It would appear that it took at least six months (from late January to late July) before the CIA got around to torturing Ghul.

This, in spite of the fact that an earlier reference to the August 25 letter claims that CIA believed Ghul had information about pending attacks.

The commissions’ main purpose is to produce government propaganda, not justice. These are meant to be show trials, part of an overarching plan of “exploitation” of prisoners, which includes, besides a misguided attempt by some to gain intelligence data, the inducement of false confessions and the recruitment of informants via torture. The aim behind all this is political: to mobilize the U.S. population for imperialist war adventures abroad, and political repression and economic austerity at home.

The unredacted sections of the Goldsmith Memo do not rely on In re Sealed Case to claim warrantless wiretapping qualifies as a special need, whereas the White Paper does.

As I have noted before, there are a number of paragraphs in the May 6, 2004 Goldsmith memo authorizing warrantless wiretapping that appear to be badly overclassified. Not only were many of the same paragraphs printed, almost verbatim, in unclassified fashion, in the White Paper released in January 2006. But many of those paragraphs contain nothing more than discussions of published statute.

Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo was always an embarrassing hack. But for some reason, the upcoming SCOTUS fight has made him reveal his hackery in full splendor.

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. I thought I ought to sum up what we who have been following all along already know–but Baer’s CIA sources aren’t telling him.

Something appears to have been done to detainee Abu Zubaydah which caused severe mental suffering–something amounting to a threat of imminent death, like waterboarding or mock burial. In response to that treatment AZ gives his torturers the first piece of intelligence that actually involves al Qaeda (because, of course, he wasn’t a member of al Qaeda). But the treatment is serious enough that CIA’s lawyers (probably including John Rizzo) start worrying whether it can get the torturers charged with torture. That probably weighed heavily on John Rizzo when, after he presented the “proposed” torture program on July 13, the country’s top prosecutors reacted badly. And so, panicked, he asked John Yoo for a fax laying out how to avoid being charged under the torture statute. And while CIA and OLC danced around for two more weeks preparing a document that made the torture program look palatable enough to sign off on, that wasn’t what CIA would rely on.

As former legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, David Addington apparently took the lead on refusing the 9/11 Commission’s request to review interrogation tapes or access to detainees. It appears Addington got the draft of the letter from 9/11 Commission–which was addressed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. Tenet and Addington clearly had a conversation about how to respond. But it seems that Addington drafted the response, got Condoleeza Rice, Andy Card, and Alberto Gonzales to review it, and then sent it to Tenet (and, presumably, Rumsfeld) to okay and sign the letter.

Why would Addington have obstructed the 9/11 Commission’s review?

It appears that early in July 2004, the White House dictated to DOJ what torture methods would be approved. And only after Congress got involved did the White House agree to niceties like OLC opinions.

Nothing quite has the power of hearing the words contained in critical documents the torture era read out loud.