Ratner: Judiciary Subcommittee Should Subpoena OLC Emails

After Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and his Judiciary subcommittee officially announced its intent to hold a hearing on the Office of Legal Counsel torture memos next week, I asked Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and author of “The Prosecution of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book”, what evidence he would want to see come out of the upcoming hearings. What evidence is still missing is a subject he’s thought a lot about.

Among other things, Ratner suggested that the subcommittee should subpoena “all of the documents, including emails, that surrounded their [the OLC memos'] writing.”

The committee could then “subpoena all those who wrote those emails or had conversations with the OLC lawyers about those memos both before or after they were written. That context might well demonstrate that the memos were not written in good faith and were shaped to fit the torture policy.”

Sounds like a good start.