How could John Durham be scheduling appearances before the grand jury already unless those appearance came out of his torture tape destruction?

Abu Zubaydah’s psychological profile was a complete whitewash of his condition. Surprise.

The LAT says the torturers never saw the Bybee Two Memo placing limits on how they executed waterboarding. But chances are very good they saw a memo authorizing far more abusive waterboarding.

The LAT returns to the story of the purportedly imminent torture prosecution.

Some tidbits from Jane Mayer’s latest on torture.

Leon Panetta admits he’s protecting the identities of contractors.

I increasingly suspect that the torture index provided to ACLU may better pinpoint the day when Abu Zubaydah’s torture began. Here are they key datapoints.

April 13, 2002: CIA starts taping Abu Zubaydah interrogations.

April 16, 2002: Bruce Jessen circulates draft exploitation plan to JPRA Commander.

April 2002: CIA OGC lawyers begin conversations with John Bellinger and John Yoo/Jay Bybee on proposed interrogation plan for Abu Zubaydah.

The letter DOJ sent a letter to Leonie Brinkema to explain why it had neglected to admit there were torture tapes it didn’t disclose to her during the Moussaoui trial. The whole letter makes a lot more sense if James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen had had the tapes.

How did a guy with neither Arabic skills nor expertise on al Qaeda get a hold of al Qaeda training manuals as early as December 2001?

The torture architects received a document that warned that torture–yes, it used that term–was likely to elicit false confessions.