Judiciary Committee to Explore Administration Approval of Torture Techniques

Washington, DC -- House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) today invited several current and former Administration officials to a May 6 hearing to explore the development and legal approval of Bush administration torture policies and other potential abuses of executive power.

Among those invited are former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, chief of staff to the vice-president David Addington, and former Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin. Professor John Yoo of the University of California, Berkeley, author of a March 2003 memorandum concluding that U.S. law does not bind the president when he orders interrogation of detainees, has also been invited to appear.

Recent news reports place White House decision makers and top administration officials, referred to as the “Principals,” at the center of the planning and approval of interrogation plans for U.S. detainees. These accounts describe a disturbing back-and-forth between Department of Justice legal advisors and these so-called “Principals” in which department legal advice was crafted as a supposed “golden shield” to immunize those conducting the harshest of interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.

These press accounts describe torture techniques being physically demonstrated for the “Principals” in the White House Situation Room and chronicle the close involvement of the “Principals” in specific operational decisions about what methods of interrogation would be used on particular detainees. Concerned about the direct White House involvement in these decisions, former Attorney General Ashcroft is reported to have said “[h]istory will not judge this kindly.”

“New and troubling allegations suggest that the decisions on torture came from the highest levels of government,” said Conyers. “These reports, if true, represent a stain on our democracy. The American people deserve to hear directly from those involved.”

“If these press accounts are true, the sign-off for America’s torture policies came from the highest levels inside the White House,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. “It is clear that these ‘enhanced interrogation’ programs are torture, and fly in the face of American values and our laws. Simply having the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) assert these methods as constitutional does not make them so. Indeed, these conclusions are reprehensible and repugnant. It is telling that the OLC memos that authorized these actions have since been withdrawn. I, along with my colleagues in Congress, will continue to seek the truth on this issue, and to bring clarity to the law so that this nation never again allows torture as an official policy.”