Legal Ethics and Human Dignity

Revelations of torture and sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib erupted into the news media at the end of April in 2004, when reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the scandal in The New Yorker magazine and CBS News broadcast the notorious photographs. Five weeks later, with the scandal still at the center of media attention, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post broke the story of the Bybee Memorandum – the secret “torture memo,” written by elite lawyers in the US Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which legitimized all but the most extreme techniques of torture, planned out possible criminal defenses to charges of torture, and argued that if the President orders torture it would be unconstitutional to enforce criminal prohibitions against the agents who carry out his commands. (The memo, written to then White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, went out over the signature of OLC head Jay S. Bybee, but apparently much of it was drafted by John Yoo, a law professor working in the OLC at the time. Before the Abu Ghraib revelations, Bybee left OLC to become a federal judge, and Yoo returned to the academy.)

Soon after, more documents about the treatment of War on Terror detainees were released or leaked – a stunning and suffocating cascade of paper that has not stopped, even after two years. When Cambridge University Press published The Torture Papers a scant six months after the exposure of the Bybee Memo, it included over 1,000 pages of documents.