More on Yoo Two by Scott Horton (Harper's Magazine)

Lawyer Scott Horton in Harper's Magazine writes very extensively on "Yoo Two". Here's just a little, it's well worth a read.

"According to the official narrative, the Bush Administration turned to the Justice Department for legal guidance on what could be done to give interrogators the latitude they were demanding in dealing with prisoners taken in the war on terror. However, not a single element of the official narrative is entirely true. The interrogators were not ‘pushing for broader authority.’ Indeed, the pushing was all coming out of the White House (from Vice President Cheney, to be specific), and the intelligence professionals were actually pushing back. Moreover, torture was being used almost from the start of the ‘war on terror.’ Special operations units operating under the authority of Dr. Stephen Cambone, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, had been authorized to use torture techniques from the opening of the war, and they used them with gusto. At Guantánamo and at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, numerous instances of ‘highly coercive techniques’ had been documented; indeed, the stories out of Bagram are among the most gruesome to be documented. In the documentary ‘Taxi to the Dark Side,’ for instance (for which I consulted and in which I appear), we find footage of a senior U.S. officer in Afghanistan talking about the authority for torture, which was issued, and which military personnel were instructed to lie about or deny to keep covered up."

"Yoo Two also furnishes us a lesson in how the Bush Administration wields “secret” classifications. The idea that a legal memorandum by OLC could be classified as “secret” and withheld on that basis is astonishing. When this point was raised previously, it produced speculation that the memo must as written be tied to specific facts which are highly classified and cannot be disclosed. When Yoo Two was declassified and released, we see that not a single word of the document was blacked out or excised. And indeed, there was no basis whatsoever for the classification to start with, not even a figleaf. So why has a legal policy statement been classified and withheld for five years? The answer to that question is now clear. The memorandum would have produced reactions of ridicule and outrage from throughout the professional community—as indeed it has."