Marty Lederman has a different take:

Harman does not assert that the CIA techniques were torture or cruel treatment.

She does not insist that they were illegal, and breaches of at least two treaties — and does not insist that they be terminated immediately.

She does not ask how it’s possible that waterboarding is not intended to result in severe physical suffering. She does not ask how the CIA can avoid the conclusion that “stress positions” and severe sleep and sensory deprivation are “cruel treatment.”

She does not insist on seeing all the OLC opinions that reached the absurd conclusions that the techniques were legal.

She does not threaten to inform any of her colleagues in Congress about the shocking illegal conduct of which she has learned.

She does not begin a public debate about whether such conduct is lawful and, if not, whether the U.S. should amend the law and therefore breach its treaty obligations.

Although Harman may be proud of her “oversight”, I think Lederman has it right: Harman is a part of a dysfunctional oversight mechanism that has been central in enabling this Administration to do anything they want, Constitution and Law be damned.

I am not so excited about her principled stand….

I am assuming that the redaction was made immediately prior to the declassification of the letter. I just did a search for the use of “stressful positions” (I have heard it more commonly called just stress positions) and saw that right after the Abu Graib photos hit the streets articles were written saying

Rumsfeld told a Senate committee that Pentagon lawyers had approved methods such as sleep deprivation and dietary changes as well as rules permitting prisoners to be made to assume stressful positions.

If the redaction was right before the declassification why would they redact something that they have argued publicly was legal? The only reason I could think of is they redacted it because the letter may screw with the timeline of when Rumsfeld may have said the techniques were approved.

BTW…after reading through the letter again I kinda agree with you but I posit this…

Does “these practices” refer to “that what was described” or what was redacted. If the redacted wording is basically “that what was described” then why did she not use the redacted wording again?

I really like the “DO interrogations” as being the redacted part because it fits in nicely with the how you would write a letter like that. Start of general and identify who is doing what. She mentions the CIA early, then you get more specific — DO interrogations — and then hone in with the next paragraph — enhanced techniques….and hone further in the last paragraph — videotapes of the techniques and interrogations.

I think you may have something there

I pasted the block of text into Word.
Used Times New Roman 12 point (instead of 11 point) and changed the right hand margin to 6 and 3/8.

I should mention, the ‘of’ from ‘Department of Justice’ sits on the last line of the paragraph instead of the next to last line, but all the other formatting looks like it reproduces the original PDF file.

here is a quick and easy way to figure out the right size needed. Open up notepad/wordpad/Word if on a Windoze machine. Set font to New Times Roman and font size to 12 (dont think the font size is that important).

one one line type in torture techniques, next line type in extreme measures. Both of these have the same length needed.

Type in your guess on the line underneath, if it matches the two words above it then you are golden. I wouldn’t completely rule out a word/phrase that is a half space short/long of this, but I am confident that the length of “extreme measures” is the exact length that is needed.

Either too long or too short:
waterboardings
waterboarding
water boarding
water-boarding
water boardings
water-boardings
“water boardings”
enhanced methods
enhanced techniques
President’s Orders
Executive orders
harshest procedures
harsh techniques

Closest matches:
Executive Orders
harshest methods
harshest practices
“torture” methods
torture techniques
“waterboardings”
President’s orders
extreme measures

I think earlier arguments in the thread have ruled out Executive Orders, President’s orders, and “waterboardings” By looking at things through Word, I am confident to say that harshest methods and harshest practices are actually a half space too short to fit into the redacted area. That leaves the words:

“torture” methods
torture techniques
extreme measures

I am going to rule two of these out for the sake of consistency in the rest of the letter. I am going to rule out “torture” methods and extreme measures because Harman later uses the word phrase “enahanced techniques”. I don’t think that she would use the word methods or measures and then switch up in the next paragraph and use the word techniques. I will go even further and rule out torture techniques, because for consistancy again….why would she use the word “torture” and then the next paragraph soften it up and use the right-wing approved (TM) phrase “enhanced techniques.” In addition I dont think that they would have redacted the phrase “extreme measures”…..although I do think they would have redacted the word torture.

Thus, I believe that all of our guesses so far have been wrong. Currently I think what was redacted was some specific form(s) of torture they dont want shown in the wild. A second thought that I got an idea from WilliamOckham, what if what was redacted was something along the lines of “CIA interrogations” but NOT done by the CIA but someone else and signed off by the AG, but I cant think of what would fit.

BTW…for analysis purposes, I took a screenshot of the pdf, a screenshot of Word using the phrase “torture techniques” and overlayed it in Photoshop (with slight enlarging to match size and rotation). It fit exactly…with the preceding “the” and following “approved”. This is not to say that was the words that were redacted, but it does give an exact size that needs to fit inside of the redacted space.

I’m all out of ideas, I’ll let the other sleuths take over for now