Just between Yoo and He: Two Justice Department Lawyers\u27 Imaginary Torturous Email

On December 9, 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its long-awaited Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, which The New York Times described as “a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend and even harder to stomach.” The Times had reported four years earlier that a number of Department of Justice (DoJ) emails were determined to be missing during the Office of Professional Responsibility\u27s investigation of the Bush Administration memoranda providing legal justification for “enhanced interrogations,” the so-called torture memos. What follows is an imaginary exchange of emails between two young lawyers during their tenure at the DoJ Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in 2002. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental