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The Torture Papers

By Jack M. Balkin

No, not the indispensable volume compiled a few years back by Karen Greenberg and Josh Dratel.

I'm referring to the more than seven thousand pages of documents still hidden within the Executive branch dealing with the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" practices and "black sites" and renditions programs. (This does not even include the DOD materials.) The documents are described in outline here and here (and in the other documents found here), and they include at least eight OLC final opinions and opinion letters in the period between September 2004 and February 2007 alone.

Which is to say: We've barely scratched the surface. And unless the next President chooses to permit a public accounting (quite doubtful, I suspect, since most of these documents are classified and the CIA will be very reluctant to declassify them), the burden will likely fall on historians many decades from now to reconstruct the full story of how the United States came to bless and implement an elaborate official practice of torture and cruelty. Those historians will have a lot of arduous archival work ahead of them, beginning, perhaps, with these 7000 pages.

Full post as published by Balkinization on April 24, 2008 (boomark / email).