Entries by emptywheel

Judge Hellerstein Spanks (Figuratively) the CIA

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Michael Hayden and the rest of the torture apologists have been wandering around all week claiming that the Administration could have won its FOIA case against ACLU and withheld the torture memos.

If this ruling from Juge Hellerstein is any indication, they couldn’t be more wrong. It did five things:Demanded a full “Vaughn” index for the FOIAed materials, describing the people involved and the dates.Refused the government’s attempt to limit production of

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Why Don’t They Claim al-Nashiri’s Waterboarding Worked?

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As I noted last night, MiniCheney very pointedly avoided claiming that al-Nashiri provided important intelligence as a result of being waterboarded. In a non-sequitur response to Norah O’Donnell’s assertion that waterboarding is torture, MiniCheney offered this as rebuttal to O’Donnell’s point (at 2:15).

There were three people who were waterboarded, and two of those people are people who gave us incredibly important and useful information, information that saved American lives after

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Cheney Cherry Picks Intelligence Again

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Greg Sargent got a hold of Cheney’s FOIA request for the documents that will prove–he claims–that torture was effective. He’s asking for two documents, both of which were stored in his “detainees” file in his files. They are:CIA Report, dated July 13, 2004CIA Report, dated June 1, 2005

(I’m a little confused about what the two different forms refer to, as they seem to refer to the same documents, though of

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Cliff May: N_O Reading, ‘Riting, or ‘Rithmetic

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Some lessons on the 3 Rs for the Cliff May and the other folks at N_O, who apparently don’t know this stuff.

Reading

First, read before you write. Because when you write, Under a strict set of rules, every pour of water had to be counted — and the number of pours was limited.

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Jerrold Nadler: We Must Investigate Torture … and Fix State Secrets

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Jane and I had a chat yesterday with Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), the Chair of the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties to talk about his call for a special prosecutor to investigate the torture program. Chairman Nadler was clear: “You don’t have much choice under the law–you have to investigate.” The law requires, he explained, that such allegations be investigated.

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