Newsweek is reporting three 2005 Justice Department memos detailing the Bush Administrations use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques are being prepared for public release. The memos reportedly provide the Bush Administrations legal rationale for such torture techniques as waterboarding and are expected to "embarrass" the CIA.
The debate about torture ramped up again last week with an account in the New York Review of Books about a secret International Red Cross report that was delivered to the CIA in February 2007. The report, according to journalist Mark Danner, quotes detainees describing, often in gruesome detail, how they were locked in coffin-size boxes; swung by towels around their necks into plywood walls; and forced to stand naked for days while their arms were shackled above their heads.
This news follows the release, three weeks ago, of nine internal Bush Administration memos that were used to justify the use of torture in the interrogation of detainees in the "war on terror".
The puzzle is beginning to come together. The nine previously released memos provided the rationale and the three to be released will, reportedly, provide detail on the techniques used during the Bush White House authorized "enhanced" interrogations.
There will be a point, I reckon fairly soon, where we will no longer be able to turn a blind eye.