In this post, I’m going to test a hypothesis that OLC may not have included “cramped confinement” in its torture plans until it removed “mock burial.” If I’m right, it means after having been told OLC would not approve mock burial, OLC and CIA instead just renamed what they were doing as “cramped confinement” so [...]

At Mary’s instigation, I went back to look at Ibn Sheikh al-Libi’s description of how he was shoved into a coffin-like box in Egypt. (Thanks to burnt for the searchable copy.) According to al-Libi, the foreign government service [redacted] “stated that the next topic was al-Qa’ida’s connections with Iraq. … This was a subject about [...]

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 [...]

You know what I find surprisingly absent from the OPR Report? Any discussion of how–just days after potentially receiving a document making clear that SERE techniques were torture and that torture was not effective–John Yoo still authorized the use of torture in US interrogations. Here are the last two paragraphs of that document: (U) Another [...]

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 [...]

[Note: this is a working thread, not a finished document. As such, I may not pay as much attention to typos as in finished posts.] OPR Report on torture [for searchable copies, go here) Memorandum for the Attorney General OPR Final Report OPR 1st Draft Report OPR 2nd Draft Report Yoo Response to OPR 2nd [...]

Update: The Nation’s Chris Hayes and I had a chat about the OPR report here. The OPR Report [searchable PDF here] notes–but does not call much attention to–a Goldsmith footnote on a draft of his attempt to replace the March 2003 Yoo Memo that had authorized torture for us in DOD. In a footnote designed [...]

Back in September, I put together a timeline of everything we knew about the “Legal Principles” document created by the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center and lawyers from OLC in 2003. The OPR Report has additional information on the document (starting at PDF 107), which it refers to as the “Bullet Points,” so I wanted to update [...]

As I noted yesterday (though I got the details slightly wrong), the OPR report revealed that a number of John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s emails had been deleted (and that Goldsmith’s had been deleted but were subsequently recovered). OLC initially provided us with a relatively small number of emails, files, and draft documents. After it [...]