One day after releasing a set of Bush administration memorandums claiming sweeping presidential powers to bypass legal constraints when fighting terrorism, Justice Department officials said on Tuesday that they may soon disclose further secret opinions about interrogation, surveillance, and other national security policies.
Meanwhile, some lawmakers cited the disclosures of the nine formerly secret documents as a reason to have an independent commission review the development of the department’s legal opinions involving presidential powers in the global campaign against terrorism.
The Justice officials said that the decision to release nine memorandums on Monday was the result of an accelerated review, conducted after some of the documents were sought in a civil lawsuit in California.
In my morning post, I wondered if (and hoped that) the Obama administration would release more of Bush's memos offering legal arguments in support of their lawbreaking. Looks like they may -- which is a load off my mind. Or, at least, it will be if it happens.
The article tells us:
Officials who discussed the process spoke on the condition of anonymity because other memorandums that are still under review might involve classified information. If so, those memorandums — dealing with interrogation, surveillance and detention policies — may have to be cleared with other agencies before they can be released. Among those that have not yet been disclosed, but are believed to exist, are a memorandum from the fall of 2001 justifying the National Security Agency’s program of domestic surveillance without warrants, and another from the summer of 2002 that listed specific harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, that the C.I.A. was authorized to use.
And you thought the stuff that's been released was bad...
