Happy Fourth of July. This week, the DC Circuit Court had to tell the government that using false passports does not make someone an al Qaeda member. At issue is the appeal of Belkacem Bensayah, an Algerian who had been living in Bosnia alleged to have arranged travel for five others (the rest of the [...]

I’m going to assume John Cole was asking sincerely when he posted this request. Can someone explain this reaction from Emptywheel: After prompting Kagan to deliver the standard justification for detaining enemy combatants during war and rewarding her with a condescending compliment, Lindsey starts by getting Kagan to agree that the war on terror will [...]

As McClatchy reported yesterday, Judge Henry Kennedy granted a the habeas petition of a Yemeni man, Mohamed Hassan Odaini, several weeks ago. That brings the total number of men held at Gitmo who have won habeas petitions to 36. Kennedy’s ruling reveals not just his exasperation with the government’s arguments, but also the absurd lengths [...]

As MadDog noted, Judicial Watch just got some new documents detailing briefings Congress received. Or rather, they got new documents providing further proof that CIA has no fucking clue what it said to Congress during some key briefings (this batch shows, for example, that the fall 2003 briefings were never finalized into a Memo for [...]

I felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people. — Abu Zubaydah to the Red Cross Physicians for Human Rights just released a report documenting what Jeff Kaye and more recently Jason Leopold have been discussing for years: America’s torturers were conducting a kind of human experimentation [...]

While I was away celebrating my 20th college reunion this weekend (thanks for filling in, bmaz), the WaPo liberated the Gitmo Review Task Force report. As the WaPo reported, the big takeaway is the government’s admission that over 55% of those reviewed by the Task Force were what it called “low level fighters” in al [...]

I want to make one more point about the interview Jason Leopold did with Jon Kiriakou last week. Jason asks Kiriakou about Dan Coleman’s judgment that Abu Zubaydah’s diaries reveal him to be mentally ill. Kiriakou agrees with Coleman that the diaries were written in multiple voices, but dismisses that by saying they were a [...]

This is the kind of lede you’d expect from a dirty hippie blogger, not from a septuagenarian TradMed journalist. Who other than the acerbic John A. Rizzo, who served a long tenure as the CIA’s acting general counsel, would use his first talk after retiring from government to lay out a series of ironies that [...]

Thanks to BoxTurtle for linking to the manual for military commissions rushed out last night in time for the Omar Khadr hearing. There are a number of interesting details in it, but since Khadr’s hearing today pertains to torture–whether statements he made after allegedly being tortured will be admissible–I thought I’d start with what the [...]

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? [...]