Calls to Action on Justice Department Torture Memos

In a victory for government transparency, over the objections of Senate Republicans and several intelligence officials, including former CIA Director Michael Hayden, President Obama authorized the release yesterday of four Bush Administration era Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memos that explicitly authorized the use of techniques internationally recognized as torture during interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody.

The memos had been the subject of an ACLU Freedom of Information Act lawsuit originally filed during the Bush Administation; Attorney General Eric Holder has been arguing for several weeks that the documents should be declassified. According to anonmous government sources quoted in The Daily Beast, several Senate Republicans threatened to "go nuclear" and block the pending confirmation of President Obama's nominee for Justice Deparment Chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen.

The memos, available in their entirety at the ACLU website, describe in graphic detail harsh interrogation techniques proposed for use against detainees in U.S. custody, including "walling" (repeatedly slamming a detainee against a wall), hitting detainees in the face and the abdomen, food deprivation, severe sleep deprivation (the documents specifically mention forcing a particular detainee to forgo sleep for eleven days), denying detainees access to toilet facilities and forcing them to wear adult diapers, simulating drowning with waterboarding, chaining detainees in stress positions for days at a time, and locking detainees in boxes with insects.

In one memo, Bush-era Justice Department official OLC Steven Bradbury openly admits that the interrogation techniques he is writing to authorize have previously been condemned by the United States' own State Department as torture:

Each year, in the State Department's Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, the United States condemns coercive interrogation techniques and other practices employed by other countries. Certain of the techniques the United States has condemned appear to bear some resemblance to some of the CIA interrogation techniques. [. . .] The State Department's inclusion of nudity, water dousing, sleep deprivation, and food deprivation among the conduct it condemns is significant and provides some indication of an executive foreign relations tradition condemning the use of these techniques.

But the memo concludes:

Given the paucity of relevant precedent and the subjective nature of the inquiry, however, we cannot predict with confidence whether a court would agree with this conclusion, though, for the reasons explained, the question is unlikely to be subject to judicial inquiry.

implying that though the Bush Justice Department could not be sure that a court would find the torture Bush Administration officials were authorizing legal, no one in the CIA needed to worry about that problem, because the torture techniques were meant to be kept secret and would likely never be challenged in court.  

In a public statement about the release of the OLC torture memos, President Obama said, "These memos speak to techniques that were used in the interrogation of terrorism suspects during that period, and their release is required by the rule of law," but went on to add:

In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution. The men and women of our intelligence community serve courageously on the front lines of a dangerous world. Their accomplishments are unsung and their names unknown, but because of their sacrifices, every single American is safer.

This statement has lead many human rights and civil liberties advocates to argue over whether President Obama means to altogether rule out prosecutions of those who authorized and committed acts of torture against prisoners in U.S. custody; the debate largely hinges on the President's specific focus on the "intelligence community" (note the lack of a mention of immunity or protection for non-intelligence Bush administration officials) and what exactly the President meant by the words "good faith."

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder reports that Obama Administation officials have assured him the President's statement regarding the memos was by no means meant to grant blanket immunity to all those who authorized and committed acts of torture.

But the ACLU and other civil liberties groups, human rights groups and progressive bloggers are urging American citizens who care about protecting the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions and the rule of law to keep the pressure on the President, and Congress, to seek criminal investigations against the architects of the Bush torture policies. 

The ACLU has launched a petition asking Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate allegations of torture against detainees in U.S. custody; the progressive blog Firedoglake has created a similar petition on their site calling for the same.

Comments

[Julie Pippert]

I think you're right that we need to keep the pressure on, via written or spoken communication. If people appear to move on too much, it might seem easier to just let it go or let it slide. But I also don't want it to become a witch-hunt patsy fest where the gladiators get sacrificed to appease the bloodlust while the culpable Roman senators go along their merry way.

[Amber]

Obama has left the decision regarding prosecution up to our AG, Eric Holder. I hope that the correct people are appropriately punished.

[cynematic]

Maybe we'll have our Truth Commission one way or another. What the Bush-Cheney regime permitted, encouraged, and authorized is so completely against who we, the public, believe our country to be that we can't just repress the facts any more.

We tortured; and as Paul Begala pointed out, we executed WWII war criminals for doing exactly the same thing then as we did just recently.