Above: CIA torture

The Pentagon has recently made public a five year old Justice Department memo that approves of harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists.

The memo is dated March 14, 2003. It was written by John Yoo (pictured below), who was at the time deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.

Below: John Yoo

The memo legally justifies the military’s use of torture tactics against al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees overseas. The catch is that the torture is not supposed to be directly intended – which is stupid since torture techniques are all pre-empted as it uses different tools to inflict pain.

The memo also empowers the US president in such a way that in times of war, as commander in chief of the army, the president cannot be limited by United Nations treaties against torture. Even the United States Congress “cannot interfere with the president’s exercise of his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war.”

According to the memo, “Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion.”

“Finally, even if the criminal prohibitions outlined above applied, and an interrogation method might violate those prohibitions, necessity or self-defense could provide justifications for any criminal liability,” the memo added. This basically means that any interrogator accused of torture can use this memo as a defense in case he or she was charged with violating local or even international laws.

The problem with backing up such actions with legal basis is that the same can be used against you. Surely, the international community, especially enemies of the West, will see this memo as a way to get back at the US and their soldiers. If I was al-Qaeda and I caught me an American soldier, I will surely treat him the same way that this legal memo allows his comrades to treat mine. That’s only fair, right? What makes US torture of detainees different from al-Qaeda torture of enemy soldiers – from the point of view of the terrorist?

Mr. Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s national security project, said that the reasoning behind the Yoo legal memo puts “no limit to the kinds of interrogation methods that the president can authorize.” The broad definition of torture in the memo means that any action of interrogation, inhuman or not, as long as it was not intended (which is very vague and can easily be denied), is justified.

“The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president’s wartime authority,” Jaffer added. “The memo was meant to allow torture, and that’s exactly what it did.”

To summarize the 81-page memo, it basically centers on whether military interrogators can be held responsible if torture is not the intent of the questioning. Torture, according to the memo, is the intended sum of a variety of acts, which could include acid scalding, severe mental pain and suffering, threat of imminent death and physical pain resulting in impaired body functions, organ failure or death.

To us, this is how this means. If the interrogator caused only one or some of these painful, painful stuff and not all of it, then he’s good. If he did not intend to inflict pain, even if it caused impaired body functions or death, then he’s good.

Then the memo goes and defends previous accounts of torture, stating that sleep deprivation, hooding detainees and “frog crouching” is not considered torture.

Here is the best part.

It says that foreign enemies held overseas do not have the same rights from cruel and unusual punishment that U.S. citizens have under the Constitution.

The memo was rescinded in less than nine months. But the fact that it was in existence is scary enough. The current United States administration will always find a way to justify its actions, may it be justifiable in the international community’s eyes or not.

Just last month, President Bush vetoed a bill that would explicitly prohibit methods such as waterboarding (pictured above: US protesters who are obviously not happy with the Bush veto, demonstrates the method to on-looking civilians and media). The CIA admitted to using waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects.

We hope that the next president will have enough balls (sorry Hillary!) to tackle this issue in the future – for the protection of all humanity!

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