Obama releases memos detailing interrogations

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By Jon Ward

President Obama's release Thursday of four top-secret memos - which gave bracing details about enhanced interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects during the Bush administration - was welcomed by civil liberties groups but condemned by at least one former top intelligence official, who said the president was endangering the country.

Mr. Obama, in a statement issued after he left the country for a four-day trip to Mexico and a Latin American summit, said the disclosure was required to protect the U.S. from false accusations about its actions in the past.

"Exceptional circumstances surround these memos and require their release," the president said. "Withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time. This could contribute to an inaccurate accounting of the past, and fuel erroneous and inflammatory assumptions about actions taken by the United States."

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But the 126-page document release did include massive amounts of detail never before divulged by the government, including clinical explanations of how interrogation techniques were performed and the intended effects on detainees.

One previously undisclosed detail included the revelation that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba placed insects into a "confinement box" that held al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, knowing that the suspected terrorist appeared "to have a fear of insects."

Instructions from the Aug. 1, 2002, memo by Jay S. Bybee, then-director of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), read that in order for this treatment to avoid reaching the legal threshold of torture, interrogators could tell Zubaydah that the insects were "stinging" creatures but "you must inform him that the insects will not have a sting that would produce death or severe pain."

Zubaydah's questioners intended only to place "a harmless insect ... such as a caterpillar" into the box.

The memos, written in 2002 and 2005 by OLC to provide legal justification for specific techniques, also address waterboarding. Mr. Bybee ruled in his 2002 memo that the practice of simulated drowning went only halfway toward meeting the legal definition of torture under U.S. law, constituting "a threat of imminent death" but not resulting in "prolonged mental harm."