The AP noticed something troubling in Michael Vickers’ response to the Senate Armed Services Committee questions on his nomination to be Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence: the government did not include descriptions of its cyberwar activities in the quarterly report on clandestine activities.

I’m guessing that the Senate Armed Services Committee wants to hold hearings on the survey on November 30 rather than December 1, as part of their timeline for getting the defense authorization bill to the floor. I think it’s positive that Gates is accommodating them. The Senate won’t be back in session until Monday, December 29, so the Pentagon could have technically released the survey two days early, though the timing of the hearing was probably the major factor here.

A new investigation from the Senate Armed Services Committee shows that private security contractors in Afghanistan “rely on warlords and strongmen” to provide security guards that watch US bases. These guards often have ties to the Taliban.

I’m not trying to be too alarming but we don’t have much time to get repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell passed in the defense authorization bill. Things are looking very bleak for passage of the defense authorization bill, at least for this year. And who knows how many seats we’ll have next year? People have been sold a whole bunch of lies on this repeal bill, starting from the fact that it’s not repeal itself – it just allows repeal to happen if certain conditions are met and then three people sign off on it. Yet, we’ve heard the loud pronouncements that “DADT is dead” on certain leftist political blogs.

On the International Day of Support of Victims of Torture, I offer an analysis of where the fight against U.S. torture currently stands, as well as a retrospective of the history of the development of U.S. torture policy. In particular, the role of U.S. behavioral scientists in the construction of torture techniques is explored.

The Murphy amendment passes the House, 234-194, with 5 Republicans voting in favor. This means that the amendment is in the House and Senate versions of the bill, as of tonight. The five Republican votes in favor were Djou (HI), Cao (LA), Ron Paul (TX), Ros-Lehtinen (FL) and Biggert (IL).

The Senate Armed Services Committee, after a closed door session this evening, voted 16-12 for the Lieberman/Levin DADT ‘repeal’ that the full House will vote on tonight or Friday morning.

Congressional leaders and the White House may have a deal in principle to initiate a process to repeal the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, but Congress still needs to find the votes for that repeal. And those hopes took a hit today with Scott Brown’s opposition.

By the end of this week, we should know whether Congress will make a play to end the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy on gay service members, or whether they’ll allow continued discrimination in our nation’s armed forces.

Bradbury and OMS’s assurances don’t correspond with the evidence from JPRA internal documents, which describe the use of waterboarding as leaving students “psychologically defeated” and impaired in the ability to develop “psychological hardiness.” Furthermore, as a Truthout article last month notes, the discontinuance of waterboarding was not due to mere failure at resistance to the technique. They were finding measures of physiological harm.