The disclosure of four Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel opinions on interrogation and torture is likely to have significant political and perhaps legal consequences. But their release is also a landmark in national security classification policy.

These OLC memos, released by the Justice Department yesterday, were among the most urgently sought and the most fiercely protected classified records of recent years. They addressed fundamental questions of national policy and yet they were off limits to public review and discussion by virtue of their classification status.

“The interrogation techniques described in these memos have already been widely reported,” President Obama said in a statement explaining his decision to declassify the memos. “Withholding these memos would only serve to deny facts that have been in the public domain for some time.”

But remarkably, this sensible view — that information which has reached the public domain should not remain classified — does not characterize or dictate classification policy.

“Classified information shall not be declassified automatically as a result of any unauthorized disclosure of identical or similar information,” according to Executive Order 12958, as amended.

Nor can judicial review reliably compel disclosure of such information. In order to win declassification and disclosure of previously released information, a FOIA plaintiff must show that each of the following conditions is met: 1) the information previously released is as specific as the information that is being requested; 2) the information requested matches the information previously released; and 3) the information requested has been made public through an official and documented disclosure (Fitzgibbon v. CIA, D.C. Circuit, 1990).

The new release does not alter this non-disclosure policy, which lends credence to the statement of former CIA director Michael Hayden that the government could have successfully argued against disclosure of the OLC memos in court, as he favored.

But the four newly declassified memos are now themselves “an official and documented disclosure.” This means that not only have their combined 124 pages been published (with limited redactions) but also that an obstacle to the release of a related body of legal and intelligence information has now been removed. Such material can no longer legitimately remain classified. Furthermore, the new release will also enable participants and other officials to speak publicly about the issues involved.

The memos are shocking in their calculated brutality and in their likely violation of categorical legal prohibitions against torture. They are, as President Obama stated, evidence of a “dark and painful chapter in our history” involving practices that should “never take place again.” But they also provide abundant food for thought as well as new insight into their authors’ thinking, and their predicament.

The authorization for coercive interrogation of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was predicated on the “certain” belief that “he is withholding information regarding terrorist networks in the United States… and information regarding plans to conduct attacks within the United States” and that “he refuses to divulge” the information. Furthermore, there was an estimated threat level “equal to that which preceded the September 11 attacks.” “This opinion is limited to these facts. If these facts were to change, this advice would not necessarily apply.” (“Interrogation of al Qaeda Operative” [pdf], August 1, 2002, at page 1).

In other words, it appears that the OLC authors proceeded not out of sadism or indifference, but out of desperation.

They recognized that under other circumstances (such as law enforcement), the coercive practices that they were authorizing could be thought to “shock the conscience.” But they concluded that coercive interrogation by the CIA did not violate that standard since it was only being used where the detainee had “knowledge of imminent terrorist threats against the USA” and that it had already proved effective in producing “critical, actionable intelligence.” (“Application of U.S. Obligations Under Article 16″ [pdf], May 30, 2005, at pp. 3, 29ff).

The development of the OLC memos suggests that if torture is to be permanently abolished, alternatives to coercive interrogation that are at least as effective need to be identified, or else the occasional prospect of an “imminent terrorist threat” threatening thousands of lives must be accepted in principle as preferable to the extreme violations of human dignity authorized by OLC.

A couple of other points. Both President Obama and Attorney General Holder noted that the OLC memos were released as a consequence of ongoing litigation. In other words, their release is thanks to the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU and its co-plaintiffs, and the resonance that the lawsuit found in the press, the blogosphere and the public. Congressional oversight did not get the job done (despite a Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for these records). This reflects a significant and dangerous weakness on the part of Congress.

Yesterday, former CIA Director Michael Hayden told MSNBC that the CIA interrogation program “began life as a covert action.” If that is true, it means that there should be a Presidential “finding” authorizing the program, and that such a finding should have been provided to Congressional overseers. As a covert action, the program may also have entailed active deception. It’s one more loose end that remains to be tied.

Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey criticized the release of the OLC memos in “The President Ties His Own Hands on Terror,” Wall Street Journal, April 17.

The ACLU called for appointment of an independent prosecutor to investigate torture under the Bush Administration, in an April 16 release.

Reporting from Iraq for McClatchy Newspapers, Corinne Reilly writes that throughout Iraq, “Libraries and schools are understocked, and many bookstores are closed…. College-level texts, books on specialized subjects and recent editions are the hardest to come by. Most elementary and high school students use decades-old materials.”

“You could say we are starving for textbooks,” May Youssef Saour, a microbiology professor at Baghdad University’s al-Kindy College of Medicine, told Reilly.

According to the National Museum of Ireland, a similar piece dating between 900-700BC was found around 300 years ago in Killymoon, Co Tyrone, although unlike the find at Killymoon, which was a plain design, this recent discovery is highly decorative.

The Coroner also ruled yesterday that a separate find of a gold Bronze Age purse or ‘bulla’ should be considered a treasure.

The item, which is around the size of a 50 pence piece and dates from 950 to 800 BC, was discovered by Bangor man Glen McCamley, using a metal detector on land belonging to farmer John Kennedy at Inch in Downpatrick.

The temple’s inner sanctuary — also know as its 'holy of holies' — will be the focus of the 2009 field season which begins on July 1.

In 2006 Egypt's government and UNDP initiated a joint program to fund and implement the development mega-project, breaking it down into bite-sized chunks more appealing to foreign donors. The first phase is a pilot project to establish an administrative unit, procure equipment and de-mine 13,000 hectares of land. The government and UNDP covered 27 percent of the phase's $3.2 million cost. Foreign donors supplied the rest.

The team has also conducted field surveys and reviewed existing case files to create a comprehensive database of land-mine incidents and casualties. So far, 647 land-mine survivors, including 206 amputees, have been identified. "Whenever we identify new survivors who were not available when we made the survey we add them," he added.

While Egypt's development drive promises to rid the North West Coast of its deadly legacy, it could be over a decade before the funding is in place to complete the mine action program. In the meantime, efforts should be made to improve medical facilities in mine-infested areas, and secure the welfare of land-mine victims and their families, argues LSC's Abada, who accuses Cairo of neglecting these victims because they are generally poor and marginalized people living far from the policymakers in the capital.

US authorities consistently limit their actions to revoking the US citizenship of suspected Nazi war criminals and then deporting them to European countries. The legal hurdles for taking these steps are relatively low: All it takes is proof that a suspected war criminal lied about his past upon immigration to the United States.

The Americans have never put any suspected Nazi war criminals on trial, even though the Nazis' victims included American Jews who lived in Europe or happened to be there at the time. Otherwise, US courts could have faced a large number of cases. Historians and legal experts estimate that up to 10,000 Nazi collaborators emigrated to the United States during the chaos of the first few postwar years.

The Americans are not the only ones to have shown little interest in bringing Hitler's helpers to trial. There has also been a lack of commitment on the part of Europeans. For instance, the United States would have extradited suspected concentration camp guard Demjanjuk to Ukraine or Poland long ago if those countries had shown an interest in prosecuting him.

The failures of the German judiciary have been the most grievous, however. Even as German investigators are now focusing their attention on the Nazis' foreign henchmen, German accessories to murder were more or less allowed to escape punishment for years. Since the end of the war, German courts have investigated more than 100,000 cases, but only 6,500 of the accused were ever sentenced. "While senior government officials, officers and commanders enjoyed their retirements in peace," says Christiaan F. Rüter, an Amsterdam criminal law professor, "this old man is now expected to pay for everything." Rüter is referring to Demjanjuk.

The excavation proved one of the biggest breakthroughs in South Asian history and is now listed for World Heritage status conferred by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). It is an extraordinary archaeological finding. A big housing complex that matured during the Harappan era was discovered by these archaeologists who have been working in this little known village for the past three years.

Gonzalo Alvarez and his colleagues at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain calculated what is called the inbreeding coefficient for each individual across 16 generations of the Habsburgs, using genealogical information for Charles II and 3,000 of his relatives and ancestors. The inbreeding coefficient indicates the likelihood that an individual would receive two identical genes at a given position on a chromosome because of the relatedness of their parents.