Benen: RELEASING THE TORTURE MEMOS....
There's been consider behind-the-scenes wrangling between the Justice Department and intelligence agencies over the potential release of Bush-era torture memos. It looks like Holder, accountability, and transparency, are going to win.
After a tense internal debate, the Obama administration this afternoon will make public a number of detailed memos describing the harsh interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency against al Qaeda suspects in secret overseas prisons.
The interrogation methods were among the Bush administration's most closely guarded secrets, and today's release will be the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the interrogation program that some senior Obama administration officials have said used illegal torture.
The documents are expected to include Justice Department memos from 2002 and 2005 authorizing the C.I.A. to employ a number of aggressive techniques- including sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and "waterboarding," the near-drowning technique.
Among the anticipated documents are detailed 2005 memos by Stephen G. Bradbury, who as acting head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel authorized the C.I.A. techniques. The documents have never before been made public, but a story by The New York Times in October 2007 said that the memos gave legal support for using a combination of coercive techniques at the same time and concluded that the C.I.A.'s methods were not "cruel, inhuman or degrading" under international law.
Another document expected to be released this afternoon is a Justice Department memo written August 1, 2002. The memo, written by John C. Yoo and signed by Jay S. Bybee, two Justice Department officials at the time, is a legal authorization for a laundry list of proposed C.I.A. interrogation techniques.
If the NYT report is right, this is a very encouraging development. Intelligence officials, most notably John Brennan at the National Security Council, had reportedly raised "holy hell" over this issue, and urged the White House not to release the memos. The arguments were hardly persuasive.
Of particular interest will be the response from Senate Republicans, who recently vowed to derail administration nominees for key legal positions unless the White House agreed to suppress the torture memos. As Scott Horton reported, "It now appears that Republicans are seeking an Obama commitment to safeguard the Bush administration's darkest secrets in exchange for letting these nominations go forward."
President Obama, apparenrly, isn't playing by the GOP's rules. We'll see what happens.
- John Cole: He Came Through President Obama did the right thing and released the memos. Good.
- Glenn Greenwald:
In a just-released statement, Barack Obama announced that -- in response to an ACLU FOIA lawsuit -- he has ordered four key Bush-era torture memos released, and the Associated Press, citing anonymous Obama sources, is reporting that "there is very little redaction, or blacking out, of detail in the memos." Marc Ambinder is reporting that only the names of the CIA agents involved will be redacted; everything else will be disclosed. Simultaneously, and certainly with the intend to placate angry intelligence officials, Attorney General Eric Holder has "informed CIA officials [though not necessarily Bush officials] who used waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects that they will not be prosecuted," and Obama announced the same thing in his statement.
I will add more detailed commentary, along with an interview with the ACLU's lead counsel, Jameel Jaffer, as soon as the documents themselves are available. If the report about the OLC memos are accurate, Obama will have done exactly the right thing here and will deserve real credit. My analysis earlier today of the issues surrounding disclosure are here...... I'll have more details as soon as these memos are available. One can certainly criticize Obama for vowing that no CIA officials will be prosecuted if they followed DOJ memos (though that vow, notably, does not extend to Bush officials), but -- assuming the reports about redactions are correct -- there is no grounds for criticizing Obama here and substantial grounds for praising him.
UPDATE: These memos are now becoming available, and do truly appear to be almost entirely unredacted. They are unbelievably ugly and grotesque and conclusively demonstrate the sadistic criminality that consumed our government. ... ...... ... ... The more one reads of this, the harder it is to credit Obama's statement today that "this is a time for reflection, not retribution." At least when it comes to the orders of our highest government leaders and the DOJ lawyers who authorized them, these are pure war crimes, justified in the most disgustingly clinical language and with clear intent of wrongdoing. FDL has a petition urging Eric Holder to immediately appoint a Special Prosecutor to determine if criminal proceedings should commence.
Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos, providing all the information and impetus the citizenry should need to demand investigations and prosecutions. But it is up to citizens to demand that the rule of law be applied.
It's Greenwald, he has much much more, and you should go read the whole thing.
- Sully: The Banality Of Evil
Perhaps you are reading these documents alongside me. I've only read the Bybee memo, as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil. To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any "ticking time bomb" scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. It is all true. These memos form a coda to the Red Cross report, confirming its evidentiary conclusions, while finding exquisite, legalistic and preposterous ways to deny the obvious.
I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross' debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect. I say "almost" because even Jay Bybee, in this unprofessional travesty of lawyering, stipulates that these techniques might be combined successively in any ways that could cumulatively become torture even in his absurd redefinition of the term. And yet the ICRC report shows, as one might imagine, that outside these specious legalisms, such distinctions never hold in practice. And they didn't. Human beings were contorted into classic stress positions used by the Gestapo; they had towels tied around their necks in order to smash their bodies against walls; they were denied of all sleep for up to eleven days and nights at a time; they were stuck in tiny suffocating boxes; they were waterboarded just as the victims of the Khmer Rouge were waterboarded. And through all this, Bush and Cheney had lawyers prepared to write elaborate memos saying that all of this was legal, constitutional, moral and not severe pain and suffering.
Bybee is not representing justice in this memo. He is representing the president. And the president is seeking to commit war crimes. And he succeeded. This much we now know beyond any reasonable doubt. It is a very dark day for this country, but less dark than every day since Cheney decided to turn the US into a torturing country until now.
Stay tuned as I try to unpack and make sense of these documents. There is some feeling of relief that we now have the incontrovertible evidence in front of us. But there is also a feeling of great nausea as well. Look what they did to these suspects. And look what they did to America.
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