Obama Releases Torture Memos that Guided CIA
The Justice Department made public detailed memos on Thursday describing brutal interrogation techniques used by the CIA, as President Barack Obama sought to reassure the agency that CIA operatives who carried out the techniques would not be prosecuted.
In dozens of pages of dispassionate legal prose, the methods approved by the Bush administration for extracting information from senior al-Qaida operatives are spelled out in careful detail — from keeping detainees awake for up to eleven straight days, to placing them in a dark, cramped box, to putting insects into the box to exploit their fears.
The interrogation methods were authorized beginning in 2002, and some were used as late as 2005 in the CIA’s secret overseas prisons. The techniques were among the Bush administration’s most closely guarded secrets, and the documents released Thursday afternoon marked the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the program.
Some Obama administration officials have labeled one of the 14 approved techniques, waterboarding, as illegal torture. During war crimes trials after World War II, the United States prosecuted some Japanese interrogators for waterboarding and other methods detailed in the memos.
The release of the documents came after a bitter debate that divided the Obama administration. Fueling the urgency of the discussion was Thursday’s court deadline in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had sued the government for the release of the Justice Department memos.
Together, the four memos give an extraordinarily detailed account of the CIA’s methods and the Justice Department’s long struggle, in the face of graphic descriptions of brutal tactics, to square them with international and domestic law. Passages describing forced nudity, slamming into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and dousing with 41 degree water alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Convention against Torture.
The documents were released with minimal redactions, indicating that Obama sided against current and former CIA officials who for weeks had pressed the White House to withhold sensitive details about specific interrogation techniques. CIA Director Leon Panetta had argued that revealing such information set a dangerous precedent for future disclosures of intelligence sources and methods. A more pressing concern for the CIA is that the revelations might give new momentum to a full-blown investigation into Bush administration counterterrorism programs and possible torture prosecutions.
Within minutes of the release of the memos, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that the memos illustrated the need for his proposed independent “Commission of Inquiry,” which would offer immunity in return for candid testimony. Obama condemned what he called a “dark and painful chapter in our history,” and said that the interrogation techniques would never be used again, but he also repeated his opposition to a lengthy inquiry into the past.