The announcement of John Durham’s decision to investigate two CIA detainee murders prompts a reexamination at how the different torture techniques were developed, and how they were propagated across governmental institutional boundaries between the Department of Defense and the CIA. If the press did their job, perhaps we could get a better picture of how torture was implemented, who was responsible, leading the public to demand the accountability that otherwise, without significant public outcry, is not going to happen.

Josh Gerstein reports that a Federal Judge has rejected ACLU’s effort to get the government to remove more of the redactions in the OPR Report on the torture memos. Judge Rosemary Collyer basically argued that the President’s need to get candid advice on how to make torture legal trumps citizens’ right to know about such illegal activity.

In a series of recent articles, I’ve pointed out Yoo, Bybee, and later Office of Legal Counsel attorney Stephen Bradbury, disregarded internal SERE documents related to the safety of waterboarding. Now we can add the suppression of complaints by SERE trainees of having contracted PTSD from participation in SERE training. This directly contradicts the Yoo/Bybee contention in the Aug. 2, 2002 memo to Rizzo, where they wrote, “Through your [i.e., CIA] consultation with various individuals responsible for such training, you have learned that these techniques have been used as elements of a course of conduct without any reported incident of prolonged mental harm.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee will take up the report by Physicians for Human Rights alleging torture experimentation by the CIA. The US was not created as a torturing country; let’s see if our ideals overcome and throw light on this troubling chapter.

The involvement of Margolis in defanging the OPR report is perhaps not an incidental fact.
The role of Margolis, and the man himself, deserve a closer look. It does not take long to see that 40+ year DoJ veteran David Margolis has some skeletons in his closet, and that his track record is not unblemished.

Classes start this week for Dawn Johnsen at IU’s Maurer School of Law, and also for John Yoo at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. But before classes start for either of them, Yoo is sitting down tomorrow night with John Stewart to chat about his new book.

That should make the first class session on Tuesday quite something at both schools.

As torture proper moves from offshore U.S. military and CIA/Special Operations prisons to the territory of the U.S. “homeland,” civil liberties activists and commentators must make their protest against the use of torture techniques in the Army Field Manual heard in the White House. The truth about the use of cruel, inhumane, and degrading interrogation techniques must drown out the obfuscatory fear-mongering from the Cheneyesque right-wing, who babble about how the AFM is inadequate for use by intelligence agencies in the “Terrorist War.”

In January Amy Gooman’s guest Allan Nairn described to Democracy Now’s audience how in 1999 Admiral Dennis Blair, Obama’s Intel Czar pick, had repeatedly supported Indonesian generals commanding Indonesian death squads in Timor, rather than obey his Commander-In-Chief’s lawful orders to tell our client generals in the Indonesian military to shut down their death squads. Today the NY Times reports that last Thursday, as Obama released the torture memos and his Adminstration told us the torture failed to produce useful results, Admiral Blair told the intel community the exact opposite. Who does Dennis Blair serve – America’s elected leaders, or the torture and death squad operatives?