torture memos

The Justice Department still hasn’t officially announced it, but The Washington Post is reporting this afternoon, based on anonymous sources, that Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to go ahead and open an investigation on those controversial CIA interrogations we’ve been talking about for weeks now.
According to The Post’s Carrie Johnson, Holder is set to [...]

As Newsweek reported Friday evening, the CIA inspector general report expected to be released on Monday reveals that the CIA staged mock executions to terrify terror suspects into talking. Regardless of whether interrogators got the information they were looking for, these actions were clearly against the law. It is a violation of both the federal [...]

The Washington Post’s editorial today arguing for prosecution only of “those who went well beyond the often-extreme measures authorized by the [Office of Legal Counsel] memos” that justified abusive interrogations is calling more attention to the rumor, first reported by Daniel Klaidman in Newsweek, that Attorney General Eric Holder is seriously considering such prosecutions.
According to [...]

The New York Times’ front-page story Sunday reporting the unanimous agreement among Justice Department lawyers that the “harsh” interrogation techniques approved by the Office of Legal Counsel for use by the CIA were legal relies on the classic journalistic “battle of the experts”: one “outside” expert says the CIA interrogation techniques like slamming, sleep and food [...]

In insisting during his speech yesterday that President Obama and the CIA declassify the memos that he claims will show the effectiveness of the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” former vice president and anointed Republican spokesman Dick Cheney neglects to mention one critical fact: torture is illegal, even if it worked.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s request to declassify certain documents that he said will show the effectiveness of Bush administration interrogation policies has been denied, reports Cheney biographer Stephen Hayes:
A letter dated May 7, 2009, from the CIA’s Information and Privacy Coordinator, Delores M. Nelson, rejected Cheney’s request because the documents he has requested are [...]

During this morning’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on torture, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) who chaired the hearing, asked Philip Zelikow, the former state department adviser, about the reaction he received when he objected to the interrogation techniques approved by the Office of Legal Counsel. Whitehouse noted that “lawyers love to debate. It’s our nature to [...]

The Judiciary subcommittee didn’t, ultimately, get a copy of Philip Zelikow’s 2005 memorandum opposing torture, written when he was counselor to the State Department. But in his opening statement — which the committee’s distributed but he he’s just started delivering — he provides a pretty big hint as to what he argued:
The issue is not [...]

David Luban, a law professor and expert on legal ethics at Georgetown University, just called the torture memos written by the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel “a legal train wreck.”
“The rules of professional ethics forbid lawyers from counseling or assisting clients in illegal conduct,” Lujan, the first witness testifying at today’s Senate Judiciary subcommittee [...]

I’ve been asking why the Senate Judiciary subcommittee holding the first congressional hearings on the torture memos this morning aren’t calling the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who wrote the memos, or their clients — the Bush administration’s most senior officials — to testify.
On Tuesday night, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told Keith Olbermann on MSNBC [...]