Who in the CIA is responsible for the torture? Who in the Bush administration is responsible? No more blanket statements, no more obfuscation, no more speculation masquerading as knowledge. We need a truth commission, period.

During the ramp-up of lavishly-promoted corporate astroturf teabagging stunt put on by Fox News and its friends, Texas governor Rick Perry dusted off a few of George Wallace’s more infamous bits of segregationist phrasings and unleashed them as part of his effort to keep the crazy-base part of the Texas Republican Party from deserting him for Kay Bailey Hutchison.

President Obama deserves huge applause for releasing the OLC torture memos, as do the people in the Administration who fought for it. It’s brave move certain to bring down right wing howler monkeys crying about threats to national security, but a huge step toward restoring the rule of law in the United States.

As Spencer pointed out, the first August 2002 OLC specified that it was acceptable to apply physical pain to a detainee so long as it was less than the sort of pain emerging from “organ failure, impairment of bodily functions, or even death.” and that as long as your “purpose” was to get actionable intelligence, not to cause pain, you were in the clear.However, the 5/10/05 memo tells

Here’s something jumping out at me on my first read through the OLC memos.

In two separate memos, both written at the request of John Rizzo (acting and then Senior Deputy Counsel for the CIA), OLC relied on representations gleaned from SERE psych determinations as a means of assessing and understanding the potential for long-term mental harm or physical risks involved in treatment.

On insects and confinement boxes. . .

Consider this a working thread.

On April 3, DOJ submitted a filing that argued that no citizen had the ability to sue if she had been wrongly wiretapped under Bush’s illegal wiretap program. On August 15, we learn that DOJ’s Inspector General “recently” learned of “significant misconduct” in the wiretap program. Did Holder know of that “significant misconduct” when his DOJ made those expansive claims?

After all the hype, how many Teabaggers showed up yesterday? Nate’s got the numbers, and it isn’t pretty.

One of the factors that frequently limits the value of demonstrations in the modern era is that no matter how many people you pull together, if the media decides it’s not going to cover something, the impact is minimal. And they weren’t all that large relative to the hype and free media time they got — Nate Silver estimates that across the country there were 250,000 people attending.