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 [...]

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 [...]

CIA’s torturers asked DOJ to let them use mock burials. But DOJ said no. PDF page 42 of the OPR Report (searchable copy here) includes a list of the torture techniques that Mitchell and Jessen recommended be used with Abu Zubaydah. Whereas the Bybee Two Techniques memo approves ten techniques, Mitchell and Jessen recommended twelve. [...]

Siobhan Gorman reports that the satellite domestic surveillance program has–finally–been killed.

Someone wants the NYT to prempt the OPR report. And the NYT has obliged.

Every time I’ve raised the 2004 CIA IG report on torture on the Hill, whomever I’ve been talking to has gotten all hush hush, as if even they had to pretend the report never existed. Today, Conyers invoked it as one of the things that a Commission investigating the crimes of Bush and Cheney would focus on.

Apparently, DHS can’t–or won’t–tell CREW where Michael Chertoff was the day New Orleans flooded.

What do you think he was doing?

The Yoo Torture Memo claims that OLC had consulted with the Criminal Division about which statutes would not be applied to the military during the conduct of war:

The Criminal Division concurs in our conclusion that these canons of construction preclude the application of the assault, maiming, interstate stalking, and torture statutes to the military during the conduct of a war.

Radar provides an explanation for what so offended Jim Comey about the warrantless wiretapping program. They were using the warrantless wiretaps to collect information for a database called Main Core, which is basically a database of anyone the federal government considers potential enemies of the state.

Michael Chertoff sure likes waiving laws, doesn’t he? We know about his waiver of Chiquita’s support for right wing terrorists. We learned today about his intent to set aside environmental laws so he can build his wall on the border. And now, Marty Lederman suggests Chertoff gave John Yoo the go-ahead to exempt the military from laws prohibiting torture.