A week or so ago on the Larry King show, George W. Bush, responding with characteristic eloquence to a question about whether he facilitated torture, said "Everything we did was -- you know, it had legal -- legal opinions behind it," adding "I got legal opinions that said whatever we're going to do is legal." Unfortunately, Bush's office has blocked attempts to scrutinize the legal reasoning behind said extralegal behavior.
But last week, Obama issued an executive order on transparency that puts the decision of whether the Bush OLC memos that provided the legal justification for torture, indefinite detention, and warrantless surveillance are protected by executive privilege in the hands of current Obama administration officials and the United States Archivist, and ultimately Obama himself, should the attorney general, the White House counsel, and the archivist not unanimously agree on whether a claim of executive privilege has merit. The ACLU is now testing Obama's commitment to transparency with a request to the Office of Legal Counsel that Bush memos regarding torture, surveillance, and indefinite detention be released, and ProPublica has a helpful chart of which memos remain secret.
-- A. Serwer
