Like a dog with a bone, the ACLU thinks they have a winning hand with their FOIA releases from the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. Along with their “partners”, Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace, they’ve been scratching through the documentation hoping that they’ll find a smoking gun that they can actually call torture. <\/p>\n
At Huffington Post, Jameel Jaffer<\/a>, one of ACLU’s litigators, announced their new project “The Torture Report<\/a>“. <\/p>\n The goal is simple: to tell the whole story and to get it right. How to do this \u2013 how to bring together everything we know from tens of thousands of formerly secret documents, from official and independent investigations, from press reports and the many good books that have recently appeared, and from the growing number of first-hand accounts of those who witnessed, participated in, or suffered mistreatment, how to register it all so we can come to some conclusions \u2013 is a daunting challenge.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n At HuffPo, Jaffer names his stellar staff of writers;<\/p>\n It will be a collaborative project. We have invited a group of expert contributors to offer comments and observations as new material appears. These contributors include Matthew Alexander, David Frakt<\/a>, Glenn Greenwald<\/a>, Joanne Mariner<\/a>, Deborah Popowski<\/a>, John Sifton<\/a>, and Marcy Wheeler<\/a>, as well as attorneys from the ACLU<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I inserted links to their bios – all except one. Mathew Alexander’s bio has yet to be written. I wrote about him a bit<\/a> when he poked his head up at VoteVets last month. I didn’t know his real name then, but, as regular readers know, you can’t hide from the staff of This Ain’t Hell.<\/p>\n Kit Bond has pulled out of the Congressional investigation of interogators’ techniques because he claims that Congress will hamstring future intelligence operations like they did in the 70s (Washington Times<\/a> link);<\/p>\n Sen. Christopher S. Bond, the panel’s vice chairman, said Mr. Holders decision to ignore President Obamas pledge to look forward – not back – has hampered the panels effort.<\/p>\n The Department of Justice “sent a loud and clear message that previous decisions to decline prosecution mean nothing and old criminal charges can be brought anytime against anyone – against these odds, what current or former CIA employee would be willing to gamble his freedom by answering the committee’s questions?” the Missouri Republican said. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n His Democrat co-chair on the Commission, Dianne Feinstein says she’ll continue on without Bond. So it ought to be a real effective report like the 9-11 Commission’s report. I guess all of that talk about change and hope was just blather. Hope and Change are words that relate to the future not about dwelling in the past. So, we here at This Ain’t Hell are all about the future – anything we can do to short circuit ACLU’s Torture Report we’ll do. <\/p>\n There are a lot of hints that the right reader can pick up on in this post. Those of you who don’t get it, stay tuned for the ensuing episodes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"