Senators push on interrogation legal advice

In the latest tack by Democrats trying to get to the bottom of the Bush administration's decision-making on harsh interrogations -- what critics call torture -- Senators Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse sent a letter today to the Justice Department, seeking more information about an internal investigation of attorneys who provided legal advice on waterboarding and other interrogation techniques.

Durbin, of Illinois, and Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, said in a statement that their letter is in response to revelations that former Justice Department officials Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury, the targets of the internal investigation, were given the opportunity to review and comment on the investigators’ findings.

The investigators may have altered their findings in response to the officials' comments, which seems to be a sharp break from the Justice Department’s normal practice, the senators said.

“We are concerned that the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, and ultimately Congress, will review a report that has undergone significant revisions at the behest of the subjects of the investigation without the benefit of reviewing OPR’s initial draft report,” Durbin and Whitehouse wrote to Acting Assistant Attorney General M. Faith Burton.

(To read the letter, click here.)

One of their colleagues, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, is pushing a "truth commission" to investigate alleged abuses of power during the Bush years.