Pentagon Lawyers Said President Must Approve Torture

Here’s a quick summary. Read the comments for a link to the WSJ article itself.

A Pentagon legal task force, in early 2003, led by unnamed Bush political appointees, decided that the President was totally above the law. US-signed Treaties and International Law that forbid torture could be ignored. Torture could be used at any time, but only after the President of the US directly approved it, through the mechanism of a secret Presidential “finding” document. Those who actually carried out torture would be protected legally by the President’s own personal authorization of the torture. The lawyers claimed literally that the “Nuremberg Defense” would be valid in the case of any torturer being accused. Within the document was a specific list of interrogation techniques they planned to use with Bush’s approval; this has been blacked out in the Wall Street Journal’s copy.

Get this part, from the New York Times Story on the legal memo (love that headline):

The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of the anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.

A number of techniques not redacted that are legally OK’ed in this report include: administering involuntarily “mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt the sense of personality” as long as the drugging did not “penetrate to the core of an individual’s ability to perceive the world around him.” The report dwells on the President’s personal authority alone as being necessary for the entire defense setup if legal charges are made as a result of the torture:

“in order to respect the president’s inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign … (the prohibition against torture) must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to this commander-in-chief authority,” the report asserted. The Justice Dept. “concluded that it could not bring a criminal prosecution against a defendant who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the president’s constitutional power.”