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 More…
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
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
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 More…
While we’re all duly praising Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) for calling a hearing next Wednesday on the torture memos, I’m still puzzled by one thing: why isn’t the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts calling the authors of the memos to explain how and why they More…
The latest word on the Justice Department’s Office Of Professional Responsibility review of the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted the so-called “torture memos” is that the report concludes that the the lawyers committed “serious lapses in judgment,” as The New York Times puts it in a More…
More than a year ago, Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill..) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the conduct of lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, whose work provided legal justifications for waterboarding and other abusive interrogation tactics.
Since then, the two senators More…
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