Replies to post #61208 on Discover GOP Opprobrium

[teapeebubbles]

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Five previously unacknowledged secret memos revealing new information about the Bush administration's interrogation policies remain hidden in government file cabinets, a Senate report disclosed Wednesday.

It's not just the memos' contents that are classified. Until Wednesday, their very existence was secret, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, which has a long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain all records about the interrogation program.

President Barack Obama has already released more than 125 pages of previously secret Bush-era memos detailing the CIA's interrogation program, including a top secret Aug. 1 , 2002, memo that described the methods the CIA was allowed to use under President Bush. That list included waterboarding, slamming prisoners up against walls, extended sleep deprivation and slapping.

The Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday released a newly declassified Justice Department narrative of the legal guidance provided to the CIA on its interrogation program that added to the list of documents the ACLU wants, said Jameel Jaffer, the organization's national security program director.

One Office of Legal Counsel memo, dated July 22, 2007, concluded that Congress had endorsed the CIA's interrogation program when it adopted the Military Commissions Act which, among other things, prohibited cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of U.S. prisoners.

The narrative also references a July 22, 2004, memo from the attorney general to the acting director of the CIA that confirmed the legality of the CIA interrogation program, minus the waterboarding program. An Aug. 6, 2004 memo separately endorsed waterboarding. Those memos were issued after the Justice Department disavowed the 2002 memo that originally endorsed the CIA program. The memo had established a narrow new definition of torture that was formally revoked in June 2004.

The Senate document also references two previously undisclosed August 2006 documents from the Office of Legal Counsel that considered whether the conditions in which prisoners at CIA secret prisons were legal.

President Obama ended the CIA's harsh interrogation program and shuttered the secret prisons in one of his first acts in office.