As promised Obama signed an executive order forming a presidential commission to study the BP disaster today. I thought it’d be instructive to compare what he just formed with what Edward Markey and Lois Capps proposed. Starting with this detail: Sec. 4. Administration. (a) The Commission shall hold public hearings and shall request information including [...]

A couple of weeks ago, I noted that the CIA Memorandum for the Record from their February 4, 2003 briefing of Pat Roberts revealed that Bob Graham, Roberts’ predecessor as Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had attempted to institute some oversight over the CIA’s interrogation program in November 2002. After CIA discouraged the idea [...]

Practically the first thing Pat Roberts did after he became Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee was to back down off nascent efforts Bob Graham had made as SSCI Chair to exercise real oversight over the torture program. That’s one of the most important details revealed in the Memo for the Record [big PDF] of [...]

David Corn reports that the SSCI has included its torture briefings in its investigation on torture–and wonders whether that might get Cheney in trouble. I’m guessing that Cheney’s briefing of SSCI may be the least of the investigation.

In spite of the fact that it is becoming increasingly clear to the rest of the media that Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi agree that they were not briefed that the CIA had already been torturing prisoners in September 2002, the WaPo has decided to double down on deliberately misreading events.

Bob Graham says OCA, not CTC, conducted his one “torture” briefing. He also said the location of the brieing–in the Hart Senate Office Building and not the White House–shows that the briefing was not highly classified.

The WaPo is apparently in the business of reprinting ignorant challenges without any fact-check or context.

I suggested yesterday that one of the explanations for the CIA’s unreliable record of briefings on torture and terrorism in 2002 and 2003 might reflect an attempt to hide certain information.

Did CIA not reveal they were torturing detainees to dodge any question about the accuracy of claims about Iraq intelligence? 

While we don’t know the full schedule of briefings on Iraq intelligence, the schedule of intelligence documents pertaining to Iraqi ties

I’ve got to correct something I said yesterday about Bob Graham. I reported that Graham said that CIA had given him two erroneous dates for briefings. They gave erroneous dates for three briefings.

Bob Graham says that when he asked when CIA briefed him on torture, they gave him two briefing dates when no briefing had even occurred.