BBC NEWS | Defining torture in a new world war:
"as far as the definition of torture is concerned, a lot depends on what is meant by 'severe.' In a memorandum on 1 August 2002, the then Assistant US Attorney General Jay Bybee said that 'the adjective severe conveys that the pain or suffering must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.' He even suggested that 'severe pain' must be severe enough to result in organ failure or death.
Such an interpretation would obviously leave an interrogator a great deal of latitude, and that memo was subsequently disowned by the Bush administration.
What seems to have evolved is a series of interrogation techniques which in the US view do not amount to torture as defined by the UN Convention but which go beyond the simple business of asking questions.
... Senator McCain has written against any ill-treatment of prisoners: "We should not torture or treat inhumanely terrorists we have captured. The abuse of prisoners harms, not helps, our war effort. In my experience, abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear - whether it is true or false - if he believes it will relieve his suffering," he said in an article in Newsweek.
He is particularly against "waterboarding". "I believe that it is torture, very exquisite torture," he said.
But the administration clearly feels that the CIA's hands should not be tied too tightly.
Stephen Hadley, the US National Security Adviser, has spoken of the dilemma faced by governments which say they abide by the rule of law yet which need to get information to save lives. "The president has said that we are going to do whatever we do in accordance with the law. But you see the dilemma. What happens if on September 7th 2001, we had gotten one of the hijackers and based on information associated with that arrest, believed that within four days, there's going to be a devastating attack on the United States?"
One very grey area of the rendition policy is that sometimes a prisoner is handed over secretly to a country which itself carries out the interrogation. Such a country might not be so particular as to the methods used
There is a view among some lawyers that the US would violate international law if it knew of such practices by governments to which it hands over suspects."
- posted by geoff @ #