Remember the Polish prosecutor who got fired as he was preparing to charge top members of the Democratic Left Alliance party for their complicity in America’s torture site? The same newspaper that broke that story–Gazeta Wyborcza–just reported former President Aleksander Kwasniewski’s purported explanation of his role in the torture site: complete ignorance. “Aleksander Kwasniewski did [...]

I had been predicting for weeks before Obama went to Poland that the Poles would move to quash their investigation into the black site at which KSM and others were tortured. And sure enough, that appears to be what happened. The first move actually happened before Obama arrived in Poland: three days before Obama got [...]

When the WikiLeaks Gitmo Files were first released last week, the Telegraph’s top headline warned of a “nuclear hellstorm” if Osama bin Laden were captured or killed. One of the terrorist group’s most senior figures warned that al-Qaeda had obtained and hidden a nuclear bomb in Europe that would be detonated if Osama bin Laden [...]

I don’t really know precisely what days in March 2003 the CIA’s contractors waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a total of 183 times. But I thought about the rough timing when Dafna Linzer tweeted about this Steven Aftergood post, noting the report in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review of what they did last Congress said they [...]

As I mentioned in my earlier post on the new Gitmo protective order, DOD is reportedly preparing to charge Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri for his role in the Cole bombing for trial in a military commission. That’s worth keeping in mind because the Gitmo order is largely based on the protective order the DC District [...]

DOD just issued a new protective order that will cover the military commissions they’re about to roll out. (h/t Carol Rosenberg) I’m still reading the document. But I wanted to highlight this requirement. Statements of the detainee that detainee’s counsel acquires from classified documents cannot be shared with the detainee absent authorization from the appropriate [...]

Josh Gerstein reports that the government has withdrawn from defending Donald Rumsfeld and others in the Jose Padilla suit Judge Richard Mark Gergel dismissed the other day. (h/t MD) The Justice Department under President Barack Obama has quietly dropped its legal representation of more than a dozen Bush-era Pentagon and administration officials – including former [...]

There’s Matt, who froze Gul Rahman to death in the Salt Pit. Paul, his boss and the CIA Station Chief of Afghanistan, who ignored Matt’s requests for more help at the prison. There’s Albert, who staged a mock execution of Rahim al-Nashiri, and his boss, Ron, the Station Chief in Poland, who witnessed the forbidden [...]

The AP has a story on Mitchell and Jessen’s torture defense. The lead of the story describes how CIA protected the torturers both by paying all of their defense costs–up to $5 million–as well as paying it directly out of CIA funds. But there’s an interesting sub-narrative. The piece describes how, in addition to just [...]

ACLU reports that Rahim al-Nashiri’s lawyer’s request to include their client’s treatment at a black site in Poland in the country’s investigation has been successful. The Polish prosecutor will investigate the detention and torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a black site in Poland after he was kidnapped and transported there by the CIA. [snip] [...]