I’m working on some deep weeds for a post later on Monday (hopefully). But as a preliminary to them, I wanted to point out a minor–but very critical–bit of timing. As I pointed out in the comments to this thread, someone (I’ll show in my new weedy post why it might be then-Counterterrorism Center Legal [...]

Bob Baer has a column out stating that he can’t figure out why the torture tapes were destroyed–and repeating CIA spin claiming the torture depicted in the tapes should not, itself, be a legal problem, since it was approved by DOJ. (h/t cs) Did the CIA want to destroy graphic evidence of sleep-deprivation or waterboarding? [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There is a report out in the Washington Post that John Durham may be winding up his torture tape investigation and that little, if anything, will come from it.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Just go read it. Because every word Glenn Greenwald wrote in his post today, entitled Nostalgia for Bush/Cheney Radicalism, the gospel truth. It is rare that you will see a post here just pointing you somewhere else because the other source says it all. This is one of those times.

The OPR Report has been leaked, and it looks like the Obama DOJ has watered it down to protect Bush malfeasants.

New docs to comb through on the torture tape destruction!