All Blog Posts from Courtwatch

And so it came to pass that on the day before Halloween 2009 we all were reminded that most of the biggest tricks of the past decade were on us.

Read full post…

Ninety years ago, in the shadow of the Great War, long before the invention of cable news and bloggers, the great American writer and journalist Walter Lippmann wrote in Liberty And The News that:

The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding. What he knows of events that matter enormously to him, the purposes of governments, the aspirations of peoples, the struggles of classes, he knows at second, third or fourth hand. He cannot go and see for himself.

Americans could not go see for themselves the effects of the Bush Administration's torture policies. There are no commuter flights to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and the train doesn't run on time to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. The digital cameras that recorded the degradation of Iraqi prisoners at the prison were never supposed to see the light of day. And the video recordings of the Gitmo interrogations were improperly destroyed by the CIA so that they never would.

We were blind but now we begin to see. Slowly, a clearer picture is emerging of the legal and political path from the "torture memos" authorized by the Office of Legal Counsel (by men like John Yoo and Steven Bradbury and Alberto Gonzales) to the reported water-boarding (simulated death by drowning) of Khalid Sheik Mohammed not once or twice but 183 times. What began in 2002 as faux legal ambiguity (about the legality of torture) turned into official military policy and then into a moral and diplomatic disaster and now has become, as almost all facts always do, a part of history.

Read full post…

This hot August day really is a dog for the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Justice Department releases a declassified report (drafted in 2004 by the CIA's Inspector General) which contains brutally embarrassing details about past interrogation tactics. The White House announces the formation of a new, elite, highly-complex interrogation team that places the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Council and not the CIA at the core of future questioning sessions of terror suspects. And then the Justice Department comes back with its own internal report recommending the renewal of a criminal probe into past prisoner abuse by CIA agents.

It's been such a tough day in the spy world that CIA Director Leon Panetta had to draft and circulate a "cheer up, buck up" memo to his staff, reminding them in self-serving bureaucratic fashion that what some of them did to those detainees back in 2002 and 2003 was pre-approved by Bush-era lawyers through those Office of Legal Counsel "torture memos."

"For the CIA now," Panetta wrote today, "the challenge is not the battles of yesterday, but those of today and tomorrow. It is there that we must work to enhance the safety of our country. That is the job the American people want us to do…"

This confluence of events over prisoner abuse and the CIA's role in it has been coming for a long, long time. And yet there are still so many moving parts, so many unanswered questions, that perhaps the best course now is simply to identify a few of the most important themes and issues sure to play out over the next few days, weeks and months. Here are the first 10 angles that come to mind.

1. Just because the Justice Department's Office of Personal Responsibility has rejected Bush-era conclusions and recommended a second look at criminal prosecutions doesn't necessarily mean we'll see any current or former CIA agents as defendants anytime soon. The final call still rests with Attorney General Eric Holder and there are as many political reasons not to proceed as there are legal ones warranting trials.

Read full post…

Although we came to learn about them five years apart, there is no separating in law or in fact the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib from the prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay or wherever else our government's agents used mock executions and power-drills during interrogation sessions of terror suspects.

Whether in Iraq or Cuba, whether at Gitmo, Bagram Air Force Base, Diego Garcia or at some secret prison, the odious conduct occurred around the same time (2003), came from the same dubious legal rationale (Bush-era torture memos), and ultimately upon its disclosure brought embarrassment, if not outright shame, to our diplomatic and public-relations efforts in the war on terrorism.

We've already processed through our court systems the men and women whose actions generated the Abu Ghraib scandal. At least 12 soldiers and civilians, including Lynndie England and Charles Graner, were found guilty or pleaded out their cases. Most of these ignominious people say they have been punished unfairly for the sins of their superior officers. Six years after the photos, we still do not know how high up goes this particular chain of command.

Read full post…

He'll probably get overturned on appeal, but if and when he does, at least U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White will have gone down fighting and with candor.

The federal trial judge in Northern California declared late Friday in a 42-page ruling that a civil lawsuit against John Yoo could proceed, at least for the time being, to determine whether the torture-memo scoundrel can be held legally accountable for his role in authorizing and enabling the Bush Administration's odious torture policy.

Read full post…

People far smarter than me have tried to psychoanalyze Dick Cheney to understand his motivations, both recent and past. Books have been written on the topic; talking head politicos have strained neck muscles arguing the matter before television cameras. But after watching Cheney’s terror-law speech on Thursday, and after reading his prepared remarks, let me humbly offer a theory that may explain both why he seems so creepy to so many and so right to some.

Read full post…

Let’s assume the worst about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her rough re-entry into the national debate over Bush Administration torture tactics. Even though she vigorously disputes this, let’s assume that she knew back in 2002 that the Central Intelligence Agency was performing water-boarding and other “enhanced” interrogation tactics upon terror suspects. Let’s assume Rep. Pelosi said nothing for years even as those policies crumbled under the weight of their own illegalities and immoralities.

This makes her a hypocrite, a coward and probably a liar (not exactly a new or rare trifecta in Washington). It neutralizes her as a weapon the Democrats may choose to employ as some (but not all) Republicans eagerly seek to distance themselves from the disastrous policy. It paints her as part of the problem and not part of the solution, which is the kinder way of saying what many GOP leaders were saying about Pelosi as the week wore on. It also helps educate us all about the routine interaction between parties on sensitive intelligence matters.

But what Pelosi’s complicit silence does not do is exonerate the men who drafted the torture memos and the men and women who authorized them to do so. Their degree of culpability for this mess is an order of magnitude more profound than is Pelosi’s. She did not conjure up the dangerous legal theories used by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzales, and Steven Bradbury to justify the shift in policy. She didn’t decide to call off FBI interrogators (whom we now know were successful) and replace them with dark CIA operatives (whom we now know were not).

Read full post…

There is no justice in the world. John Yoo, the disgraced architect of the Bush Administration’s odious torture policies, has been rewarded for his infamy with a job writing columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer. There are a dozen other people, journalists and scholars alike, who have covered the legal war on terror with dignity and candor and insight and integrity. But the Inky instead chose Yoo to continue to spew his twisted vision of the Constitution.

Read full post…