Adam Goldman has another in his series of articles fleshing out the details of the torture that John Durham is investigating. Today’s story describes the former FBI-turned CIA guy, “Albert” threatened Rahim al-Nashiri with a drill–with the approval of Albert’s boss, “Mike.” (Though the AP story says this threat would be less than a felony [...]

The WaPo reports that the Administration has shelved plans to try Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in military commissions. The decision at least temporarily scuttles what was supposed to be the signature trial of a major al-Qaeda figure under a reformed system of military commissions. And it comes practically on the eve of the 10th anniversary of [...]

I wanted to point out two details of timing on the Ramzi bin al-Shibh tapes: The tapes were made after CIA started getting worried about making interrogation tapes The tapes were disclosed after the CIA started trying to figure out what happened to the Abu Zubaydah tapes The tapes were made after CIA already started [...]

You should read two pieces in conjunction this morning. First, this Andy Worthington piece from last week, that lays out new details on the black site CIA used in Poland in 2002-2003. On Friday, the Polish Border Guard Office released a number of documents to the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, which, for the [...]

Spencer’s got one of the big scoops of the day: that Philip Mudd left the FBI about six weeks ago (so early March). Philip Mudd, one of the intelligence community’s leading al-Qaeda analysts, has quietly retired from the FBI, where he was associate executive director of the National Security Branch. Mudd confirmed in an email [...]

I talked yesterday about one of the puzzling documents in last week’s FOIA dump. In this post, I wanted to try to figure out why the most puzzling document–the Interview Questions from PDF 106-108. The document has no date nor any office information–it’s just a 3-page list of questions marked Top Secret. Given how little [...]

Shortly after news broke that CIA destroyed the torture tapes, the 9/11 Commission issued a letter complaining that they had not been told of–much less been allowed to review–the torture tapes. The commission’s mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda [...]

ACLU just had a conference call on today’s Gitmo announcement with, among others, Razmi bin al-Shibh’s civilian defense attorney, Tom Durkin, and Rahim al-Nashiri’s defense attorney, Nancy Hollander. Both had important details about their clients’ defense. I asked Durkin about the status of al-Shibh’s competency hearings. Since the government has been trying to refuse defense [...]

Back in January 2008, the CIA’s OIG claimed it did not launch its investigation into torture in response to an allegation of wrongdoing. But that’s not what the IG Report itself said.

Ali Soufan tells us what we didn’t learn because we used torture.