The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Justice Department to force the release of an internal report on possible ethics violations by the agency lawyers who wrote the Bush administration's so-called torture memos.

The ACLU called release of the ethics report "long overdue."

In November, Attorney General Eric Holder testified that the report would likely be out by the end of the month, TPM reported. At that time, the Justice Department said it was going through the normal review process.

In a press release Friday, the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer wrote that the department's Office of Legal Counsel "issued a series of memos intended to permit interrogators to use methods that the United States had previously described as war crimes. As a result of those memos, hundreds of prisoners were abused and tortured, and some were even killed during the course of interrogations. The public has a legitimate interest in knowing whether the authors of the memos violated ethical rules as well as the criminal laws."

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