Congress has asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a 2005 memo written by a top State Department lawyer, which is said to have taken an alternative view on the legality of torture to that famously offered by DOJ lawyers.
In a letter to Clinton, Reps John Conyers and Howard Berman, who chair, respectively, the Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees wrote that the memo “may shed important light on the process by which these interrogation practices were evaluated, approved, ad implemented by the former Administration.” Reps Jerry Nadler and Bill Delahunt, who chair subcommittees of Judiciary and Foreign Affairs, respectively, also signed on.
As we’ve written about, Philip Zelikow, who was a top State Department lawyer under Condoleezza Rice, last month revealed the existence of the memo — as well as the fact that the Bushies not only didn’t act on it, but even “attempted to collect and destroy all copies” of it.
In their letter to Clinton, Conyers et al call this response, with some understatement, “troubling.”
The lawmakers have also written to the National Archives to request a copy of the memo.