Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report for Newsweek that the Obama administration plans to release confidential memos from the Bush Office of Legal Counsel laying out the rationale for using torture on terror suspects over the objections of former Bush administration officials.

Because of an executive order signed by President Obama on Jan. 22 banning such aggressive tactics, deputies to Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. concluded there was no longer any reason to keep the interrogation memos classified. But current and former intel officials pushed back, arguing that any public release might still compromise “sources and methods.” According to the administration official, ex-CIA director Michael Hayden was “furious” about the prospect of disclosure and tried to intervene directly with Obama officials. But the White House has sided with Holder. Faced with a court deadline in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit regarding the memos filed by the ACLU, Justice lawyers asked for a two-week extension “because the memoranda are being reviewed for possible release.” (White House, Justice and CIA spokesmen all declined to comment.)

It’s possible that much of the content of these memos has already been reported, if not officially acknowledged by the government. We know that one of these high level detainees, Abu Zubayda, was waterboarded, based on statements made by John Kiriakou, who served as a CIA interrogator. A recent report leaked from the International Red Cross went into great detail about detainee treatment that constitutes torture. We know that much of this kind of treatment was disclosed in an earlier Red Cross report that Jane Mayer used as a source for her book, The Dark Side, and that many of the accounts from the report were corroborated by former CIA officials. There are other prominent examples that are too numerous to list here.

So we know a lot about methods. We know less about the legal rationales for using interrogation methods that constitute torture, which are contained in the still secret memos along with more details about the approved “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Glenn Greenwald speculates that the contents may be enough to push establishment opinion in the direction of prosecutions. 

— A. Serwer