Senate Holds Hearing On Justice Department Torture Memo Report

The
Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing today in the wake of a
report from the Justice Department's Office of Professional
Responsibility (OPR) that revealed new details about the development
and justification of the Bush administration's torture program. The
report, which contained the results of an investigation into the
authors of the Bush administration Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)
"torture memos," sheds new light on the extent to which the White House
and Vice President Cheney's office, in particular, were involved in the
drafting of the memos and the development of the torture program, and
gives the impression that the memos were drafted at the direction of
those offices. This information comes on top of the wealth of other
evidence already in the public domain that high level Bush
administration officials were involved in the torture program.

"It
is critical today that senators make clear that, given the information
in the OPR report and the wealth of other evidence in the public
domain, the Justice Department's criminal investigation into the
torture program must be broad enough to include those
who authorized and legally sanctioned these shameful acts," said Laura
W. Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

The
OPR report found that John Yoo and Jay Bybee, two of the three torture
memo authors, engaged in professional misconduct by failing to provide
"thorough, candid, and objective" analysis. That conclusion, however,
was rejected in a later memorandum written by Associate Deputy Attorney
General David Margolis, who, while still critical of Yoo's and Bybee's
conduct, found that they exercised "poor judgment."