...notably, Holder did not release today, but instead continues to conceal, the OPR Report which, it has long been reported, concluded that the DOJ lawyers who authored the torture memos (at least John Yoo and Jay Bybee) violated their ethical duties by producing legally fallacious conclusions -- i.e., they issued those memos in bad faith. Withholding that OPR Report today is critical because it focuses attention on the flamboyant sideshow of the more extreme cases of CIA abuse, while obscuring the fact that it was high-level DOJ lawyers who, in bad faith, authorized a knowingly criminal torture regime.  Marcy Wheeler made this point perfectly yesterday:
If it is, indeed, DOJ's plan to release all the other torture documents save the OPR report, it will have the effect ofdistracting the media with horrible descriptions of threats with power drills and waterboarding, away from the equally horrible description of lawyers willfully twisting the law to "authorize" some of those actions. It will shift focus away from those that set up a regime of torture and towards those who free-lanced within that regime in spectacularly horrible ways. It will hide the degree to which torture was a conscious plan, and the degree to which the oral authorizations for torture may well have authorized some of what we'll see in the IG Report tomorrow.
If it is, indeed, DOJ's plan to release the IG Report and announce an investigation without, at the same time, releasing the OPR report, it will serve the goal of exposing the Lynndie England's of the torture regime while still protecting those who instituted that regime.
Precisely. The fact that those DOJ memos were created with everything except "good faith" guts the argument for using them as a shield of immunity for high-level Bush officials. To continue to conceal the OPR Report is to conceal how invalid were those memos and how warped it is to use them as guidance for who should and should not be prosecuted.
see also Justice probe may pose 'enormous consequences' for Bush officials
