memos

Documents reveal the CIA was allowed to deny detainees sleep upward of 80 to 180 hours at a time.

Something I couldn’t figure out for my piece yesterday on the 2007 memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel about CIA interrogations: why didn’t the Obama administration disclose it last week, when it released the 2002 and 2005 OLC memoranda? The Justice Department declined to comment on the memo, so I wasn’t going [...]

A wealth of new information emerged Tuesday on interrogation practices.

The latest Office of Legal Counsel torture memos released last week have led to calls for further investigation and criminal prosecution of former Bush administration officials. But increasingly, lawmakers, newspapers and advocacy groups are demanding the impeachment of Jay Bybee, the author of some of those memos who is now a federal judge comfortably ensconced [...]

Greg Sargent makes a great point about the torture memos:
What was actually revealed in yesterday’s memos was the nature of the Bush administration’s efforts to legalize and justify the “harsh interrogation techniques” that we mostly knew about already. And it’s not terribly difficult to imagine why some folks would want those legal efforts kept under [...]