Confused about all the memos and the timeline? See this handy New York Times Guide to the Memos on Torture.
And stop a minute to think that we have sunk so low, under the weight of so many memos about torture, that we need a guide to them.
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by Michael Froomkin
Laurie Silvers & Mitchell Rubenstein Distinguished Professor of Law
University of Miami School of Law
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Here’s a parallel story to go along side the torture memos timeline:
Back in winter 2002 (between Jan-March, but I’m still trying to locate the precise date) I heard a former head of CIA counterintelligence speak at a regional campus here in central Ohio. Things he advocated to the audience: torture, assassination, dealing with known criminals in intelligence gathering, and agents working undercover as missionaries, clergy, journalists, aid workers, etc. By the end of the evening he had the frightened audience endorsing the need for everything but torture on US soil and agents using the clergy as a cover.
Here’s a link to a report on the nearly the same talk given by the same guy a year later in Texas:
http://tinyurl.com/32p7g
My point is this: I heard this talk in 2002 when the White House was producing screw-the-Geneva-Conventions memos and the CIA was pushing for legal cover.
This was more than an in-house strategy. This guy was on a pr tour, playing on the public’s fears to gain its support for what they had already begun to do.
The New York Times has been systematically trying to avoid the constitutional issues raised by Bush’s February 7 declaration that he had the authority to “suspend” U.S. obligations under the Geneva conventions. In fact, they have (amazingly!) never even reported the fact of Bush’s controversial declaration.
Bush’s February 7 memo is in the Times list, which you link to, but the supporting Jay Bybee memo of January 22, 2002 — a precusor to the famous August 1 “torture memo” — is nowhere to be seen. Bybee’s January 22 memo was the basis for Bush’s February 7 memo, and foreshadowed the August 1 memo.
The Washington Post list includes the 37-page January 22 memo.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62516-2004Jun22.html