Later On

I have a commenter who asserts (without backing it up in any way) that waterboarding is not torture. I referred him to a column by Evan Wallach, a judge at the U.S. Court of International Trade in New York, who teaches the law of war as an adjunct professor at Brooklyn Law School and New York Law School. The column includes:

he United States knows quite a bit about waterboarding. The U.S. government — whether acting alone before domestic courts, commissions and courts-martial or as part of the world community — has not only condemned the use of water torture but has severely punished those who applied it.

After World War II, we convicted several Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American and Allied prisoners of war. At the trial of his captors, then-Lt. Chase J. Nielsen, one of the 1942 Army Air Forces officers who flew in the Doolittle Raid and was captured by the Japanese, testified: "I was given several types of torture. . . . I was given what they call the water cure." He was asked what he felt when the Japanese soldiers poured the water. "Well, I felt more or less like I was drowning," he replied, "just gasping between life and death."

Nielsen’s experience was not unique. Nor was the prosecution of his captors. After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan’s military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

In this case from the tribunal’s records, the victim was a prisoner in the Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies:

A towel was fixed under the chin and down over the face. Then many buckets of water were poured into the towel so that the water gradually reached the mouth and rising further eventually also the nostrils, which resulted in his becoming unconscious and collapsing like a person drowned. This procedure was sometimes repeated 5-6 times in succession.

The United States (like Britain, Australia and other Allies) pursued lower-ranking Japanese war criminals in trials before their own tribunals. As a general rule, the testimony was similar to Nielsen’s. Consider this account from a Filipino waterboarding victim:

Q: Was it painful?

A: Not so painful, but one becomes unconscious. Like drowning in the water.

Q: Like you were drowning?

A: Drowning — you could hardly breathe.

Here’s the testimony of two Americans imprisoned by the Japanese:

They would lash me to a stretcher then prop me up against a table with my head down. They would then pour about two gallons of water from a pitcher into my nose and mouth until I lost consciousness.

And from the second prisoner: They laid me out on a stretcher and strapped me on. The stretcher was then stood on end with my head almost touching the floor and my feet in the air. . . . They then began pouring water over my face and at times it was almost impossible for me to breathe without sucking in water.

As a result of such accounts, a number of Japanese prison-camp officers and guards were convicted of torture that clearly violated the laws of war. They were not the only defendants convicted in such cases. As far back as the U.S. occupation of the Philippines after the 1898 Spanish-American War, U.S. soldiers were court-martialed for using the "water cure" to question Filipino guerrillas.

More recently, waterboarding cases have appeared in U.S. district courts. One was a civil action brought by several Filipinos seeking damages against the estate of former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos. The plaintiffs claimed they had been subjected to torture, including water torture. The court awarded $766 million in damages, noting in its findings that "the plaintiffs experienced human rights violations including, but not limited to . . . the water cure, where a cloth was placed over the detainee’s mouth and nose, and water producing a drowning sensation."

In 1983, federal prosecutors charged a Texas sheriff and three of his deputies with violating prisoners’ civil rights by forcing confessions. The complaint alleged that the officers conspired to "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning."

The four defendants were convicted, and the sheriff was sentenced to 10 years in prison…

Interesting story by Daphne Eviatar:

Veterans groups and conservatives roared last week when news broke that the FBI was targeting veterans in a broad probe of extremist groups. But little noise was made in December, when the Bush administration quietly granted the FBI wide-ranging authority to investigate individuals or groups, regardless of whether they are suspected of criminal activity.

The Attorney General guidelines, proposed last summer and adopted by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, appear to be particularly problematic. Although in the past these guidelines required that the FBI have at least some factual basis for believing that the target of an investigation was engaged in criminal activity, in December 2008, Mukasey instituted new guidelines that authorized the FBI to conduct “assessments” of suspects without requiring any factual basis for suspicion.

Specifically, the Mukasey Guidelines, purportedly “to prevent future terrorist acts against the American people,” allow the FBI to use physical surveillance; interview a person’s neighbors, landlord, colleagues or friends; recruit and assign informants to attend political or other meetings under false pretenses – essentially to act as an undercover spy; and to retrieve personal data from commercial databases; all without having a factual basis to believe that the target of the investigation has done anything wrong.

“I’m a former FBI agent and I can tell you it’s beyond bizarre,” said Michael German, policy counsel on National Security, Immigration and Privacy with the American Civil Liberties Union, and a 16-year veteran of the FBI.

The Attorney General Guidelines were first created in 1976 in the wake of the revelation of intelligence and law enforcement abuses during the Watergate era and revealed by the Church Committee. “The guidelines always required articulable facts to support a reasonable suspicion that someone was violating the law,” said German. “That’s a very low standard.”

Similarly, the Code of Federal Regulations has long required that state and local law enforcement agencies receiving federal funding “collect information concerning an individual only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct or activity and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity.”

Reasonable suspicion is much less than the standard for an arrest, which requires “probable cause.”

“But you need to articulate why you think this person deserves your attention,” said German. “I would say to FBI agents, if you can’t articulate why you’re investigating this person then you probably shouldn’t be out there.”

Under this new “assessments” authority, however, the FBI can recruit informants and send them, undercover, into any organization to spy on them. To critics, that seems eerily reminiscent of FBI counter-intelligence programs in the 1960s and early 70s, used to spy on political leaders and organizations that the government considered radical, such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr…

Continue reading.

Glenn Greenwald:

Blue Dog Rep. Jane Harman — once the most vigorous Democratic cheerleader of Bush’s NSA warrantless eavesdropping program — is rip-roarin’ angry today.  Apparently, her private conversations were eavesdropped on by the U.S. Government!  This is a grave outrage that, as she told Andrea Mitchell just moments ago, demands a probing investigation:

That’s what I asked Attorney General Holder to do — to release any tapes, I don’t know whether they were legally made or not, of my conservations about this matter  . . . and to hope that he will investigate whether other members of Congress or other innocent Americans might have been subject to this same treatment.  I call it an abuse of power in the letter I wrote him this morning. . . .

I’m just very disappointed that my country — I’m an American citizen just like you are — could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years.  I’m one member of Congress who may be caught up in it, and I have a bully pulpit and I can fight back.  I’m thinking about others who have no bully pulpit, who may not be aware, as I was not, that someone is listening in on their conversations, and they’re innocent Americans.

So if I understand this correctly — and I’m pretty sure I do — when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was “both legal and necessary” as well as “essential to U.S. national security,” and it was the “despicable” whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials.  But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power.  Behold Jane Harman’s overnight transformation from Very Serious Champion of the Lawless Surveillance State to shrill civil liberties extremist…

Continue reading. It’s quite a funny column. Harman, based on her own voting record in favor of domestic surveillance, doesn’t have a leg to stand on, but she’s still indignant as hell.

By Glenn Greenwald, and I urge you to read both:

Obama recognizes: whether to prosecute is not his decision

The conclusion of that column:

There may be good arguments, for strategic reasons, to opt for a full-scale independent investigation to enable all facts to be publicly disclosed before embarking on prosecutions (Harper‘s Scott Horton and Elizabeth de la Vega both make strong cases for that approach).  There may even be legitimate reasons why an independent prosecutor, with all the evidence assembled, might ultimately decide, as a matter of standard prosecutorial discretion, that prosecutions should not be pursued (that’s what Patrick Fitzgerald did when he refrained from indicting Karl Rove in the Libby matter).  But the fact that Obama himself opposes prosecutions, or that accountability for these crimes would create political difficulties or “distractions” for the White House, are completely inappropriate reasons for refraining from enforcing the rule of law.  Decisions about prosecutions are meant to be apolitical.  Those decisions are about vindicating equality under the law, not about forging bipartisanship by placating the political party of the criminals and ensuring that our political elites continue, in the name of “harmony,” to retain their license to break our laws with impunity.

The Pulitzer-winning investigation that dare not be uttered on TV

From the second column, this cute note:

For some added irony:  on his NBS News broadcast last night suppressing any mention of David Barstow’s Pulitzer Prize, Brian Williams’ lead story concerned Obama’s trip to the CIA yesterday.  Featured in that story was commentary from Col. Jack Jacobs, identified on-screen this way:  ”Retired, NBC News Military Analyst.”  Jacobs was one of the retired officers who was an active member of the Pentagon’s “military analyst” program, and indeed, he actively helped plan the Pentagon’s media strategy at the very same time he was posing as an “independent analyst” on NBC (h/t reader gc; via NEXIS).  So not only did Williams last night conceal from his viewers any mention of the Pentagon program, he featured — on the very same broadcast — “independent” commentary from one of the central figures involved in that propaganda program.

Quite a guy:

It’s Friday at Florida International University, which means a few things for Sky Choi: physics lab, Calculus II — and a trip to the game room.

For this 12-year-old, the youngest student ever to attend FIU, college is a long-awaited challenge and a daily adventure.

”We have fun here,” he said as he prepared to start a work sheet on pistons, gases, and pressure with his lab partners.

Welcome to the world of Sky, who is taking a full course load of physics, calculus, and Chinese language classes at the university — and still finds time to play pool and table tennis in the game room at the West Miami-Dade campus.

A home-schooler who has a third-degree black belt in tae kwon do and is fluent in Korean, he is dual enrolled and officially finishing high school at the end of this semester.

When he starts classes in the fall as a full-fledged college student, he’ll have as many credits as a sophomore.

The Pembroke Pines preteen, who is classified as ”profoundly gifted,” started taking classes there when he was 10.

”I felt really, really small,” he said…

Continue reading. Here he is:

Mike Lillis in the Washington Independent:

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, appearing today before the congressional bailout oversight panel, repeatedly emphasized the importance of transparency to the success of the rescue plan.

“In a crisis, transparency, accountability and a coherent plan with clear goals are essential to maintain the confidence of the public and capital markets,” he told the panel.

Funny, then, that Geithner is ignoring a congressional inquiry into Treasury’s plan to circumvent congressionally imposed restrictions on bailout recipients by creating a middleman through which to channel bailout funds. That strategy — first reported April 4  by The Washington Post — would allow the bailed out firms to claim that they haven’t received help directly from the government because the money would be funneled through these “special purpose vehicles” — a technicality allowing firms to ignore certain behavioral conditions, including executive pay limits.

The plan drew fire from Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who fired off a series of questions to Geithner about why the Treasury thinks it has the authority to ignore Washington’s legislative branch.

Towns requested answers by last Thursday, but Towns spokeswoman Jenny Rosenberg said today that Treasury has yet to respond.

How’s that for maintaining the confidence of the public?

Daphne Eviatar in the Washington Independent:

With the latest batch of Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel torture memos having revealed more of the intricate, gruesome details of the CIA’s interrogation techniques, how can the government continue to claim that its now-defunct “extraordinary rendition” and torture program is a “state secret”?

That’s the question raised in a letter sent today by the American Civil Liberties Union to a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which is now considering the appeals of victims of that formerly secret CIA program in a pending case.

Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, which I’ve written about here, charges that Jeppesen, a subsidiary of Boeing, assisted the CIA in unlawfully sending the men abroad to be interrogated under torture. The victims seek monetary damages and an acknowledgment of what was done to them. But the government – first under President Bush and now under President Obama – has claimed the case must be dismissed because the rendition program is a “state secret” and revealing information about it would endanger national security, even though President Obama has insisted that the program is no longer active.

With the memos describing the CIA’s interrogation techniques now in the public domain, that argument makes little sense, the ACLU wrote today in a letter to the court…

Continue reading.

Dean Baker:

Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, is very upset with the TARP. Last fall, Mr. Blankfein borrowed $10 billion through the TARP at below market interest rates. Now, the government is starting to tie some real condition to this money, for example, by limiting what Goldman can pay its executives. Mr. Blankfein argues that such conditions are making it impossible to run his business and is now anxious to return the TARP money.

It is great to see that Goldman is finally prepared to go forward into the market without its government training wheels of TARP aid, but, unfortunately, Mr. Blankfein isn’t yet confident enough in his business acumen to actually forego government assistance. Goldman Sachs has benefited and continues to benefit enormously from other forms of government aid.

For example, last fall Mr. Blankfein also took advantage of the opportunity to borrow $25 billion with an FDIC guarantee to his creditors. If this government guarantee reduced his borrowing costs by two percentage points, then it means that the taxpayers handed Goldman $500 million a year in lower interest costs.

Goldman Sachs also has the opportunity to …

Continue reading. His conclusion:

… The basic story is straightforward. The Wall Street crew thinks that they are entitled to pilfer as much as they want from the public and from the government. This people have no interest in a “free market”; they would be scared to death of being forced to work for a living in the absence of a government safety net.

The Wall Street crew has relied on its political power to rig the rules to make them incredibly wealthy. They are relying on this political power to ensure that the rules remained rigged, even though their crooked deck wrecked the economy, costing tens of millions of people their jobs, their homes and their life savings. So far, it looks like the Wall Street boys are winning.

Dean Baker in the Guardian:

It is often said that the there are few forces as destructive as the power of bad economics. Rarely has this been more clearly demonstrated than in the current crisis.

While the bankers’ greed fed the housing bubble, the incompetence and corruption of the economics profession allowed the world’s largest financial bubble to grow unchecked, until its inevitable collapse wrecked the economy. Remarkably, the economists who got everything wrong as the bubble was expanding, are still being given the opportunity to get everything wrong as we try to dig out from the wreckage.

Even though most of the "best" economists in the world did not see it, the story of the bubble and its collapse was in fact extremely simple. The recovery from the stock market crash in 2001 was driven by the growth of the housing bubble.

In the United States, the unprecedented run-up in house prices fueled the economy by causing a construction boom, and even more importantly, a consumption boom, as the saving rate fell to zero. While many prominent economists lectured the country on the need to save and to end spendthrift ways, those who knew economics pointed to the well-known housing wealth effect.

Households spend in part based on their housing wealth. The predictable result of the creation of $8tn in housing bubble wealth ($110,000 per homeowner) was a massive consumption boom on the order of $400bn to $600bn a year. The problem was not people’s spendthrift ways; the problem was that economic policymakers allowed a huge bubble to develop. People treated this bubble wealth as real wealth, and responded exactly as economic theory would predict: they spent like crazy.

With house prices falling rapidly back to earth, the housing construction boom is now a bust and saving rates are returning to normal…

Continue reading.

Dean Baker writes in The Economist:

The quest to increase taxes on the wealthy is not a gratuitous attack on upper income households; it is driven by the need to raise more revenue to run the government. While many deficit hawks been irresponsible in raising fears of an impending collapse of the American government, the projected deficits for years following the recovery are in fact larger than is desirable.

There are areas of American spending at the federal government level that could be reasonably cut, but even after we have zeroed out the "waste, fraud, and abuse" category of federal spending we will still likely need additional revenue of between 1-2%t of GDP to keep budget deficits in an acceptable range. That leaves a choice between increasing taxes on the wealthy or imposing more taxes on the middle class.

The vast majority of the income gains in the United States over the last three decades have gone to the richest 5% of the population, largely as a result of policies that were explicitly designed to redistribute income upwards. Therefore it is far more appropriate to tax the richest 5%t of families who have prospered than the broad middle class who have suffered.

Of course taxes can be designed in a better or worse manner. The best way to increase taxes on the wealthy, in addition to allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, would be to apply a modest financial transactions tax (FTT).

There is a long history in both the United States and the rest of the world with FTT. Until 1964, …

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This is encouraging, though redundant: Holder already had the authority. He’s Attorney General. The story, from Congressional Quarterly:

President Obama on Tuesday left it up to the Justice Department to decide what action, if any, to take against Bush administration officials responsible for legal opinions permitting the use of harsh interrogation tactics on suspected terrorists.

The president also signaled that he would not necessarily oppose the creation of an independent commission to probe Bush-era counter-terrorism policies.

But he stressed his preference for looking forward, as he seeks to move beyond the controversies over waterboarding and other interrogation tactics that the government has renounced.

In brief remarks at the White House, Obama said that memos by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that he made public last week “reflected, in my view, us losing our moral bearings. That’s why I’ve discontinued those enhanced interrogation programs.” …

Continue reading.

Via Mark Bittman, this post lists some good food blogs. One example:

Kalofagas.ca– “Greek Food and Beyond,” from Toronto. Recipes, food, more.”Kalofagas” is Greek for “gourmet.”

Good post on miso:

I love miso. It’s delicious, savory, salty, low in calories – but high in sodium – and easy to use.

So, what is miso?  At its most basic, miso is a paste made from fermented soy beans. Sometimes other components are fermented along with the soybeans, such as rice, barley, or ginger.  Miso is very versatile.  It’s soft texture (a little like canned pumpkin, only a little thicker) makes it easy to use as a sandwich spread, marinade, soup base, salad dressing – all sorts of things.  In Japanese cuisine, there’s even a sauce called tamamiso, which is a sauce of egg yolks and miso, among other things.  It’s like a Japanese version of Hollandaise.  Chances are, if you’ve ever had geoduck sashimi, you’ve had it.  In Japan, miso soup is a traditional foundation for breakfast (so I’ve read. I have, alas, not yet been to Japan, although I am pretty sure I was Japanese in a former life).

Because I love salt, I think one of the reasons I love miso so much is because of its saltiness.  But also, it is a very satisfying, considering its very low caloric content (35 calories per tablespoon).

Another great thing about miso is …

Continue reading.

Interesting story, which begins:

About the time that Chemical Ag spokespeople were chiding Michelle Obama for promoting home-grown organic food with her White House garden, compost from the Rodale Institute farm was landing on a new organic garden right in front of U.S. Department of Agriculture headquarters.

Since he jackhammered an asphalt walkway just off the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in front the USDA’s Whitten building, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack has taken a personal interest in developing the new People’s Garden.

Delivering the compost was Jeff Moyer, farm director for Rodale Institute, Kutztown, PA. “Compost is a big part of what makes organic farming work so well,” he said. “We’re happy to donate a truckload of high-quality compost to biologically jump-start this welcome change in the USDA’s front lawn. The Secretary wanted the garden to be certified organic, so all the inputs—including compost—need to conform to the National Organic Program standards.” Moyer chairs the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board, which provides input from the organic sector to the department’s organic program…

Continue reading. Photos at the link.

Just a few from a page filled with them:

Chemical reaction: A long term study by Mount Sinai Medical Center on children in East Harlem links exposure to a class of chemicals called phthalates — found in products that list “fragrance” as an ingredient, and in soft plastics — with childhood obesity. The study found that the heaviest children had the highest levels of phthalates in their urine. In trying to find the causes of obesity, the 10-year study took into account factors like pesticide exposure, diet, and proximity to bodegas. (EPA/Mt. Sinai via NY Times)

We’re watching your gut: Minnesota consistently reports disproportionately high rates of food-related disease, but that’s probably because the state has a model surveillance system. For that, we can all be grateful: “If not for the Minnesota Department of Health, the Peanut Corporation of America might still be selling salmonella-laced peanuts, Dole might still be selling contaminated lettuce, and ConAgra might still be selling dangerous Banquet brand pot pies.” North Star State indeed. (NY Times)

Farmers take one for the (despicable) team: Peanut Corp. of America may be out of business, but the ramifications of the recall it caused — the largest in U.S. history — are still echoing through the barns of Georgia’s peanut farms. Consumers afraid of peanut products have rejected even those that come from local sources, and the ultimate cost to farmers and farm-chain businesses could top $1 billion. (Southeast Farm Press)

More at the link. On that last item, it’s hard to understand why agribusiness generally fights better food inspection since they take such a hit when the foods go bad.

John Dean, one-time White House counselor (under Nixon) writes in FindLaw:

There is a high-stakes game for the future of the federal judiciary currently underway, albeit, at this time, still quietly being played out behind-the-scenes. Over a month ago, the New York Times revealed the then-imminent selection by the Obama Administration of "a small stream of nominees to the federal appeals courts" throughout the nation. The story even floated a few names of potential nominees. But little has happened since then.

Thus far, there has been no stream of nominees; indeed, barely a trickle. No one keeps score better than the Alliance for Justice, which reports three Obama nominees so far: Gerald Lynch for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Andre Davis for the Fourth Circuit, and David Hamilton for the Seventh Circuit.

The reason Obama’s judicial nominees have not been streaming forth is that conservatives in the Senate are doing their best to dam that stream, literally and figuratively. To use the phrase coined by former Nixon speechwriter Bill Safire, the Obama Administration is being blocked by what can accurately be described as the new "nattering nabobs of negativism."

According to the coiner of the phrase, Safire, nattering is complaining; a nabob – taken from Urdu – is a self-important potentate; and negativism, of course, is habitual skepticism, the tendency to be pessimistic, seeing the world in the worst light possible. This outlook is very much the one possessed by the remarkably pompous contemporary conservative Republican leaders, particularly those in the Senate.

Nattering Negative Nabobs of Conservatism: Working to Block Change In the Judiciary

Needless to say, conservatism is inherently negative (see William F. Buckley’s founding motto and mission statement for the National Review: "It stands athwart history, yelling Stop"). But since President Obama’s election, the conservative nabobs have been yelling STOP before anything even starts. They have truly fulfilled Safire’s colorful alliterating appellation for overbearing naysayers.

Well-known nabobs like …

Continue reading.

Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent has also been busy:

DOJ Sits on Secret CIA Interrogation Memo. This one was filed at 12:02 a.m. and begins:

The release last week of Bush-era legal memoranda justifying the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of extreme interrogation methods has opened a window on what former Vice President Dick Cheney famously called “the dark side” of the war on terrorism. But despite President Obama’s declaration that releasing the four Justice Department memos disclosed Friday would end “a dark and painful chapter in our history,” at least one other memorandum on CIA interrogations remains undisclosed: a 2007 opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel on what a new interpretation of the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3 meant for the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program.”

A former senior intelligence official, who would not speak for the record, said that in 2007, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Steven Bradbury, issued a still-secret memorandum authorizing an updated CIA interrogation regimen. The Justice Department issued the document after months of internal Bush administration debate, a Supreme Court decision in 2006 that extended protections from Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to enemy combatants in U.S. custody, a piece of new legislation responding to the Court’s decision and a presidential executive order on interrogations.

“The CIA still seems to want to get authority to interrogate people outside of what would be found to be a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the law,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who cautioned that he had not previously known about the 2007 memorandum.

The still-unreleased Office of Legal Counsel memo spelled out for the CIA what interrogation practices were considered lawful after President Bush issued an executive order on July 20, 2007 that sought to reconcile the CIA’s interrogation program with the Geneva Conventions’ Common Article 3, which prohibits inflicting “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment” upon wartime detainees.” The Supreme Court, in 2006’s Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, ruled that Common Article 3 protections applied to enemy combatants in U.S. custody, a determination that the Bush administration had resisted since creating its post-9/11 detention and interrogation policies. Congress in 2006 responded by passing the Military Commissions Act, which reserved for the president the right to define the applicability of Common Article 3 protections for detainees in the war on terrorism. Bush’s order, known as Executive Order 13440, determined that the the CIA’s interrogation program fit within Common Article 3, provided that it met certain criteria, such as the exclusion of practices like “murder, torture, cruel or inhuman treatment, mutilation or maiming.”

But the order did not …

Continue reading. It’s a long article and has a lot of information.

And then there’s this one:

So Much Torture Disclosure to Be Had

Former Vice President Dick Cheney — the avatar of secrecy — really did say this last night. Daphne puts together a wish list:

[I]f there are memos showing that torture and the CIA’s other “extreme” interrogation techniques were successful, I’d like to see those, too — all of them. Including the ones that show that detainees like Abu Zubaydah gave up the most important information they had before they were waterboarded — and nothing of much use afterwards. And while we’re at it, let’s see the proof that the techniques were successful — that the information these torture victims offered actually turned out to be reliable.

But that’s not all! Naturally I’d like to see this Office of Legal Counsel memo from 2007. But any full account of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program has to include CIA Inspector General John Helgerson’s 2004 internal investigation of the program. That report has never been released despite numerous congressional requests. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, cited its nondisclosure in an op-ed arguing for the creation of an independent commission to investigate Bush-era security activities.

Several footnotes in the Office of Legal Counsel memos written by Steven Bradbury in 2005 and released last week indicate …

Continue reading. More info in the story.

And, the last of the series:

Senate Armed Services Committee Set to Release Fuller Torture Report

Word coming down the pike: the Senate Armed Services Committee is gearing up to release a fuller version of its report from last year on how the Rumsfeld-era Defense Department got into the torture business. Last year, you’ll recall, the committee held a series of hearings that provided the deepest look to date about the origins of Pentagon interrogation and detainee policy. “Senior officials in the United States government sought information on aggressive techniques, twisted the law to create the appearance of their legality and authorized their use against detainees,” committee chair Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said in June. In December, the committee declassified and released the executive summary of its report.

Now the committee is preparing to release a more complete, declassified version of the report. It’s unclear to me right now if they’re going to declassify the whole thing, but if you haven’t gotten enough interrogation and detention disclosures since Thursday, you’re in for another helping.

Mary Kane of the Washington Independent has been busy:

TARP Cop Elizabeth Warren Already Under Fire From Right Wing:

Even before she poses her first question to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner when he testifies before her panel for the first time today, expect Troubled Asset Relief Program oversight head Elizabeth Warren to come under fire. That’s because conservatives have been gunning for Warren, who was an outspoken advocate for consumers before she became chair of the congressional TARP oversight panel. And her warm reception from Jon Stewart during her recent appearance on “The Daily Show,” while cementing her popular appeal, only provided more fodder for critics.

At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith notes how the right wing increasingly has turned on Warren: …

And, later in that same story:

… I think the anti-Warren movement is growing in response to the popularity of some of her ideas. Warren has long pushed for a Financial Products Safety Commission, modeled after a commission for consumer products. Her idea is to provide safeguards so consumers would more clearly understand what they might be getting into when they buy financial products from mortgages to car loans. President Obama has publicly expressed his support for the idea. Bills have been introduced in both the House and Senate to implement it…

Plenty of Fodder for the Warren Panel: TARP Program Marred by Fraud:

The Troubled Asset Relief Program’s inspector general, Neil Barofsky is out with a scathing report today, contending the program already is marred by tax and securities fraud, insider trading, and other violations. Barofsky has opened 20 separate criminal probes into the alleged violations – and that’s just for starters,  The Los Angeles Times reports.

The cases represent only the first wave of investigations, and the total fraud could ultimately reach into the tens of billions of dollars, according to Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the bailout program.

The disclosures reinforce fears that the hastily designed and rapidly changing bailout program run by the Treasury Department and Federal Reserve is going to carry a heavy price of fraud against taxpayers — even as questions grow about its ability to stabilize the nation’s financial system.

Barofsky said the complex nature of the bailout program makes it “inherently vulnerable to fraud, waste and abuse, including significant issues relating to conflicts of interest facing fund managers, collusion between participants, and vulnerabilities to money laundering.”

Looks like TARP oversight chief Elizabeth Warren will have plenty to talk about today with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, when he testifies before her panel for the first time.

Fascinating story by David Weigel of the Washington Independent of how Charles Johnson, who is blogger responsible for Little Green Footballs, is riling up the Right:

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jazz musician and Web designer Charles Johnson has devoted his blog, Little Green Footballs, to exposing Muslim extremism in and outside the United States. His targets have included the Council on American-Islamic Relations, filmmaker Michael Moore, Reuters, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), Dan Rather, and the late pro-Palestinian activist Rachel Corrie — who some LGF commenters (not Johnson) call “St. Pancake,” a tribute to the Israeli steamroller that killed her. LGF helped write the lexicon of the self-styled “anti-Jihadist” blogosphere — from “moonbat” (”an unthinking or insane leftist”) to “anti-idiotarian” (”anyone who grasps the significance of and does his or her best to combat the post-9/11 political alliance between the ‘Old Left’ and militant Islam”).

But in the early days of Barack Obama’s presidency, LGF has become better known for the various fights it picks with many on the right — including conservative bloggers, critics of Islamic extremism, and critics of Islam in general who used to be Johnson’s fellow travelers.

Johnson has blasted Fox News host Glenn Beck, promoting a video from a Beck-inspired party that shows conservatives ranting about evolution and arguing that “this turn toward the extreme right on the part of Fox News is troubling, and will achieve nothing in the long run except further marginalization of the GOP.” In response to the news that the Department of Homeland Security was watching for increased right-wing extremism — something that most of the conservative blogosphere, like most Republicans, responded to with angry ridicule — Johnson pointed to the recent arrests of right-wing terrorists and criticized bloggers for buying into “distorted claims” about the DHS report. When Obama genuflected before King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Johnson found archival video of President Bush bowing to take a medal from the King and urged conservatives to turn down their “hyperventilating nonsense.”

This has the blogger’s peers asking themselves the same question, over and over: What the heck happened to Charles Johnson? …

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