The New Press publishes critical book
on Justice Department torture memos

Publication coincides with release of previously secret Inspector General report on torture tactics

On August 24, 2009, the Obama Administration released a newly declassified version of a 2004 Inspector General report on the CIA’s controversial coercive interrogation tactics.  The contents are reported to have “disgusted” Attorney General Eric Holder, and to have prompted him to reconsider appointing an independent prosecutor in connection with the CIA interrogation program. 

To coincide with the release of the report, The New Press is pleased to announce the publication of The Torture Memos: Rationalizing the Unthinkable, a new book edited by renowned constitutional scholar David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and longtime critic of the CIA’s interrogation tactics. The book includes the full set of Justice Department legal memos authorizing the CIA’s interrogation tactics and an incisive commentary that offers the first comprehensive legal analysis of the arguments advanced to approve the program. 

Professor Cole, author of Enemy Aliens, No Equal Justice and Less Safe, Less Free, argues that the memos are the real “smoking gun” in the torture controversy, and that they show that the culpability lies not merely with CIA interrogators who may have exceeded Justice Department guidance, but with the legal guidance itself, which contorted the law to authorize clearly illegal CIA tactics, and continued to do so in secret even after the Bush administration sought to assure the public that it was abiding by the very laws it was breaking.

This collection of the uncensored and unprecedented memos used to justify abuse after 9/11 gives readers an unfiltered look at the tactics approved for use in the CIA’s secret overseas prisons—including forcing detainees to stay awake for eleven days straight, slamming them against walls, stripping them naked, locking them in a small box with insects to manipulate their fears, and, of course, waterboarding—and at the incredible arguments advanced to give them a green light.

According to New Press publisher Ellen Adler, The Torture Memos offers “an eloquent argument that official accountability is necessary for the profound wrongdoing conducted by the very people whose job it was to uphold the law.” 

David Cole is a professor of law at Georgetown University, legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and author of the American Book Award–winning Enemy Aliens. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Philippe Sands is a leading international lawyer and law professor at University College London, and the author of Torture Team. He lives in London.

PurchaseThe Torture Memos here.