Why was the second Yoo torture-justifying memo released yesterday?
ACLU has tried to get it for years and congress was asking for it for some month. But out of the blue sky, it was released late Tuesday and is extensively covert in yesterdays press.
I find it likely that this was done to divert the media attention from a Vanity Fair article that was published the very same day.
That article tells how the very top government lawyers went to Guantanamo themselves and "brought ideas with them" on how to torture alleged al-Qaida members. The article concludes that these men committed war-crimes.
Philippe Sands is an international lawyer and Professor in London. The piece he has written is a good coverage of the process that brought torture to Guantanamo and Abu Graibh.
I recommend to read The Green Light in full. Among others, Sands interviewed Diane Beaver, staff judge advocate for Gitmo commander Maj.Gen. Dunlavey, and Dunlavey himself.
This is the gist of what was not known before:
On September 25 [2002], as the process of elaborating new interrogation techniques reached a critical point, a delegation of the administration’s most senior lawyers arrived at Guantánamo. The group included the president’s lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, who had by then received the Yoo-Bybee Memo; Vice President Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington, who had contributed to the writing of that memo; the C.I.A.’s John Rizzo, who had asked for a Justice Department sign-off on individual techniques, including waterboarding, and received the second (and still secret) Yoo-Bybee Memo; and Jim Haynes, Rumsfeld’s counsel.
They were all well aware of al-Qahtani. “They wanted to know what we
were doing to get to this guy,” Dunlavey told me, “and Addington was
interested in how we were managing it.” I asked what they had to say.
“They brought ideas with them which had been given from sources in
D.C.,” Dunlavey said. “They came down to observe and talk.” Throughout
this whole period, Dunlavey went on, Rumsfeld was “directly and
regularly involved.”
…
They met with the intelligence people and talked about new interrogation methods. They also witnessed some interrogations. Beaver spent time with the group. Talking about the episode even long afterward made her visibly anxious. Her hand tapped and she moved restlessly in her chair. She recalled the message they had received from the visitors: Do “whatever needed to be done.” That was a green light from the very top—the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the C.I.A. The administration’s version of events—that it became involved in the Guantánamo interrogations only in November, after receiving a list of techniques out of the blue from the “aggressive major general”—was demonstrably false.
Sands concludes that the men and women involved in this committed war-crimes and could well be prosecuted when caught outside of the United States.
While the memo release has been picked up in the main papers, I have yet to find any MSM reference to this important piece. That seems to support my suspicion that the memo release is just a diversion.
Yoo was a mid-level lawyer at the justice department. A despicable person for sure. But the really guilty guys were above him. Yoo just did what they told him to do.
The second Yoo-Bybee memo is available here.