What is torture?
The Justice Department released a rewritten legal memo on what constitutes torture, backing away from its own assertions prior to the Iraqi prison abuse scandal that torture had to involve ``excruciating and agonizing pain.''
The 17-page memo omitted two of the most controversial assertions made in now-disavowed 2002 Justice Department documents: that President Bush, as commander in chief in wartime, had authority superseding U.S. anti-torture laws and that U.S. personnel had several legal defenses against criminal liability in such cases.
The new document said torture violates U.S. and international law.
``Consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the president's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture,'' said the memo from Daniel Levin, acting chief of the Office of Legal Counsel, to Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
Critics in Congress and many legal experts say the original documents set up a legal framework that led to abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, in Afghanistan and at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. After the Iraqi prison abuses came to light, the Justice Department in June disavowed its previous legal reasoning and set to work on the replacement document.
The Justice Department memo, dated Thursday, was released less than a week before the Senate Judiciary Committee was to consider Bush's nomination of his chief White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to replace John Ashcroft as attorney general.
- posted by geoff @ #