the Second Bybee Memo…

Posted on Saturday 10 May 2008

A U.S. judge ordered the Central Intelligence Agency on Thursday to submit to the court a 2002 memo said to specify harsh interrogation methods used on suspected terrorists held abroad. The American Civil Liberties Union said the memo was written by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel and sent to the CIA in August 2002. The ACLU described the memo as "one of the most important torture documents still being withheld by the Bush administration."

In a copy of the order posted on the ACLU’s Web site [above], Judge Alvin Hellerstein told the government to produce the memo so he can determine whether it should be made public as part of a lawsuit the ACLU and other organizations filed in June 2004 requesting records concerning the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody abroad.

Hellerstein has scheduled a review of the document for Monday. "This memo authorized the CIA to use specific torture techniques — including waterboarding," Jameel Jaffer, ACLU’s national security project director, said in a statement. "CIA agents waterboarded prisoners because this memo told them that they could," he said. "The memo is being withheld not for legitimate security reasons, but in order to protect government officials from accountability for their decisions."

Waterboarding is a simulated drowning technique…
The Bybee Memo was  dated August 1, 2002 and sent to the President’s Counsel, Alberto Gonzales. While signed by Jay Bybee, it apparently written by John Yoo [see the TPM timeline].
August 1, 2002: Jay Bybee, the chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, issues a memo that restricts the definition of torture to physical pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." A still-classified memo from roughly the same time period, known as the Second Bybee Memo, reportedly gets specific about the legality of certain prospective CIA interrogation techniques.
The memo in question at the moment is the still unreleased  Second Bybee Memo, presumabely written by John Yoo, but apparently more specific and sent to the C.I.A. directly. At the time these memos were being written, we’d been at war in Afghanistan for nine or ten months and had captured a number of al Qaeda operatives. Shortly after the 9/11 attack, Vice President Cheney portended what was coming on Meet the Press:

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: I’m going to be careful here, Tim, because I – clearly it would be inappropriate for me to talk about operational matters, specific options or the kinds of activities we might undertake going forward. We do, indeed, though, have, obviously, the world’s finest military. They’ve got a broad range of capabilities. And they may well be given missions in connection with this overall task and strategy.

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

MR. RUSSERT: There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering, reluctance to use unsavory characters, those who violated human rights, to assist in intelligence gathering. Will we lift some of those restrictions?

VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: Oh, I think so. I think the–one of the by-products, if you will, of this tragic set of circumstances is that we’ll see a very thorough sort of reassessment of how we operate and the kinds of people we deal with. There’s–if you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing. You need to be able to penetrate these organizations. You need to have on the payroll some very unsavory characters if, in fact, you’re going to be able to learn all that needs to be learned in order to forestall these kinds of activities. It is a mean, nasty, dangerous dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena. I’m convinced we can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities in terms of accomplishing their mission…
I doubt that anyone listening picked up on "There have been restrictions placed on the United States intelligence gathering" and what that meant. I for one had no idea that Cheney had a whole vision of how the U.S. should be reconstructed. And although that vision was written down in black and white [PNAC. AEI, etc.], none of us really knew about it. And we sure didn’t know what he meant by "We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world." Well, now we know. And hopefully we’ll know even more on Monday after the Judge rules on whether or not to release the Second Bybee Memo. We allowed this to happen. We owe it to the world and to the people we tortured to flesh this story out in its most grusome details. And we owe it to future generations…

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