Daily Kos: The Alternate Torture Memo

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Apr 23, 2009
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Last night former State Department official and executive director of the 9/11 Commission Philip Zelikow appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show to discuss the anti-torture memo he wrote while in the administration in dissent of the OLC memos authorizing torture. The administration attempted to destroy all copies of that memo. MADDOW: So you first saw these Office of Legal Counsel memos in 2005. What was your reaction to the legal reasoning in those memos? ZELIKOW: Many years earlier when I had been a law student and had been a practicing lawyer, I had worked, actually, on issues of treatment of prisoners and that whole body of constitutional law. So when I saw the memoranda, I was struck by the fact that, even aside from the policy problems, the legal reasoning seemed deeply unsound to me, and I wasn't sure that the president and his advisers understood just how potentially questionable and unreasonable many lawyers and judges would find this reasoning. And so, I thought it was important to just say, hey, there is another view here of this law, and a lot of people would regard the views in these memos as, to say the least, outliers. MADDOW: So when you say that judges might see it, you suggest judges are one of the audiences that might not be persuaded by the reasoning in these memos, were you thinking ahead to the purpose for which these memos were drafted, which is essentially -- I mean, it's hard for those of us outside of government sometimes to understand what an OLC -- what the purpose of an OLC memo is, but essentially to provide a defense in case people were accused of acting illegally in ways that were described in those memos? Is that what you were thinking of? ZELIKOW: Yes. Rachel, perhaps just a little bit of background, to put this in context for your viewers. America has fought a number of wars in our history, including against unconventional enemies. This was an interrogation program, however, for which there is no precedent in the history of the U
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