ACLU head Anthony Romero urges Obama to pardon Bush, CIA torture authorizers

On Tuesday, the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are expected to publicly release a 500-page version of the committee's 6,000-page investigation into harsh CIA interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration in 2002, and some instances where interrogators reportedly overstepped even those loosened standards. Republican committee members and the CIA will publish critiques of the long-awaited document.

The report's imminent release has Washington more sharply divided than usual, with Obama supporting the airing of America's dirty laundry, Republicans decrying it, and the military and intelligence community preparing for a possibly violent backlash overseas at the recounting of torture-like techniques. The American Civil Liberties Union supports releasing the report, for obvious reasons, but its executive director, Anthony Romero, also argues for pardoning George W. Bush and the other government officials with a hand in the program.

"That officials at the highest levels of government authorized and ordered torture is not in dispute," Romero writes in a New York Times op-ed. And when conservatives first pushed the idea of pardons for the torture enablers, the ACLU and other human rights groups "found the proposal repugnant," he adds.

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Read the rest of Romero's argument, and his suggested pardon candidates, at The New York Times.