Why the White House should turn over secret legal memos, and why I'm sponsoring legislation to end brutal interrogations.
By Sen. Edward M. Kennedy
Oct. 10, 2007 | Last Thursday's New York Times alerted the nation to yet another shocking fact about the Bush administration: The Department of Justice authorized the use of extreme interrogation techniques not only in 2002 and 2003, but also two more times in 2005. The Justice Department's record is even worse than we'd realized. It's up to Congress to act against torture because this administration can't be trusted to do so.
We've been here before. Before this latest scandal, we already knew about an earlier opinion by the department's Office of Legal Counsel authorizing the use of torture -- the Bybee torture memo. When it came to light along with the shocking photos from Abu Ghraib, it shamed America in the eyes of the world. We lost our moral high ground in the battle against terrorism. This memo and others like it violated the values we hold dear, undermined our intelligence gathering, encouraged our enemies to respond in kind, and made the war on terrorism harder to win.
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