On October 4, the New York Times reported on the two torture memoranda authored by Steven Bradbury-the OLC head who was appointed by Alberto Gonzales and who it now appears was placed in the office for the specific purpose of being a torture “yes man.” The ACLU noted that the Bradbury memoranda had not been revealed in the Justice Department in their response, triggering an admission that the documents had been “missed” coupled with an embarrassed and hardly tenable explanation. The ACLU had previously sought disclosure of Justice Department torture memoranda, and the Justice Department responded with a list that excluded the OLC memos. Some degree of accountability is long overdue.” “It is now obvious that senior administration officials worked in concert over a period of several years to evade and violate the laws that prohibit cruelty and torture. “These torture memos should never have been written, and it is utterly unacceptable that the administration continues to suppress them while at the same time declaring publicly that it abhors torture,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. The memos are believed to have authorized the CIA to use extremely harsh interrogation methods including waterboarding. Until now, the existence of only two of those memos had been reported and it was not known precisely when the memos had been written. Legal papers filed in federal court Monday in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other organizations disclose that the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) for the Department of Justice issued three secret memos in May 2005 relating to the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody. Silence can be tolerated among career employees, perhaps, but it will certainly check their advancement.Īnd now, courtesy of the ACLU, we learn some more about the logical corollaries of the culture of torture: secrecy and lies. Opposition to torture policies is not tolerated, as Daniel Levin and Michael Mukasey have learned. Specifically, the article considers whether reliance upon the advice constitutes a legal defense to a charge of torture, whether the Department of Justice is now estopped from prosecuting, and whether the Department should prosecute as a matter of policy, even if it can.I recently examined how the Bush Justice Department was developing a “Culture of Torture,” that is, the Bush Administration’s addiction to torture has become its defining element. This article considers whether interrogators who used these techniques can be prosecuted for torture. The OLC advised that the program and the techniques were lawful and did not constitute torture within the meaning of the Torture Statute, 18 U.S.C. On August 1, 2002, the OLC provided two memoranda of advice to the CIA on the lawfulness of the proposed program and the specific techniques intended. The proposed program included the use of techniques such as walling, stress positions, confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding. In the spring of 2002, the CIA sought advice from the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) regarding an interrogation program for high-level al Qaeda detainees.
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