Today, the Robert Jackson Steering Committee (RJSC), of which BORDC Executive Director Shahid Buttar is a member, filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking the release of a report by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) on the conduct of Bush administration attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel who wrote legal memoranda authorizing torture.

Attorney General Eric Holder has thus far failed to fulfill his promises to release the report. The FOIA request also seeks the release of an similar report written during the last months of the Bush administration and then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s rebuttal of that report.

Founded in September 2008, the RJSC works to bring about the criminal prosecution of top government officials in the United States alleged to have committed war crimes. The committee was named in honor of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the top U.S. prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. “We must never forget,” Jackson had said in his Opening Statement, “that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our lips as well.”

For more on the RJSC’s FOIA request, see David Swanson’s article on OpEdNews.

Tags: Freedom of Information Act, torture

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 11:49 am and is filed under BORDC & PCC News, Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.