In this post, I described the Harvard study that showed that US’ largest newspapers stopped calling waterboarding torture once it became clear the US was doing it.I wanted to look more closely at an odd time lapse in the NYT’s Orwellian treatment of waterboarding. In a seeming defense of their refusal to call torture torture [...]

Scott Shane and Eric Lichtblau tell a sort of weird story of how a House Intelligence Committee staffer, Diane Roark, tried to reach out to William Rehnquist to get him to review Dick Cheney’s illegal wiretapping program. Within months of the beginning of the eavesdropping program in October 2001, a staff member of the House [...]

One of the potential bombshells in last week’s FOIA dump appears in a CIA discussion about a potential statement in response to NYT’s breaking of the torture tape story (PDF 86). The document notes that the videotapes would have shown the sheer number of times the torturers waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, and suggests that that may [...]

As I said the other day, most of the documents we received the other day are the 13 or so documents that CIA had cleared for FOIA release, but over which John Durham had declared a law enforcement privilege. This chart compares what we got with what had been declared in Vaughn Indices in November [...]

The latest Ghost Detainee FOIA materials [long pdf] (for a general overview see this post) prove that Michael Hayden lied to the Senate on April 12, 2007. One of the things included in this packet is a heavily redacted transcript of Hayden’s classified briefing to the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI) on April 12, 2007. There’s [...]

Michael Hayden is at it again. This time it is CNN that has donated the bandwidth to his continued petty whining about the release of the OLC Torture Memos. After acknowledging that the matter is over and now simply a matter of history, Hayden, in a “Special to CNN Comment” bearing today’s date, says: I [...]

Seven DCIs request that Obama interfere in the workings of DOJ to stop the torture investigation. Interestingly, Poppy Bush is not among them.

Michael Hayden appears to have claimed that the 2003 “Legal Principles” document was an OLC opinion. But OLC says–or at least said–it’s not.

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

The circumstances surrounding the start date and initial approval date of the domestic spying program are getting more and more confusing.