Judge Lewis Kaplan has basically concluded that if the government can persuasively argue that government believed the torture necessary at the time, then they can torture a detainee as long as he still has intelligence value without infringing on the detainee’s right to a speedy trial.

Time for another blogger ethics panel. Or maybe just a bloggers’ style guide, one that states unequivocally that waterboarding is torture. Because–as Glenn reported earlier–the dead tree press only calls waterboarding torture when others do it. And they stopped referring to it as torture as soon as it became clear it had become US policy. [...]

Clark Hoyt has a really curious final column summarizing his three years as the NYT’s public editor. A lot of it is self-congratulation to the NYT for even having a public editor. But I’m most fascinated by Hoyt’s rebuttal of reader claims that NYT is a “liberal rag.” For all of my three years, I [...]

The Old Gluehorse, John McCain, is lost without strategist Hohn Weaver and should be put out to pasture.

MadDog linked to the letter that Dennis Blair and Eric Holder sent the Senate describing the process by which 6 agencies and a 100 staffers meticulously decided the ultimate fate of Gitmo detainees–who could be released or imprisoned elsewhere, who could be tried, and (presumably) who had to be held indefinitely. It might be a [...]

I wonder how Greg Craig–ousted from the Administration because he tried to do the right thing on Gitmo–feels about this. In December 2008, Obama, Emanuel and Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) met in Obama’s transition headquarters in Chicago to discuss detainee policy. According to Graham, Obama turned to him at [...]

McCain suggested, back in May, that he was able to prevent the Bush Administration from abusing detainees. I guess not.

The CIA is lying, once again, about what transpired in briefings with Congress.

The WaPo confirms that, as I speculated, Cheney was the “not available” briefer. So why weren’t we told?

Yes, I’m glad that Arlen “the Scrapple formerly known as Haggis” Specter has come out in support of Nancy Pelosi’s suggestion that CIA misled her in her September 2002 briefing.

“The CIA has a very bad record when it comes to — I was about to say ‘candid’; that’s too mild — to honesty,” Specter, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a lunch address to the American Law