Justice Memo Backed Torture Interrogations

Ex-veep's speech full of torture distortions

(NEWSER) - In his full-on assault on the president's conterterrorism policies yesterday, Dick Cheney deployed an arsenal of “omissions, exaggerations and misstatements,” charge Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of McClatchy. Among them:

• Cheney claimed that harsh interrogations yielded vital, attack-preventing information and quoted Adm. Dennis Blair, director of national intelligence. In fact Blair, along with the CIA and FBI brass, said the damage outweighed the benefit, and they the tactics "are not essential to our national security."

(NEWSER) - Lawyers for US soldiers convicted of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison say the recently released CIA memos prove their clients were just following orders, the Times of London reports. Some of the dozen soldiers who were convicted plan to appeal, arguing that the Bush administration kept quiet during their trials and let them take the heat. More»

She long held that interrogation techniques were under orders

(NEWSER) - A retired colonel who helped run Abu Ghraib prison long asserted that she and her troops were just following orders in the prisoner interrogations that sparked a global outcry. Now, Janis Karpinski tells CNN, the release of torture memos has finally proven her case. “When they were first released a few days ago, I did feel this sense of being able to exhale after 5 years,” she said. More»

President's belief in rule of law won out in choice to release Bush-era memos

(NEWSER) - President Obama spent weeks thinking "very long and hard" about his "weighty decision" to release memos on harsh CIA interrogation techniques green-lighted by the Bush administration, senior adviser David Axelrod tells Politico. In the end, Axelrod says, the president's belief in transparency and the rule of law won out over the principle of the sanctity of covert operations. More»

Justice docs released detail OK'd techniques

(NEWSER) - A Bush-era memo on interrogation techniques acknowledged that waterboarding represented a “threat of imminent death,” but that the simulated-drowning procedure was not torture because it caused no lasting psychological harm, Reuters reports. The Justice Department memo and three others on interrogations were released to the public today—and simultaneously dismissed by Obama officials as no longer valid. More»