One of the most intriguing details of the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed indictment is this entry: 126. On or about July 23, 2001, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, KHALID SHEIKH MOHAMMED applied for a U.S.-entry visa, using the name “Abdulrahman A.A. Al-Ghamdi,” which application was denied. That’s interesting for a number of reasons. Such a reference doesn’t [...]

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 [...]

Given that the AP has filled in some details about the Ramzi bin al-Shibh tapes someone had hidden under a desk at CIA, I wanted to look back at the letter DOJ wrote to Leonie Brinkema in 2007, when the government first admitted it had been sitting on those tapes. AP says the tapes were [...]

Remember how Judy Miller stored the notes showing that the Vice President’s lackey had leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to her under her desk in a shopping bag? Remember how we mocked that kind of record keeping? Well, the AP reports that the CIA uses the same archival system as Judy: The two videotapes and one [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Ali Soufan claims he had success interrogating Ramzi bin al-Shibh, too, before CIA cut him off.

It was bad enough that the Bush Administration did away with attorney-client privilege via their warrantless wiretap program. Now the Obama Administration appears to be trying to intimidate lawyers defending Gitmo detainees by threatening them with prosecution for trying to ascertain the identities of those involved in abusing their clients.

DOD won’t let Ramzi bin al-Shibh’s lawyers know what drove him crazy.

Have you noticed that no one is telling us who the second Al Qaeda detainee is–the one whose torture tape was destroyed along with that of Abu Zubaydah? What if it was Ramzi Bin al-Shibh?