Darrell Issa has no credibility when it comes to matters of transparency. We’ve seen Issa’s rank hypocrisy in the past. He dismissed concerns about Karl Rove doing business on RNC emails as a political stunt. And he suggested that apparently deliberate attempts to dismantle email archives at the White House was all about technology. So [...]

I’ve been poking DOJ’s version of the events leading up to the Bybee Memo and hope to elaborate on that at a further time. But for now, I want to point to this 2005 article, apparently attempting to scuttle Michael Chertoff’s nomination to be Secretary of Homeland Security by raising his role in approving torture [...]

Since the AP story on the Salt Pit death, reporters have focused a lot of attention to a particular footnote in Jay Bybee’s second response to the OPR Report and what it claims about intent (and, to a lesser degree, what it says about Jay Bybee’s fitness to remain on the 9th Circuit). In it, [...]

It’s time to read the Bybee Two memo again. Since the OPR Report came out, we’ve learned the following (some of it was already out there, but I, at least, hadn’t noticed it): After his 63rd interrogation session, Abu Zubaydah experienced what his torturers call “hard dislocation” An “issue arose” during the interrogation of Abu [...]

My focus on the multiple versions of Abu Zubaydah’s psychological assessment led me to review the CIA OIG Vaughn Declaration from last August, and one document that was withheld caught my eye. The document strongly suggests that the July 13, 2002 John Yoo fax that appears to have been used as CIA’s general authorization for [...]

All this talk about Michael Chertoff’s role in refusing CIA an advance declination for torture had gotten me wondering about the status of Chertoff’s biggest policy initiative at the Department of Homeland Security: the fence along the Mexican border. Last I remembered, the Bush Administration was using the fence as an excuse to shred environmental [...]

As I pointed out in an earlier post, when Counterterrorism Center lawyer Jonathan Fredman sent the torturers in Thailand a green light for torture in August 2002, he relied on language about intent from a July 13, 2002 fax from John Yoo to John Rizzo rather than the finalized August 1 Bybee Memo. In a [...]

Mark Hosenball reports that Dianne Feinstein and other Senate Dems have accused the Department of Homeland Security’s spooks of using right wing propaganda to develop finished intelligence reports on Muslims. By looking at this paragraph from last year’s intelligence authorization… The Committee has raised a number of concerns with reports issued by the Department of [...]

Sorry to get so deep in the weeds on the missing OLC documents, but I wanted to show why this matters, using the example of the Legal Principles (AKA the Bullet Points) documents. As I’ll show below, one of the most sensitive documents involved in the controversy between CIA and OLC on the Legal Principles [...]

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 [...]