Obama-Era Military Commissions: Cramming on the Rules
Spencer's down in Gitmo this week, supposedly watching the beginning of Omar Khadr's hearing. Only, as he just reported, the manual laying out rules for the military commissions only got signed an hour ago by Secretary of Defense Bob Gates.
A…
BP's Procedural Spills
Another thing that happened while I was tromping around one of the most beautiful places on earth (Yosemite) is that the BP drilling rig that had an explosion and fire last week sunk and oil has started to spill into the Gulf (as this dramatic…
Dick Cheney's Counterterrorism Incompetence Continues to Endanger Us
When I was out tromping around Yosemite (!!) on Friday, one of Najibullah Zazi's co-conspirators, Zarein Ahmedzay, plead guilty to two terrorism-related charges.
Mark that up as yet another counterterrorism victory for civilian courts.
But…
David Iglesias: Obama's Used Car Salesman For Gitmo Show Trials
The Obama Administration is using David Iglesias as a shill for its wholesale adoption of the military commissions and prosecution based on torture championed by George bush and Dick Cheney.
I Guess The Comfy Chair Was Not An Option
Utah inmate Ronny Lee Gardner has chosen firing squad as his method of execution; if that is his choice, what's wrong with that?
SEC: CoxSlackers & BushWackers Fiddled While Wall Street Burned
The big outrage de jour making the rounds in the media currently is the porn scandal at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The problem was born and matured under Bush and Cox, it is the fact that it is symptomatic for the emaciation and gutting of the SEC which occurred at their hands and express direction.
Anthrax and Blago for Breakfast
I forgot to mention this yesterday. But I'm going fishing this weekend, and you're going to be blessed with the fine hospitality of bmaz and the likker cabinet until sometime Monday.
But while I'm sneaking my last Toobz fix in before Mr. EW…
Scott Bloch Cops A Plea For Bloching Justice
Scott Bloch, the former head of the Office of Special Counsel is copping a plea.
Why Were the Torture Tapes Destroyed?
Bob Baer has a column out stating that he can't figure out why the torture tapes were destroyed--and repeating CIA spin claiming the torture depicted in the tapes should not, itself, be a legal problem, since it was approved by DOJ. (h/t cs)
Did…
Court Slaps Government Over Use Of Torture Evidence
A Federal Court in Washington DC has issued a very hard slap down by of the government's continued use of bogus evidence obtained by brutal torture to try to justify continued detention of detainees at Guantanamo.
Mudd Wrestling and Torture
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…
Holder's Catch-22 on the al-Haramain Ruling
Michael Isikoff reports that--as I suspected--DOJ would very much like to accept the Vaughn Walker ruling and be done with George Bush's illegal wiretap program. But the Department of Justice led by a guy who got paid a lot of money to help…
The Interview Questions
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…
The Wikileaks Medic's Soldier's Apology
Two of the guys in the Company depicted in the Wikileaks video--including the medic guy who pulled the girl from the van--recently wrote a letter apologizing for their role in the events depicted in the video. Here's how it starts:
Peace be…
The Abu Zubaydah Document
One of the most curious documents turned over in last week's FOIA dump is the last one, titled "The CIA Interrogation of Abu Zubaydah" (PDF 110-122). While these are just wildarsed guesses, I suspect it may either have been a summary developed…
Government Continues to Avoid Court Rulings on Domestic Surveillance
Three significant pieces of news, taken together, show that the Courts continue to chip away at Bush-and-now-Obama's domestic surveillance programs.
FISA Court Encourages Government to Stop Collecting Some Metadata
First, and potentially most…
Who Is Lying? The Torturers? Or John Yoo?
One of the potential bombshells in last week's FOIA dump appears in a CIA discussion about a potential statement in response to NYT's breaking of the torture tape story (PDF 86). The document notes that the videotapes would have shown the sheer…
A Concurrence In The Case Against Elena Kagan
Glenn Greenwald has been attacked for making the case against Elena Kagan as a nominee for the Supreme Court on policy and ideology grounds. But neither Greenwald nor the Kagan supporters have addressed the fact Kagan would be effectively the first justice in the history of the Supreme Court to have had no experience whatsoever in court as either an attorney or judge, a critical deficiency in her already thin background.
The Timeline of Torture Tape Destruction in John Durham's Documents
As I said the other day, most of the documents we received the other day are the 13 or so documents that CIA had cleared for FOIA release, but over which John Durham had declared a law enforcement privilege. This chart compares what we got with…
Did the White House Review CIA's Records on Congressional Briefings?
A month ago, I wrote a post noting that CIA had never finished its Memos for the Record of several key Congressional briefings. But as I've been reviewing old Vaughn Indices to get a better sense of what we received yesterday, I've seen some…