I don’t really know precisely what days in March 2003 the CIA’s contractors waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a total of 183 times. But I thought about the rough timing when Dafna Linzer tweeted about this Steven Aftergood post, noting the report in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review of what they did last Congress said they [...]

Our country apparently has a new standard for justice: innocent until a secret study–headed by a guy who may have had some responsibility for screwing up an earlier investigation and conducted entirely after your death–finds you were psychologically capable of committing a crime. The LAT reports on a just such a report conducted on Bruce [...]

Ha’aretz reports that Israel’s Military Intelligence set up a group several months ago dedicated to collecting intelligence on non-Israeli leftist organizations that criticize Israel. Military Intelligence is collecting information about left-wing organizations abroad that the army sees as aiming to delegitimize Israel, according to senior Israeli officials and Israel Defense Forces officers. The sources said [...]

As we’ve known for years, the May 6, 2004 OLC opinion authorizing the warrantless wiretap program shifted the claimed basis for the program from inherent Article II power to a claim the Afghanistan AUMF trumped FISA. But one problem with that argument (hard to fathom now that Afghanistan has once again become our main forever [...]

Congratulations to Barton Gellman, whose book on Cheney’s abuse of the Constitution, Angler, will serve as the basis for an HBO miniseries. HBO has optioned the book Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Barton Gellman for a miniseries to be executive produced by Paula Weinstein. The mini, which will be based on the [...]

Apologies in advance. I’m going to be in the weeds reading the May 6, 2004 Goldsmith opinion for a little bit. In this post, I want to point to some details of timing that, I think, suggest that the changes DOJ made to Cheney’s illegal wiretap program in 2004 included, first, a limitation on collection [...]

Last we heard about the families of Raymond Davis’ victims, they were held in custody until they agreed to accept the blood money Pakistan offered on our behalf. Things are looking up for the family members, though. Eighteen of them have been flown to UAE to be resettled. A chartered plane carrying 18 family members [...]

As MadDog and I were discussing on this thread, the May 6, 2004 Jack Goldsmith opinion on the warrantless wiretap program references an OLC opinion that appears not to have been publicly released or, even in the course of FOIA, disclosed. Thus, this Office will typically construe a general statute, even one that is written [...]

As I noted in this post, DOJ has released two of the memos used to authorize the illegal wiretap program. I made some brief comments on the November 2, 2001 John Yoo memo here. This will be a working thread on the May 6, 2004 Jack Goldsmith memo. P1: Note in the TOC (and in [...]

As Josh Gerstein and Jack Goldsmith note, DOJ just released two of the opinions underlying the warrantless wiretap programs. They both focus on the May 6, 2004 opinion Goldsmith wrote in the wake of the hospital confrontation; I’ll have far more to say about that opinion later today and/or tomorrow. But I wanted to look [...]