Jameel Jaffer Interview with Glenn Greenwald and Salon

“Simply political documents that were meant to provide window dressing for war crimes.”—Jameel Jaffer on the recently released CIA memos.

Jameel Jaffer, co-editor with Amrit Singh of Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, was recently interviewed by Glenn Greenwald on Salon (scroll down to the bottom of Greenwald’s post to hear the interview.)

The ACLU has made the recently released CIA documents available on their Web site but for more, including memos from the FBI and the Defense Department, Administration of Torture offers a sobering portrait of how the United States government created the legal and procedural framework to allow torture to happen. You can view these documents here, these memos include Rumsfeld’s infamous query about why detainees could not be forced to stand for longer than four hours. Rumsfeld wrote, “I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours.”

For more on Administration of Torture, you can download our podcast with Jaffer and Singh, hear the editors on Leonard Lopate, or watch a recent interview with Jameel Jafffer: