A bunch of former DOJ bigwigs just wrote a seemingly pointless letter to Pat Leahy to assure him that David Margolis does not have a partisan–and they mean Left-Right partisan–bias. (h/t Main Justice) I say “pointless,” to begin with, because after last Friday’s flaccid hearing on the OPR report, is anyone actually imagining that Pat [...]

As I reported on Monday, DOJ lost not only John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s emails from the period when they were writing the Bybee Memos. It also lost at least 10 documents on torture, a number of them that went into the development of the torture memos. We first learned these documents had disappeared from [...]

In this post, I’m going to test a hypothesis that OLC may not have included “cramped confinement” in its torture plans until it removed “mock burial.” If I’m right, it means after having been told OLC would not approve mock burial, OLC and CIA instead just renamed what they were doing as “cramped confinement” so [...]

At Mary’s instigation, I went back to look at Ibn Sheikh al-Libi’s description of how he was shoved into a coffin-like box in Egypt. (Thanks to burnt for the searchable copy.) According to al-Libi, the foreign government service [redacted] “stated that the next topic was al-Qa’ida’s connections with Iraq. … This was a subject about [...]

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 [...]

You know what I find surprisingly absent from the OPR Report? Any discussion of how–just days after potentially receiving a document making clear that SERE techniques were torture and that torture was not effective–John Yoo still authorized the use of torture in US interrogations. Here are the last two paragraphs of that document: (U) Another [...]

We’ve been talking quite a bit about John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s emails on the torture memos that OLC deleted: with a rebuttal of John Yoo’s claims there were no email, a report on the National Archives’ attempts to learn what happened, and a catalog of damning facts we learned from the few emails left [...]

As we learned in an SJC hearing last summer (where this exchange took place), in addition to giving Jay Bybee and John Yoo two opportunities to respond to the OPR report, DOJ also let CIA review the report. That’s why I was so interested to see details of a John Rizzo letter (dated October 5, [...]

[Note: this is a working thread, not a finished document. As such, I may not pay as much attention to typos as in finished posts.] OPR Report on torture [for searchable copies, go here) Memorandum for the Attorney General OPR Final Report OPR 1st Draft Report OPR 2nd Draft Report Yoo Response to OPR 2nd [...]

Update, 3/9/10: Rotunda says he is not the person with whom Yoo had this email exchange. See this post for a discussion of the further puzzles that presents. I apologize to Rotunda for assuming he must be the person in the report. There’s an interesting passage in the OPR report (PDF pages 58-59 in the [...]