Yesterday, I posted on a Harvard study showing that the press, after an established tradition of referring to waterboarding as torture, stopped doing so once it became clear the US engaged in the practice. Our press, in other words, refused to tell what they had previously presented as “the truth” (that is, that waterboarding was [...]

I’ve been poking DOJ’s version of the events leading up to the Bybee Memo and hope to elaborate on that at a further time. But for now, I want to point to this 2005 article, apparently attempting to scuttle Michael Chertoff’s nomination to be Secretary of Homeland Security by raising his role in approving torture [...]

Since the AP story on the Salt Pit death, reporters have focused a lot of attention to a particular footnote in Jay Bybee’s second response to the OPR Report and what it claims about intent (and, to a lesser degree, what it says about Jay Bybee’s fitness to remain on the 9th Circuit). In it, [...]

As I pointed out in my last post, when Jonathan Fredman wrote the Abu Zubaydah torture team in Thailand to tell them they had gotten the green light to torture, he cited not the Bybee One memo which had just been signed, but a July 13, 2002 Yoo fax, for his discussion of intent. This [...]

This is going to be another weedy post… I wanted to put two totally bureaucratic pages (PDF 23-24) from the recent FOIA dump into the context of the other known documents in the chronology. The first page is an “Executive Correspondence Routing Sheet,” sent from CIA General Counsel Scott Muller around top CIA management for [...]

Jay Bybee thinks it’s really damning that Jim Comey attended a July 2, 2004 Principals meeting at which the torture of one particular detainee (he says it was Janat Gul, though there are reasons to doubt it) was discussed. Comey joined Ashcroft at a NSC Principals Meeting on July 2, 2004 to discuss the possible [...]

Sorry to get so deep in the weeds on the missing OLC documents, but I wanted to show why this matters, using the example of the Legal Principles (AKA the Bullet Points) documents. As I’ll show below, one of the most sensitive documents involved in the controversy between CIA and OLC on the Legal Principles [...]

One of the defenses that John Yoo and Jay Bybee made in response to the OPR Report with which I’m sympathetic is the argument that, if they are going to be held accountable, so should all the other Executive Branch lawyers who approved of torture. Jay Bybee even included a pretty little graph of all [...]

Back in September, I put together a timeline of everything we knew about the “Legal Principles” document created by the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center and lawyers from OLC in 2003. The OPR Report has additional information on the document (starting at PDF 107), which it refers to as the “Bullet Points,” so I wanted to update [...]

We’ve known for years that when Jane Harman asked Scott Muller in 2003 whether the President had authorized torture, he basically blew her off. But we now know that Muller consulted with the White House åbout how to respond to her.