Shortly after news broke that CIA destroyed the torture tapes, the 9/11 Commission issued a letter complaining that they had not been told of–much less been allowed to review–the torture tapes. The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda [...]

This is going to be a really weedy post trying to explore what was going on with just about the only named opinion that Jack Goldsmith wrote at OLC that has gotten focused attention–a March 19, 2004 one cataloging the protected status of different kinds of people captured in Iraq. I will return to the [...]

Jay Bybee thinks it’s really damning that Jim Comey attended a July 2, 2004 Principals meeting at which the torture of one particular detainee (he says it was Janat Gul, though there are reasons to doubt it) was discussed. Comey joined Ashcroft at a NSC Principals Meeting on July 2, 2004 to discuss the possible [...]

As I explained in this post, at least ten documents that OPR should have had to conduct its investigation into the writing of the torture memos disappeared sometime over the course of the investigation (significantly, CIA had an opportunity to come and take all the documents away for a while just after OPR first got [...]

The letter the National Archives wrote to DOJ last week inquiring about John Yoo’s missing emails focused on DOJ’s violation–as a Federal Agency–of the Federal Records Act. Now, John Conyers is taking the reverse approach–asking for email exchanges to which the White House was a party–which would be preserved pursuant to the Presidential Records Act. [...]

One of the defenses that John Yoo and Jay Bybee made in response to the OPR Report with which I’m sympathetic is the argument that, if they are going to be held accountable, so should all the other Executive Branch lawyers who approved of torture. Jay Bybee even included a pretty little graph of all [...]

The National Archives has noticed what we all did: somehow the emails via which John Yoo coordinated with (I’m guessing) the White House on the Bybee Memo disappeared. They’ve written DOJ to get some answers. Here’s the letter. In response, as Michael Isikoff reports, DOJ is mouthing the same kind of blather that Gary Grindler [...]

I my last post, I showed that the CIA asked DOJ to approve the use of mock burial, but DOJ refused. I noted that the ICRC report doesn’t appear to show that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to mock burial (though he was subject to confinement in both a small and a larger box). But what [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about the OPR report’s description of who cooperated and who didn’t with its report (those not bolded in the table). In addition to the most important White House players–particularly David Addington, as well as Tim Flanigan–they list at least four CounterTerrorism Center lawyers who refused to cooperate. (On PDF 13; [...]

The most important ethical failure described in the OPR report pertains to how the Bybee One memo became a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. On July 16, 2002, John Yoo went into a meeting at the White House having been told by Michael Chertoff that he couldn’t write a “Get Out of Jail Free” [...]