An Unknown Unknown Made Known Known
Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who authorized torture under the Bush administration, passed away today at age 88. *spit*
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Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who authorized torture under the Bush administration, passed away today at age 88. *spit*
I’m going to do a longer timeline on targeted killing authorizations, but first I wanted to address a more narrow issue: When did DOJ give the (as received) undated white paper released by NBC to Congress? Michael Isikoff says Congress got the memo in June, 2012. It was provided to members of the Senate Intelligence […]
I’ve been comparing Ron Wyden’s February 2012 letter demanding the authorization the Administration uses to kill American citizens with the one he sent John Brennan last week. It’s striking how similar the letters are, particularly given the Administration’s drone publicity tour last year, between the time Wyden wrote the two letters. Wyden dismisses the value […]
Navy v. Egan–the SCOTUS case Executive Branch officials always point to to claim unlimited powers over classification authority–just got bigger. Berry v. Conyers extends the national security employment veto over commissary jobs The original 1988 case pertained to Thomas Egan, who lost his job as a laborer at a naval base when he was denied […]
A bit of a parlor game has broken out over whether Obama really means his veto threat over the detainee provisions of the Defense Authorization. Josh Gerstein weighed in here, including a quote from John McCain accusing the Administration of ratcheting up the stakes. It’s also clear that, whether for political reasons or due to […]
First Gitmo Habeas Case Makes Way To SCOTUS and it will be an important bellwether to see if the Court accepts cert and, if so, what they do with the case.
The government appealed its loss in the habeas petition of Mohamedou Ould Salahi Friday. It’s worth reviewing what this appeal is about. At the District level, Judge James Robertson ruled that while Salahi had clearly been an al Qaeda sympathizer and, before al Qaeda declared war on the US had been a sworn member of […]
Barack Obama’s DOJ finished it’s homework assignment: to tell the Courts how it will deal with all the men Bush detained. But it basically amounts to renaming the same authorities and powers Bush claimed.
Per Jeff’s suggestion, I took a closer look at Zelikow’s memo on how the CIA stiffed the 9/11 Commission on evidence relating to interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri. I’ll come back and comment on it in more detail–but I was struck by how closely the requests coincided with the beginnings of the Abu Ghraib scandal and Tenet’s resignation.
I’ve been meaning to go back to compare the chronology laid out by Dan Rather in his complaint as it pertains to Abu Ghraib with the chronology of the Taguba investigation and the Hamdi case. Two things stick out. First, Myers pretended to be ignorant of the details of the abuse on May 6, several weeks after he called Dan Rather personally to spike–or delay–the story.