The government has now responded to Risen’s attempt to quash his subpoena in the Jeffrey Sterling case. I fear the government will succeed in at least getting Risen to the stand, not least because of the gimmicks they’ve used to claim they need information not protected by any confidentiality agreement Risen might have had with [...]

As Josh Gerstein reports, Leonie Brinkema has unsealed her November 2010 ruling quashing the government’s subpoena of James Risen to testify before the grand jury. Gerstain describes several interesting details revealed in the ruling–including that the government withheld information, including details surrounding the 2005 testimony of, apparently, a Senate staffer. Go check out those details. [...]

I wanted to point out two details of timing on the Ramzi bin al-Shibh tapes: The tapes were made after CIA started getting worried about making interrogation tapes The tapes were disclosed after the CIA started trying to figure out what happened to the Abu Zubaydah tapes The tapes were made after CIA already started [...]

Given that the AP has filled in some details about the Ramzi bin al-Shibh tapes someone had hidden under a desk at CIA, I wanted to look back at the letter DOJ wrote to Leonie Brinkema in 2007, when the government first admitted it had been sitting on those tapes. AP says the tapes were [...]

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.

I agree with Jeff. Given the news that the torture tapes never entered the US, given Porter Goss’ apparent command not to destroy the torture tapes “in Washington,” and given the terms of the Federal Records Act, I think the CIA and the Administration stretched logic with each and every request for the torture tapes so as to claim they never were required to hand over the tapes.