Last month, we talked about Judge James Robertson’s decision that Mohamedou Slahi should be released. Robertson’s order has now been released. I’ll have comments as I read it. But the short version is that the Government abandoned its attempt to prove (first) that Slahi had knowledge of 9/11 before it happened, and (second) that any [...]

About a hundred of you have pointed to this story, which reports that Lawrence Wilkerson signed a declaration to support the lawsuit of a former Gitmo detainee, Adel Hassan Hamad, stating that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld knew there were innocent people at Gitmo. Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he [...]

As I said in my last post, bmaz and I are about to let loose a slew of posts on David Passaro, the only CIA guy prosecuted for detainee abuse. I first decided to look into Passaro’s case given that he was prosecuted in relation to the death of an Afghan detainee, Ahmed Wali, in [...]

As you’ll no doubt understand over the next week or so, bmaz and I have been comparing the case of David Passaro, the only CIA-related person to be prosecuted for detainee abuse, with what happened in Gul Rahman’s death at the Salt Pit. Passaro, a CIA contractor obviously trained in SERE-based interrogation techniques, was convicted [...]

Sorry to let the threads grow so long of late–I’ve been out weeding again, if you know what I mean. So partly to open up another thread to discuss the many ways in which our government kills Americans and/or journalists, and partly because we’ve been talking about whether the Hutaree militia organizing 40 miles from [...]

I want to look at two data points about the Wikileaks video. First, note what General Barry McCaffrey has to say about the mission depicted in the Wikileaks video (around 1:25): Well, it’s not clear to me it was a mistake, Contessa, I mean if there were armed people on the ground, the fact that [...]

Let the competition begin. The WaPo clarifies an earlier Reuters report (which was unclear that this pertained to CIA) that Anwar al-Awlaki has been added to the CIA’s kill list, after having been on JSOC’s kill list for some months. Anwar al-Aulaqi, who resides in Yemen, was previously placed on a target list maintained by [...]

I’ve been poking DOJ’s version of the events leading up to the Bybee Memo and hope to elaborate on that at a further time. But for now, I want to point to this 2005 article, apparently attempting to scuttle Michael Chertoff’s nomination to be Secretary of Homeland Security by raising his role in approving torture [...]

In a follow-up on its story on Gul Rahman’s death in the Salt Pit in November 2002, AP reports that Rahman may have rescued Hamid Karzai from imprisonment by Afghan intelligence in 1994. After Soviet forces withdrew in 1989, Afghanistan descended into civil war as the Islamic groups that ousted the Soviets fought each other [...]

Bush DOJ hacks Brenda Morris and Leura Canary are still alive and stirring up more political prosecutorial mischief, even in the Obama/Holder DOJ.