addressed the fact Kagan would be effectively the first justice in the history of the Supreme Court to have had no experience whatsoever in court as either an attorney or judge, a critical deficiency in her already thin background.

As I said the other day, most of the documents we received the other day are the 13 or so documents that CIA had cleared for FOIA release, but over which John Durham had declared a law enforcement privilege. This chart compares what we got with what had been declared in Vaughn Indices in November [...]