The US determination to prosecute Julian Assange is not just a destructive and myopic scheme to effect prior restraint in a digital world, it is laughable from the point of legal foundation.

Just how inattentive and asleep at the wheel does the government think the American media and citizenry are, to brazenly engage in the simultaneous duplicity of relying on the Durham investigation in Geneva for the UN UPR On Human Rights at the same moment it was using the Durham investigation to bleed out the statute of limitation on the primary jurisdiction of the investigation at home? Well, they think the media and people are completely asleep and, sadly, they are quite correct.

As we have heard absolutely nothing from Eric Holder, John Durham, the DOJ or the Obama Administration in relation to indictments or other results of the investigation Mr. John Durham has been conducting since January 8, 2008, nearly three years, I thought a letter was in order asking just exactly what their status was. Here is that letter.

There is a report out in the Washington Post that John Durham may be winding up his torture tape investigation and that little, if anything, will come from it.

When the government possesses videotape evidence of the torture of subjects under its dominion and control, there is only one reason to destroy the tapes. That reason is not because they possess no evidentiary value; in fact it is the direct opposite, it is because they are smoking guns. Videotapes are definitive for one of [...]

The CIA’s response to a court order in the Hani Abdullah suit seems to suggest that John Durham believes some files pertinent to the torture tapes may have gotten destroyed by CIA’s OIG.

AG Mukasey claims that DOJ has never gotten any facts that would warrant an investigation. But that’s not true. We know DOJ received the results of the CIA IG’s report in 2004, showing that the interrogation techniques depicted on the torture tapes constituted cruel and inhuman treatment in violation of the International Convention against Torture.

Wow. Judge Hellerstein is not amused with the CIA’s assertion that the torture tapes–which IG staffers flew to Thailand to view as part of their investigation into CIA interrogation methods–were not part of their investigation. Nor does he buy the assertion that the “special review” is not an investigation. He basically called Bull on the CIA’s assertions in about six different ways.

The most interesting tidbit from John Rizzo’s appearance before HPSCI yesterday is that Rizzo reported lawyers within CIA admitting the 9/11 Commission would probably want to see the torture tapes. If lawyers within CIA recognized the Commission wanted the tapes, then surely George Tenet did. But he declined to mention the tapes to the Commission. No wonder he lawyered up recently.

Jose Rodriguez, with help from Bob Bennett, tried to exonerate himself in the WaPo today. But John Rizzo, whom Rodriguez seems prepared to claim authorized the destruction, apparently had none of it during his testimony before HPSCI today.