Court papers filed by Obama’s Justice Department in July revealed that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in contact about the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, including what is described as “a confidential conversation” and “an apparent communication between the Vice President and the President.”
Seven former directors of the CIA sent a letter to President Barack Obama Friday asking him to take the unprecedented step of personally blocking an investigation authorized by Attorney General Eric Holder into cases where agency officers and contractors allegedly exceeded legal guidelines during the interrogations of “war on terror” detainees.
US District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly struck another decisive blow to the credibility of the Bush administration’s detention policies at Guantánamo by granting the habeas corpus petition of Kuwaiti prisoner Fouad al-Rabia, a 50-year old aeronautical engineer and a father of four who had been accused of fundraising for Osama bin Laden and running a supply depot for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora mountains.
A month ago, rulings made by District Court judges in the habeas corpus appeals of prisoners held at Guantánamo seemed, for the most part, to confirm that the courts were uniquely placed to deliver justice to the prisoners after their long years of imprisonment, largely without charge or trial.
Col. Wilkerson discussed the long-standing rivalry between the Pentagon and the CIA, and how Donald Rumsfeld — albeit with the backing of Dick Cheney — infected the military with the kind of techniques authorized for use by the CIA on “high-value detainees.”
The Spanish newspaper Público reported exclusively on Saturday that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against six senior Bush administration lawyers for implementing torture at Guantánamo.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said Thursday, “The recent spectacle of Dick Cheney’s public effort to head off investigation of these matters makes clear how much work needs to be done to move this issue past politics. Mr. Cheney’s efforts are not surprising – such an investigation would obviously implicate his own actions and those of his underlings.”
David Broder, the senior op-ed writer at the Washington Post, has joined his colleagues (Fred Hiatt, David Ignatius, and Richard Cohen) in condemning Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to name a special counsel to examine possible law-breaking by CIA interrogators. And like his colleagues, Broder has put forth a list of irrelevant reasons for turning [...]
Did physicians and psychologists help the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency develop a new research protocol to assess and refine the use of waterboarding or other harsh interrogation techniques?
This is the question being raised in a new report by a leading human rights organization. The group says that, if confirmed, it would likely constitute a “new, [...]
It only took 24 hours for the Washington Post to go from the sublime to the ridiculous. On Saturday morning, the newspaper described the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheik Muhammad (KSM), standing before “U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called ‘terrorist tutorials.’”
