● CBS: One of the arts of fine lawyering is the art of making the ugly beautiful, the lame fleet, and the guilty determined innocent. By this measure, and perhaps this measure alone, John Yoo, the now-disgraced former architect of the Bush Administration’s terror law policies, is a masterful attorney. Yoo’s March 14, 2003 “torture” memo-more formally known as In Re: Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States-was made public late Tuesday after years of wrangling. The 81-page document was one of the legal bedrocks upon which the United States justified the torture of terror suspects. In effect for nearly nine crucial months at the start of the War in Iraq, Yoo’s work helped begat one of the great public relations disasters in American diplomatic history-the intensely chronicled prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib.
● "Torture Memo Revealed: Administration Can Do Anything, Kill Anybody, Torture Anybody, Anytime and Anywhere They Want To" Is this YOUR America?
● More than five years after its composition, we finally see a copy of John Yoo's March 14, 2003 memo to William Haynes, then the Defense Department's general counsel.
● ’03 U.S. Memo Approved Harsh Interrogations
● Secret Bush Administration Torture Memo Released Today In Response To ACLU Lawsuit
● Documents Released Under FOIA
● The infamous John Yoo torture memo has finally been released, and it's pretty remarkable.
● Yoo Torture memo released
● John Yoo Torture Memo
● Top Bush Administration officials pressured underlings to use torture tactics at Guantanamo
● The Torture Memo Author You’ve Never Heard Of
Caught!
Democracy NOW! news caught not dumbing down Americans again, reporting on recently declassified John Yoo memo...instead of Obama's pastor, Obama smokes cigarettes, or Obama's a union-buster!
● The Green Light: Attorney Philippe Sands Follows the Bush Administration Torture Trail
The Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners and interrogation methods is coming under increased scrutiny this week following the declassification of a 2003 memo.
The memo shows the Justice Department told the Pentagon that presidential authority overrode numerous laws banning torture or cruel treatment of prisoners in US custody. The memo endorsed assault, maiming and even administering mind-altering drugs on prisoners.
The memo was written on March 14, 2003 by attorney John Yoo. At the time Yoo was a deputy in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel. Today Yoo is a law professor at the University of California Berkeley.
Meanwhile the British attorney Philippe Sands has just published an article in Vanity Fair exposing new details about how Yoo and other high-ranking administration attorneys helped design and implement the interrogation policies seen at Guantanmo, Abu Ghraib and secret CIA prisons.
According to Vanity Fair, then White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez personally visited Guantanamo in 2002, discussed interrogation techniques and witnessed interrogations. Also on the trip was David Addington – then Dick Cheney’s chief counsel–and William Haynes, the general counsel of the Department of Defense.
Gonzalez, Haynes and Addington and Yoo made up what Sands describes as Bush’s “torture team of lawyers.” Sands argues that the actions of these lawyers might have amounted to war crimes and could result in their prosecution overseas.
