Some high-ranking members of the nation’s intelligence services lobbied Obama not to release the memos, or to do so in heavily redacted form. Obama released the memos almost entirely unredacted, but promised that CIA personnel who had in good faith relied on the executive branch Office of Legal Council’s advice that the techniques were legal, would not be prosecuted. This is widely regarded not to rule out prosecution of those who authorized and ordered the use of the techniques. 

The recently leaked International Committee of the Red Cross torture report (complied by cross-confirmation of prisoner interviews, and portrayed by some critics as prisoners’ tall tales) was confirmed nearly line for line by the Bush OLC memos.

The four memos are available for download (pdf) here.

Many reactions from political and legal commentators on the left and right are collected by The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, here (pt 1) (pt 2) (pt 3):

The redaction (blacking-out) of the memos, where present, is sometimes poorly executed. As I read over the memos last night, i noticed several instances of a year being blacked out, followed immediately by the year being visible in a reference to the same document.

Dafna Linzer at ProPublica spotted a more significant error (or intentional slip?) in the redactions, where the name of ‘ghost detainee’ Hassan Ghul, was inadvertently left visible. Ghul’s whereabouts are unknown since 2004. He was not transferred to Guantanamo Bay with 14 “high value” detainees in 2007 as expected by humanitarian groups.

Read Linzer’s article here.

Clearly, this is a huge legal event, and a political firestorm in the making.

B

Earlier this month, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia sided with (opinion) the family of Army Lt. Col. Dominic “Rocky” Baragona in their wrongful death claim against Kuwait Gulf Link Transport Company, a contractor providing vehicles and logistics services to the US Army and coalition forces. A head-on highway collision resulted in Baragona’s death as he was traveling to Kuwait to depart for the US.

District Judge William Duffy held that his court had jurisdiction over the foreign contractor, and that Iraqi law would govern the case after a report was prepared by a former Iraqi judge and a Saudi law professor retained by Plaintiffs. This report was uncontested due to the defendant never having appeared, and a default judgment was entered.

CNN legal analyst Jeffery Toobin said the court decision theoretically “does open the door to more lawsuits” against contractors, but that the Baragona family is a long way from ever seeing the money.

“It is always very hard to collect judgments against foreign companies and, when you overlay the chaos of Iraq, it makes it extremely difficult — if not impossible,” Toobin said.

Many comments to the CNN story express dissatisfaction that access to the “justice” and/or “compensation” accorded the Baragona family is not available to most victims of the war, be they Iraqi civilians or US personnel. While the technical accuracy of this sentiment is debatable, it is an understandable reaction.

B