Government Memo Says Even Brutal Actions OK if Done in 'Good Faith'
One of the most important building blocks in the Bush administration's apparatus of torture became public Thursday.
An Aug. 1, 2002 memorandum from the Justice Dept.'s Office of Legal Counsel to the Central Intelligence Agency instructed the agency's interrogators on specific interrogation techniques for use on Al Qaeda detainees in its custody. Most of the 17-page memo is blacked out and unreadable. But at least one of those techniques is waterboarding, the process of pouring water into the mouth and nostrils of a detainee under restraint until drowning occurs.
"This is a critical piece of the story," said Jameel Jaffer, head of the national security project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the memorandum under a Freedom of Information Act filing. "This is the most explicit statement out there that the CIA waterboarded prisoners becaused the Justice Dept. authorized them to do so."
Herman Schwartz, professor of law at American University, said the legal advice on display in the memorandum amounted to "out-and-out-fraud."
Today, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, who has been adjudicating the ACLU's extensive declassification lawsuit against the U.S. government for the past four years, ordered the memorandum released. Signed by Jay Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, the memorandum is heavily influenced by the legal theories of Bybee's then-subordinate, John Yoo. Torture-watchers have long referred to the memo, which congressional inquiries identified years ago, as "Yoo-Bybee II."
That's because Yoo-Bybee I, written around the same time as this document, contended that it would only be illegal for interrogators to inflict pain upon detainees equivalent to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." Anything short of that standard, that memo argued, was legal under the Federal Torture Statute. This newly declassified memo was an attempt at practicality: given the legal standard laid out in the first memo, Yoo-Bybee II advised the CIA on specific interrogation techniques that were now permissible.
http://www.washingtonindependent.com/view/torture-memos
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