Malkin award nominee

"Here is the fact: Democrats are saying they would prefer to see tens of thousands of Americans die than to see a KSM subjected to sleep-deprivation or to have his “phobias exploited.” I doubt that this reflects the values of most Americans."

—Andy McCarthy, NRO

Friday's incredible news dump

Radley has the details...so far.

What did the CIA hide from Congress?

Ambers opens:

Because the executive branch retains a stranglehold on regulations about the disclosure of classified information, there are very few ways for member of Congress who learn about objectionable, classified programs to reveal their discomfort. They can write a classified letter. They can risk prosecution by revealing the information publicly. Or they can do what a gaggle of House Democrats did yesterday: band together, suggest that the CIA misled them about a specific program, and wait for journalists to uncover the details.

He then goes off on a speculation spree. So basically, stay tuned...

Pelosi-gate

The Anonymous Liberal summarizes:

Pelosi-gate, in a nutshell: What did one member of the minority party know about the majority party’s illegal war crimes and when did she know it?

TPM says:

Focus, people. Let's not get distracted by what happened and lose sight of who was briefed about it.

The long game

Dish reader:

I think [Andrew] hit the nail on the head. Obama does not make willy-nilly decisions. While the Administration’s decision to release the photos is certainly a great disappointment, I still think it may be a long play. That is, it’s a no-lose situation for him right now. He strengthens his position with the CIA and military at a time when he needs their full backing; he quells the media narrative that he won’t take on the Left of the Democratic Party; and if the ACLU or other groups win their battle to have the images released (which maybe he fills they will), he has reasonable distance from the decision. He is not going to lose the support of Democrats over this and he may gain some additional support from Independents and Republicans. This is a sound strategic decision for him.

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised when a politician puts politics over principle. It does not mean, of course, that the principles are unsound—principles can't always triumph, politics is not philosophy.

As Andrew concluded:

I will note this too about the politics. If Obama wants to get the truth out, and does not want to be slimed as a partisan avenger (the propaganda line from the Rovians), it helps him to have symbolic spats with those of us who believe we have no choice but to confront the war crimes of the last administration. This has long been his mojo: give symbolic gifts to your opponents while retaining the core issue. These gestures - Rick Warren dinner with Bill Kristol, summits with Cantor - help insulate him from being drawn into them kind of partisan fight the Rove right likes to fight. In this rope, in other words, the anti-torture movement is the current dope.

Fine. Rope-A-Dope us. But let us not let the responsible parties get away with torture, abuse and murder. And let us play a smart and relentless long game as well.

Eyes on Holder

TNR's Jeffrey Rosen:

Barack Obama is trying to split the difference on torture. He wants to move forward–no messy dwelling on the Bush-Cheney era–except that he’ll look backward if forced. There will be no independent commission to hold top-ranking officials politically accountable. But, if Attorney General Eric Holder wants to prosecute the Bush lawyers who defended the legality of waterboarding–John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury–well, the president won’t stand in the way.

TMV nods:

What does Obama gain by this approach? For starters, he has delegated the hard choice to his subordinate–and has left himself room to maneuver once more if the political winds shift further.

As a bonus, it's pretty darn close to the right thing to do. I would prefer Obama be more optimistic about an independent truth commission to give us a full report, but enacting that would be up to Congress, and the Democratic leadership is against this because they are implicated. (Speaker Pelosi, for instance, knew all about the techniques before they were used in 2002.)

So in terms of what the executive branch can do on its own, that's the Justice Department's turf. And decisions like this aren't supposed to be politically motivated, so it's entirely appropriate that Obama delegate the decision to the AG and his staff. This is certainly a step up from the Bush administration's shenanigans during the Plame affair et. al.

However, Obama did promise no prosecutions for CIA interrogators, which was disappointing. It's within his power to promise pardons for anyone who's convicted for following the bogus legal advice, certainly, but ignorantia legis neminem excusat—nor is 'I was just following orders' a valid defense. We prosecuted the Nazis, remember?

That said, I can see how Obama's promise may have been helpful to keep the dolchtoss right from going absolutely berserk—but more importantly to placate the agency itself, which was somewhat pissed over the release of the shaming memos. Fmr. CIA director Michael Hayeden and others argued that revealing the techniques has made us less safe, of course, but this remains a bogus claim because Obama banned their usage on day one.  In reality, Bush officials and partisans on the right objected to the memo release because of the shame and more definitive accountability it has wrung.

Somewhat tangentially, I'm reminded of how UNRR absurdly said of the release that "Terrorist Rights Supporters Win Minor Victory", which would be laughable if the situation weren't so grave. He likes to scoff about the "bad ideas" of justice, "legalism", and moans there of "crippling legal restrictions"—I don't, because torture is indisputably illegal and will remain that way; if you wish to advocate torture interrogations it's clear that the only cogent position is that they be done extralegally and kept ultra secret.  But talking about such a thing is rather pointless, because we'd definitionally know nothing about whether it's happening or not.

Meet the press

Gibbs and Jordan's King Abdullah interview on torture, America's international image, Iran, Israel, and other issues:

Not all were silent, ctd.

Another declassified report:

Levin's investigators, armed with subpoena power, uncovered what appears to be a much more pervasive pattern of abuse that has previously been acknowledged by Defense officials.

The report fills in some detail on the history of interrogation techniques at Gitmo. They were requested by Gitmo's intelligence chief on October 11, 2002 and approved by Sec. Donald Rumsfeld less than a month later. In January of 2003, official Navy SERE trainers arrived at Guantanamo Bay to train interrogators in their methods.

The report describes some confusion among military lawyers, who assumed that Rumsfeld's authorization of the rough techniques in Gitmo meant that they were also the approved techniques for prisoners in Afhganistan. And it quotes a lawyer for a Special Missions Unit - an elite, secret counterterrorism squad - as saying that Rumsfeld's approval of the techniques provided the best legal argument for his soldiers' use of them in the battlefield. SERE instructors were shipped to Iraq to help other top-secret units learn to interrogate suspects.

Though some top generals wrote formal objections to the rough techniques, they were ignored by the chain of command, according to the report. Abu Ghraib, in particular, is portrayed as a heaven for interrogators and a cesspool for prisoners being regularly abused and subject to beatings. Warnings from military psychologists that the techniques were counterproductive were not heeded.

Even though these were military operations, I'm sure UNRR will seek a way to blame it on the CIA for not keeping torture secret enough...

Since the CIA doesn't operate within some laws, that justifies the Bush administration's authorization of these interrogations, and we need not concern ourselves with the legalities.  Or so the tortured logic goes.

"There must be more"

NYT has a bracing piece:

WASHINGTON — The first use of waterboarding and other rough treatment against a prisoner from Al Qaeda was ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew, according to former intelligence officials and a footnote in a newly released legal memorandum.

The escalation to especially brutal interrogation tactics against the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, including confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall, was ordered by officials at C.I.A. headquarters based on a highly inflated assessment of his importance, interviews and a review of newly released documents show.

Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence official with direct knowledge of the case. Instead, watching his torment caused great distress to his captors, the official said.

Even for those who believed that brutal treatment could produce results, the official said, “seeing these depths of human misery and degradation has a traumatic effect.”

[..] A footnote to another of the memos described a rift between line officers questioning Abu Zubaydah at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand and their bosses at headquarters, and asserted that the brutal treatment may have been “unnecessary.”

Quoting a 2004 report on the interrogation program by the C.I.A. inspector general, the footnote says that “although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within C.I.A. headquarters still believed he was withholding information.”

[..] interviews with current and former government officials who have direct or indirect knowledge of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation suggest that the United States began the waterboarding, labeled as illegal torture by top Obama administration officials, based on a profound misunderstanding of its captive.

[..] His interrogation, according to multiple accounts, began in Pakistan and continued at the secret C.I.A. site in Thailand, with a traditional, rapport-building approach led by two F.B.I. agents, who even helped care for him as his gunshot wounds healed.

Abu Zubaydah gave up perhaps his single most valuable piece of information early, naming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom he knew as Mukhtar, as the main organizer of the 9/11 plot.

A C.I.A. interrogation team that arrived a week or two later, which included former military psychologists, did not change the approach to questioning, but began to keep him awake night and day with blasting rock music, have his clothes removed and keep his cell cold.

[..] Through the summer of 2002, Abu Zubaydah continued to provide valuable information. Interrogators began to surmise that he was not a leader, but rather a helpful training camp personnel clerk who would arrange false documents and travel for jihadists, including Qaeda members.

He knew enough to give interrogators “a road map of Al Qaeda operatives,” an agency officer said. He also repeated talk he had heard about possible plots or targets in the United States, though when F.B.I. agents followed up, most of it turned out to be idle discussion or preliminary brainstorming.

At the time, former C.I.A. officials say, his tips were extremely useful, helping to track several other important terrorists, including Mr. Mohammed.

But senior agency officials, still persuaded, as they had told President George W. Bush and his staff, that he was an important Qaeda leader, insisted that he must know more.

“You get a ton of information, but headquarters says, ‘There must be more,’ ” recalled one intelligence officer who was involved in the case. As described in the footnote to the memo, the use of repeated waterboarding against Abu Zubaydah was ordered “at the direction of C.I.A. headquarters,” and officials were dispatched from headquarters “to watch the last waterboard session.”

“He pleaded for his life,” the official said. “But he gave up no new information. He had no more information to give.”

Abu Zubaydah’s own account, given in 2006 to the International Committee of the Red Cross, corroborates that what he called “the real torturing,” including waterboarding, began only “about two and a half or three months” after he arrived at the secret site, according to the group’s 2007 report.

Truly a sad chapter in US gov. history.

As Nietzsche put it, "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."

"Surprised and saddened"

TPM:

In an interview with TPMmuckraker, James Horne, a leading authority in the field of sleep research, said he was "surprised and saddened" to see Bush officials "misrepresent" his research to argue that such sleep deprivation does not cause serious harm to its subjects.

[.. Horne] was indignant. He explained the crucial difference between his controlled experiments, in which subjects were under no additional stress, and the CIA's use of sleep deprivation on interrogation subjects.

"As soon as you add in any other stress, any other psychological stress, then the sleep deprivation feeds on that, and the two compound each other to make things far worse. I made that very, very clear," he said. "And there's been a lot of research by others since then to show that this is the case."

As for whether such stress could be considered "harmful," Horne was unequivocal. "I thought it was totally inappropriate to cite my book as being evidence that you can do this and there's not much harm. With additional stress, these people are suffering. It's obviously traumatic," he said. "I just find it absurd."

Torture reax III

Andrew does another round...

After noting his disappointment with Obama for advocating against prosecutions, Greenwald offers this praise:

In the United States, what Obama did yesterday is simply not done. American Presidents do not disseminate to the world documents which narrate in vivid, elaborate detail the dirty, illegal deeds done by the CIA, especially not when the actions are very recent, were approved and ordered by the President of the United States, and the CIA is aggressively demanding that the documents remain concealed and claiming that their release will harm national security. When is the last time a President did that?

John Cole:

Sullivan yesterday noted an odd silence over the torture memos, and I predict that will end now that the new talking points have been released in the WSJ op-ed pages. For fun, look for instances of the phrase “tied his own hands” in the right-wing blogosphere when they discuss the subject.

Jonathan Zasloff:

Amidst the uproar over the torture memos, it's important not to lose sight of a crucial fact: its responsible author, Jay S. Bybee, is now a federal appeals court judge. Thus, apart from any issue of criminal prosecution, he can be impeached by the House and removed by the Senate.

This would be appropriate. Having judges declare that torture is legal does not serve as a good precedent. Perhaps more significantly, the memo's legal analysis was so shockingly incompetent that Bybee's successor, Jack Goldsmith, withdrew it, noting subsequently that he was appalled by its incompetence.

Joe Klein talks to some intelligence community insiders:

Not many Presidents have had good relationships with the CIA. George W. Bush's was particularly dreadful, with Dick Cheney constantly pushing for intel that reflected his ideological predilections rather than reality. (You may remember that a series of damaging anti-Bush leaks seemed to seep out of the Langley environs during the 2004 campaign.) The release of these memos may cripple Obama's relations with the clandestine service--or not, especially if the President and Leon Panetta continue to make clear that they appreciate and stand behind the clandestine service, so long as the operators act within the new ground rules.

And Abe Greenwald continues to excuse torture:

As these memos are pored over in the hours and days ahead, we must be prepared to hear details about Operation Harmless Squishy Thing that may rock the very moral foundations of our country. The caterpillar is likely just the beginning. Slugs, inchworms, centipedes, millipedes — a whole backyard of horror could be exposed.

Andrew concludes:

This is the primary technique of those who endorse Bush's torture regime – focus on the particular and ignore the whole. Any act – slapping, running prisoners headfirst into walls, stress positions, sleep deprivation, waterboarding, use of insects in confined spaces – is bad enough on its own, but can be made to seem minor annoyances in isolation. But when these techniques are combined they become deadly. We have the bodies to prove it.

Fmr. CIA Director and Attorney General defend torture

Gen. Hayden was director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009. Mr. Mukasey was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009. If you care to understand justifications for the CIA's torture and interrogation program, they've published a must-read piece in today's WSJ.

Towards the conclusion:

[..] anyone in government who seeks an opinion from the [Office of Legal Counsel] as to the propriety of any action, or who authors an opinion for the OLC, is on notice henceforth that such a request for advice, and the advice itself, is now more likely than before to be subject after the fact to public and partisan criticism. It is hard to see how that will promote candor either from those who should be encouraged to ask for advice before they act, or from those who must give it.

Eeek, criticism! Perhaps it will promote responsibility and accountability? What Hayden & Mukasey call candor, I call providing secret and illegitimate legal cover for the use of torture in CIA interrogations.

In his book "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith describes the phenomenon we are now experiencing, and its inevitable effect, referring to what he calls "cycles of timidity and aggression" that have weakened intelligence gathering in the past. Politicians pressure the intelligence community to push to the legal limit, and then cast accusations when aggressiveness goes out of style, thereby encouraging risk aversion, and then, as occurred in the wake of 9/11, criticizing the intelligence community for feckless timidity. He calls these cycles "a terrible problem for our national security." Indeed they are, and the precipitous release of these OLC opinions simply makes the problem worse.

It seems Hayden & Mukasey don't like the results of our democratic process. As their president joked on multiple occasions: "If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier". Go figure.

Economist points out flaws in their argument. Ordinary E.D. Kain has more.

Memo decision-making

Politico: Obama consulted widely on memos...

White House senior adviser David Axelrod says President Barack Obama spent about a month pondering whether to release Bush-era memos about CIA interrogation techniques, and considered it “a weighty decision.”

“He thought very long and hard about it, consulted widely, because there were two principles at stake,” Axelrod said . “One is … the sanctity of covert operations … and keeping faith with the people who do them, and the impact on national security, on the one hand. And the other was the law and his belief in transparency.”

The president consulted officials from the Justice Department, the CIA, the director of National Intelligence and the Homeland Security Department, according to his adviser.

“It was a weighty decision,” Axelrod said. “As with so many issues, there are competing points of view that flow from very genuine interests and concerns that are to be respected. And then the president has to synthesize all of it and make a decision that’s in the broad national interest. He’s been thinking about this for four weeks, really.”

A former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush called the publication of the memos “unbelievable.”

“It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake."

“I don't believe Obama would intentionally endanger the nation, so it must be that he thinks either 1. the previous administration, including the CIA professionals who have defended this program, is lying about its importance and effectiveness, or 2. he believes we are no longer really at war and no longer face the kind of grave threat to our national security this program has protected against.”

Unbelievable?

It seems when Obama spoke of 'change we can believe in', he wasn't referring to former top officials in the Bush administration. Go figure.

Sullivan thinks the journalistic standards here are low.

CIA used techniques the State Department condems

From the torture memos:

Library Grape:

This excerpt basically admits that most of the techniques the OLC lawyers are approving are routinely condemned by our own State Department when performed by other countries.

I need an Alka-Seltzer. I'll let Greenwald finish up for me:

The more one reads of this, the harder it is to credit Obama's statement today that "this is a time for reflection, not retribution." At least when it comes to the orders of our highest government leaders and the DOJ lawyers who authorized them, these are pure war crimes, justified in the most disgustingly clinical language and with clear intent of wrongdoing. FDL has a petition urging Eric Holder to immediately appoint a Special Prosecutor to determine if criminal proceedings should commence.

Obama did the right thing by releasing these memos, providing all the information and impetus the citizenry should need to demand investigations and prosecutions. But it is up to citizens to demand that the rule of law be applied.

What the CIA did

Ambers:

There are many revelations and details buried in the banal, technical language of lawyers:

Among the revelations:

** Through 2005, the CIA used "enhanced interrogation techniques" on 28 of 94 so-called "high value detainees."

** Waterboarding was theoretically allowed only in cases where the information solicited from the prisoner could thwart an imminent terrorist attack; the Justice Department permitted only "six applications of water lasting more than ten seconds" for every two-hour period during which a detainee was strapped to the board. Only 12 minutes of water torture was allowed per 24-hour period. Also: the CIA put potential waterboardees on a fluid diet before the torture in order to prevent them from choking to death on food that might be stuck in the GI tract.

** The OLC concluded that the CIA's careful application of the program didn't "shock the conscience" of a reasonable person and thus would not trigger a statute that would leave interrogators vulnerable to prosecution

** The name of at least one High Value Detainee who was subject to "enhanced techniques" has been redacted. Later (.pdf), however, the same memo mentions a "Gul" who was subjected to enhanced techniques. This appears to be an inadvertent omission.

** Through 2005, the CIA said that only 3 detainees were subject to 96-hour sleep deprivation

** See page 7 of this document (.pdf) for an example of a "typical" interrogation: abdominal slaps, facial holds, "walling," wall-standing.

** The 2002 memo (.pdf) contended it was legal to place an insect in a cramped confined space with a prisoner, provided that the insect was not poisonous. The CIA wanted to use this technique on Abu Zubaydah, who was afraid of poisonous insects. Nowhere is Zubaydah's degraded mental state mentioned.

** It sanctioned techniques which caused less pain than then type of pain one would experience with a major injury

** It allowed a previously disclosed technique called "walling," involving the slamming of a detainee's head back against a fake wall.

** It presumed that the CIA interrogators did not want to cause Zubaydah "severe" mental or physical pain;

** The CIA justified its techniques by referring to the SERE program, which teachers soldiers how to avoid capture and interrogation.

** A May 10, 2005 memo calls torture "abhorrent"

Without any doubt, these techniques are torture. Not the most barbaric form imaginable, but still torture.

I'll let lawyers sort out whether any of this was illegal and whether any of the lawyers involved should be at least disbarred, etc. I only know that I think the answer should be yes, and if we need to pass better laws to make this crystal clear for the future then we should do so.

My feelings now are mixed. The details are nauseating, and I'm ashamed a president I supported was responsible for authorizing these techniques. But I'm also relieved and not a little proud that we've got it in the open.

I'm reminded of a quote by Churchill: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried."

Democracy is dysfunctional with insufficient transparency and accountability.  Today the system worked a little better than usual.

To give you a taste of how mad some on the Right remain, here's UNRR:

Not only should there be no prosecution of those who were doing the difficult and dirty job of trying to extract intelligence from terrorists, but the administration should have refused to release the documents on grounds of national security. What's the point of classifying documents in the first place if they are just going to be made public a few years later? The idiotic efforts to expose secret CIA operations, combined with shortsighted attempts to impose crippling legal restrictions will invariably damage intelligence-gathering. Actually, they probably already have. Almost everyone agrees that intelligence is the first line of defense against terrorism. Terrorists are difficult or impossible to deter. They have to be apprehended, eliminated, or disrupted before they strike. Many of the operations designed to serve these functions require secrecy in order to be effective. Efforts aimed at breaking down the secrecy of the CIA and revealing operational details strike at the heart of our anti-terrorist defenses. We need the executive branch to stand firm against such attacks, even if they come from other branches of the government.

It seems he was thinking 4-8 years ahead and hoping the next president would re-authorize torture. Because Obama has made clear that it would not be done under his administration, so there's absolutely no downside to national security in making these memos public during his tenure. Only were a president to re-authorize torture could there possibly be a downside to these techniques being known.

I remain convinced that countenancing torture incites anti-American sentiment, which simultaneously makes the country less safe and harms relations to a degree that far outweighs any security benefit that could possibly be gained by torture. UNRR, of course, disagrees.

President's statement on releasing torture memos

The remaining Bush memos related to torture will be released, with only the names of CIA officers redacted. Here is Obama's statement:

The Department of Justice will today release certain memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel between 2002 and 2005 as part of an ongoing court case. 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.

My judgment on the content of these memos is a matter of record. In one of my very first acts as President, I prohibited the use of these interrogation techniques by the United States because they undermine our moral authority and do not make us safer. Enlisting our values in the protection of our people makes us stronger and more secure. A democracy as resilient as ours must reject the false choice between our security and our ideals, and that is why these methods of interrogation are already a thing of the past.

But that is not what compelled the release of these legal documents today. While I believe strongly in transparency and accountability, I also believe that in a dangerous world, the United States must sometimes carry out intelligence operations and protect information that is classified for purposes of national security. I have already fought for that principle in court and will do so again in the future. However, after consulting with the Attorney General, the Director of National Intelligence, and others, I believe that exceptional circumstances surround these memos and require their release.

First, the interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported. Second, the previous Administration publicly acknowledged portions of the program – and some of the practices – associated with these memos. Third, I have already ended the techniques described in the memos through an Executive Order. Therefore, withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States.

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. We must protect their identities as vigilantly as they protect our security, and we must provide them with the confidence that they can do their jobs.

Going forward, it is my strong belief that the United States has a solemn duty to vigorously maintain the classified nature of certain activities and information related to national security. This is an extraordinarily important responsibility of the presidency, and it is one that I will carry out assertively irrespective of any political concern. Consequently, the exceptional circumstances surrounding these memos should not be viewed as an erosion of the strong legal basis for maintaining the classified nature of secret activities. I will always do whatever is necessary to protect the national security of the United States.

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

The United States is a nation of laws. My Administration will always act in accordance with those laws, and with an unshakeable commitment to our ideals. That is why we have released these memos, and that is why we have taken steps to ensure that the actions described within them never take place again.

Ambers:

[..] alongside the release of Bush-era documents justifying the CIA torture program, the Justice Department will make clear that no CIA officers or officials who relied on the memos to interrogate prisoners will be subject to criminal prosecution, according to the AP. This is a victory for the CIA, which had been seeking a formal, public statement for its case officers, and which had been worried that the document's disclosures could subject many of them to future prosecution. Now, even if Congress launches investigations, the CIA will be, more or less, safe.

I think this an effective compromise. "I was just following orders" is a defense that was used at the Nuremberg trials, and it's no more valid here than it was then. But a rebellious and resentful intelligence community would be a disaster for the Obama administration and national security, so this had to give. Here's former CIA Director Michael Hayden protesting:



Aaaand here are the memos:

http://72.3.233.244/pdfs/safefree/olc_08012002_bybee.pdf -- a Top Secret memo by OLC's Jay Bybee to CIA counsel John Rizzo about torture techniques used on Abu Zubaydah, August 1, 2001.

http://72.3.233.244/pdfs/safefree/olc_05102005_bradbury46pg.pdf -- a Top Secret/SCI memo from the OLC's Steven Bradbury to Rizzo about waterboarding and other techniques, 1995

http://72.3.233.244/pdfs/safefree/olc_05102005_bradbury_20pg.pdf -- a Top Secret/SCI memo from Bradbury describing the techniques that could be used in combination with each other.

http://72.3.233.244/pdfs/safefree/olc_05302005_bradbury.pdf