The Bush administration’s "war on terror"—including its controversial policies on detentions, interrogations and warrantless wiretapping—was all underpinned by legal memoranda. While some of those memos have been released (primarily as a result of ACLU lawsuits), the former administration chose to keep many others secret, citing security and confidentiality concerns.
The decision to release them now lies with President Obama. To help inform the debate—and inject an extra dose of accountability—we’re posting a list of the relevant memos, both public and secret. (The ACLU first compiled a list of still-secret memoranda, which ProPublica verified.)
We’ll update the list as more memos are made public.
Note: Our list is quite inclusive, but we have chosen to leave off some documents, such as early drafts of later memos.
Click on the headline of each entry to see more information. Or mouse over the timeline and click on a box to jump to the corresponding entry.
