The Department of Justice on Thursday released four declassified memos authored during the Bush administration that were used to justify the methods of torture to be used against suspected terrorists. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had filed suit to gain access to the documents. Produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the memos lay out arguments for why techniques such as waterboarding and others were authorized for CIA personnel to employ. ACLU officials called the interrogation methods “barbaric,” and said the documents were “based on legal reasoning that is spurious on its face,” adding “...these aren’t legal memos at all – they are simply political documents that were meant to provide window dressing for war crimes.” The civil liberties group has called for the Justice Department to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate torture under the Bush administration.
Although the four memos were released mostly intact, each one contains portions that have been blacked out. Some parts were redacted to conceal the identity of the
CIA’s assistant general counsel, while others hide the names of certain detainees in custody. For instance, a memo dated May 30, 2005, refers to two detainees whose names were withheld—one of whom was said by the CIA to have had “actionable intelligence concerning the pre-election threat to the United States.”
But not all names of detainees were blackened. An August 1, 2002, memo revealed the name of Abu Zubaydah, described as a high ranking al Qaeda official. Another detainee mentioned is Hassan Ghul, who was arrested in early 2004, but whose fate is unknown.
The same memo is missing the name of an individual described as having worked at the “
SERE school,” a military program that teaches Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape to soldiers, sailors and airmen. Part of the SERE training is designed to help military personnel resist interrogations if captured, and the unnamed instructor in the memo was apparently brought in to help determine the breaking point of detainees subjected to torture.
SERE training alone is apparently quite intense. The memo says the unidentified instructor has trained thousands, some of whom had to seek “psychological counseling” afterwards, and two students wound up engaging “in criminal behavior, namely, felony shoplifting and downloading child pornography onto a military computer.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Steven Bradbury, author of 3 of the 4 released memos
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