For Immediate Release
August 21, 2009

Media Contact:

Kara Tershel, (202) 662-9500

Professor David Cole

WASHINGTON, D.C. - On August 24, 2009, the Obama administration is slated to release a newly declassified version of a 2004 Inspector General’s report on the CIA’s controversial coercive interrogation tactics. The contents are reported to have prompted Attorney General Eric Holder to consider appointing an independent prosecutor in connection with the CIA interrogation program.

In The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable (The New Press, 2009), a new book edited by Georgetown University Law Center Professor David Cole, Cole argues that any investigation of wrongdoing must not stop with CIA interrogators, but must include those ultimately responsible for the wrongdoing, including most importantly, the lawyers who drafted the memos that allowed the CIA to use brutal and violent tactics in the first place.  The Torture Memos includes the full set of Justice Department legal memos authorizing the CIA’s interrogation tactics, and a commentary by Cole that offers the first comprehensive legal analysis of the arguments advanced to approve the program.

Cole, an expert on constitutional law, criminal justice, and national security, and author of Enemy Aliens, No Equal Justice and Less Safe, Less Free, argues in his new book that the memos are the real "smoking gun" in the torture controversy, and that they show that culpability for the tactics lies not merely with CIA interrogators who may have exceeded Justice Department guidance, but with the lawyers who provided the legal guidance itself.  He contends that instead of holding the CIA to the constraints of the law, as they were obligated to do, lawyers for the Office of Legal Counsel contorted the law to authorize illegal CIA tactics.

The book collects the recently released six Office of Legal Counsel memos written between 2002 and 2005 that guided the creation and implementation of the interrogation policies by the legal architects of the Bush administration.  Cole's commentary maintains that the tactics approved for use in the CIA’s secret overseas prisons, including forcing detainees to stay awake for 11 days straight, slamming them against walls, stripping them naked, locking them in a small box with insects to manipulate their fears, and waterboarding, were illegal under binding federal law, but that Office of Legal Counsel lawyers conspired to misinterpret the law to authorize precisely what it forbade - and continued to do so in secret even as the law appeared to become more and more strict in public.

Cole is legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and the author of several award-winning books, including Enemy Aliens, which won the American Book Award. 

Cole is available for comment on the CIA Inspector General report.

 

About Georgetown University Law Center 

Georgetown University Law Center is one of the world's premier law schools. It has the largest full-time faculty in the nation and is pre-eminent in several areas, including constitutional, international, tax and clinical law. Drawing on its Jesuit heritage, it has a strong tradition of public service and is dedicated to the principle that law is but a means, justice is the end. With this principle in mind, Georgetown Law has built an environment that cultivates an exchange of ideas and the pursuit of academic excellence. It brings together an extraordinarily varied group of teachers, scholars and practitioners, as well as an outstanding student body representing more than 60 countries.

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