MCCLATCHY– The long-awaited release Thursday of four Bush-era memos lays out in clinical detail many of the controversial interrogation methods secretly authorized by the Bush administration — from waterboarding to trapping prisoners in boxes with insects — while former President George W. Bush was publicly condemning the use of torture.
The memos were made public by the Justice Department with assurances from President Barack Obama that the intelligence officials who followed their guidance won’t be prosecuted. However, the president’s assurances don’t apply to the former administration officials who crafted the legal justification for the interrogation program.
The newly released memos offer the public the most unvarnished and explicit look yet at once-top secret efforts to psychologically break high-level terrorism suspects.
Despite the graphic description of the techniques, the memos at the time concluded that the tactics didn’t constitute “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” even as Congress was moving to ban such treatment.
The memos reveal that by May 2005 various “enhanced” techniques were used on 28 detainees. Three high-level al Qaida operatives — Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri — were subject to waterboarding, a procedure that simulates drowning and is widely regarded as torture.
Obama said Thursday that the U.S. won’t prosecute CIA officials who used the techniques and ordered the memos rescinded. The CIA interrogators, some of whom were contractors, weren’t identified in the partially censored documents.
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