The fact that my country is having this conversation brings tears to my eyes. The word "torture" is outside of what I can say of myself, my family, my friends. We abhor these acts by members of our country . We don't know how it has come to be that a US president and this administration says and does what they do. I want to scream, strike out, be so angry with them all that they will disappear. My country ius not honorable; we are in a very bad place.
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Michael Isikoff and
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Taking a Hard Look at the ‘Terror Memos’
Michael Mukasey is all but certain to be the next AG. His first task: Re-examining controversial interrogation and surveillance policies.
Oct 17, 2007 | Updated: 5:16 p.m. ET Oct 17, 2007
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In a surprising pledge to the Democratic controlled Senate, Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey today promised to re-examine a series of controversial Justice Department legal opinions on sensitive national-security matters and "change them" if he concludes they are unsound.
Mukasey's pledge, made during his confirmation hearing, would seem to cast some doubt on the status of secret Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions that have been used to govern key Bush administration policies on interrogation techniques, warrantless surveillance and other contentious matters related to the war on terror. Such opinions are generally relied on as strict legal guidance for officials in other agencies—such as the CIA and the National Security Agency—and are rarely second-guessed once they have been issued.
Mukasey's comments would also seem to raise some questions about the future of the author of those opinions—Steven Bradbury, the de facto chief of OLC and an ally of Vice President Dick Cheney's hard-line chief of staff David Addington. Although nominated by President Bush to head the OLC, Bradbury's confirmation has been held up for more than a year, and it now seems less likely than ever to be brought to a vote.
"I'm going to review the significant decisions of the Office of Legal Counsel, particularly those relating to national security, although not exclusively, so as to make certain that they are sound, soundly reasoned, soundly based," Mukasey said in response to a question from Democratic Sen. Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin.
Mukasey did note that, in at least one celebrated case, a controversial OLC torture memo--written in August 2002 and authored by Jay Bybee, then chief of the OLC—was withdrawn by the administration. That rare move came only after the memo was leaked, prompting fierce public criticism that it essentially gave the president broad power to authorize CIA interrogators to abuse detainees despite a federal law and international conventions barring torture. "We've already had the experience of one of those opinions having to be withdrawn," Mukasey said, "and I want to make certain that the others that are in place are sound, and change them if they're not.
"I think we need to do that, not only so that everybody can have confidence in the administration of justice, but also so that the people who are out in the field, people who work for agencies, people who may be engaging in interrogation, have confidence that they are acting on the basis of the law and that they're not going to have the rug pulled out from under them at a later time because it's found that somebody had gone too far in giving them authorization."
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