Keep Your Eye On The Lawyers

by Patrick Appel

Marcy Wheeler worries about the torture documents due to be released today (we will be following this story all day):

If it is, indeed, DOJ's plan to release all the other torture documents save the [Office of Public Responsibility (OPR)] report, it will have the effect of distracting the media with horrible descriptions of threats with power drills and waterboarding, away from the equally horrible description of lawyers willfully twisting the law to "authorize" some of those actions. It will shift focus away from those that set up a regime of torture and towards those who free-lanced within that regime in spectacularly horrible ways. It will hide the degree to which torture was a conscious plan, and the degree to which the oral authorizations for torture may well have authorized some of what we'll see in the IG Report tomorrow.

If it is, indeed, DOJ's plan to release the [inspector general’s] Report and announce an investigation without, at the same time, releasing the OPR report, it will serve the goal of exposing the Lynndie England's of the torture regime while still protecting those who instituted that regime.