Obama memoranda examples full#
Obama memoranda examples tv#

In fact, in that 2nd Circuit ruling, the court made specific reference to an ongoing program: “We give substantial weight to the Government’s declarations, which establish that disclosing the redacted portions of the OLC memoranda would reveal the existence and scope of a highly classified, active intelligence activity.” And, as has been noted by Marcy Wheeler, when the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2012 that Obama could withhold the language in legal findings that authorized the torture programs, it did so under the authority of that seminal memorandum. The drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, in 2011, was launched without due process and again, under the legal cover of the 2001 MON. Just three days into office, Obama OK’d a strike inside Pakistan that reportedly killed 11 civilians, and over the course of 2009, the CIA - Obama’s CIA - conducted 52 drone strikes, killing hundreds. The finding that authorized the torture program also authorized drone strikes without notable process or oversight. In fact, there is evidence that the Obama administration continues to operate under that finding (or did until at least 2012).

Obama memoranda examples tv#

The post-9/11 torture program is dated to a September 17, 2001, Memorandum of Notification (MON, aka the “Gloves Come Off” finding) - notably a day after Vice President Dick Cheney’s TV appearance with Tim Russert, where Cheney and Russert blithely concurred it was time for the US to embrace the “dark side” - which was used as cover and as the foundation for subsequent findings by the Bush Administration’s legal team.īut that 2001 finding doesn’t have an expiration date, and there is no evidence of an Obama-era finding that directly controverts the Gloves Come Off memorandum. They knew it was illegal then, so what does that mean today?Īs is implied by Feinstein’s use of those dates, and was likely inferred by most who heard the president this summer, the summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence torture report is looking backward (something Obama pooh-poohed in his earliest days in office), with the assumption that after 2007, or at least after the 2009 handover at the White House, everything changed.īut it is the reference to the OLC findings - in the summary and in Feinstein’s statement - that sort of strips the insulation off that convenient construct.

They knew in advance that the acts that were illegal, so they asked - in advance - for a blanket amnesty. White House lawyers specifically asked the Attorney General for “a formal declination of prosecution, in advance” for anyone the US oversaw who employed the techniques we now all understand to be torture. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.īut, as noted in today’s release, the Bush OLC knew they were doing legal gymnastics. “While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 20, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,” said Sen.

Obama memoranda examples full#

With today’s release of what is being shorthanded as the “torture report” (in reality, an executive summary less than one-tenth the size of the full classified document), America now has the printed consensus behind President Barack Obama’s August admission (for lack of a better word): “ We tortured some folks.”