It’s been exactly one year since shocking new details emerged about the CIA’s torture program. After years of investigation, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence published a report – known as “the torture report” – that contained more than 6,000 pages.
Now this landmark report on torture is in danger of being buried – and we need your help. Call the Justice Department today.
US President Barack Obama speaks as he tours the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in El Reno, Oklahoma, July 16, 2015. Obama is the first sitting US President to visit a federal prison, in a push to reform one of the most expensive and crowded prison systems in the world. (Photo credit:SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)
This article originally appeared on The Huffington Post
Last week, President Obama put a much-needed spotlight on the vicious cycle of mass incarceration. In the past three decades, the prison population in the U.S. has ballooned due to a number of factors that have created a system rife with discrimination and other abuses. And the burden falls disproportionately on low-income people and people of color.
The President made a historic visit on July 16 to a federal prison — the first sitting president to do so. His visit spotlighted the massive overcrowding problem — he was shown one 9-by-10-foot cell that sometimes holds three prisoners — that is the result of a broken criminal justice system.
The Obama administration is fond of saying that it wants to “look forward” on torture, not “backward;” that is, it does not want to investigate or prosecute anyone. But failure to act now could increase the risk of torture recurring under the next administration.
There are too many horrific acts – like forced rectal feeding and hydration – that we only learned of due to the report and that we must ensure will never happen again.
(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Just over a week after a grand jury’s decision not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, a grand jury in Staten Island, New York has decided not to indict the officer responsible for the choking death of Eric Garner, despite the existence of a video capturing the incident that took place on July 17, 2014. In the process of apprehending Garner, the officer placed Garner in a chokehold which an autopsy determined compressed his neck and restricted his chest to the point of asphyxiation. These are just two of many cases we have seen this year where black men are dying at the hands of police officers around the country.
In the Afterword to her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, Jane Mayer states:
“The number of patriotic critics inside the administration and out who threw themselves into trying to head off what they saw as a terrible departure from America’s ideals, often at an enormous price to their own careers, is both humbling and reassuring.”
One such person is Jack Goldsmith, a Bush appointee who became chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2003. That position had previously been held by Jay Bybee, who had worked with White House lawyer John Yoo to produce the infamous “torture memos”. The memos redefined the meaning of the word “torture” to exclude techniques that cause pain and suffering short of organ failure or death, and they asserted that the President has the authority to order torture in the name of national security. Goldsmith condemned these memos as deeply flawed and sloppily reasoned. Acting very much against precedent within the Office of Legal Counsel and against strong opposition from the White House, Goldsmith revoked the torture memos before resigning in 2004.
Following the resignation of Goldsmith, the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics and oversight group within the Justice Department, undertook an investigation into the revoked torture memos and other legal documents pertaining to interrogation in the war on terror. The purpose was to investigate whether the quality of the legal arguments expressed in the memos was up to the standards expected of Justice Department attorneys. A draft of the report, which was sharply critical of the memos, was completed in the final weeks of the Bush Administration.
The report was not welcomed by the Bush Administration. Bush officials refused to turn it over to the incoming administration during the presidential transition. Attorney General Eric Holder still has not seen the report. The Office of Professional Responsibility wants to include the responses of people named in the report before releasing it to Holder. However, those responses have proved difficult to obtain.
If endorsed by Holder, the report could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action.
Members of Congress are beginning to suspect that release of the report may have stalled under pressure from former Justice Department officials. Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin of of Illinois and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island are demanding an update from the Justice Department.
The torture memos won’t go away. We already know a lot about them. And we know that an investigation has already taken place. It’s time to get this out in the open. This report should not only be released to Congress and the Attorney General. It should be released, insofar as is reasonably possible, to the public. We need to fully appreciate the extent to which our country lost its way before we can get back on the right path.