Justice Dept memo okayed torturing terrorists

It added that arguments centering on ‘‘necessity and self-defence could provide justifications that would eliminate any criminal liability’’ later. The memo seems to counter the pre-September 11, 2001 assumption that US government personnel would never be permitted to torture captives. It was offered after the CIA began detaining and interrogating suspected Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the wake of the attacks, according to government officials familiar with the document. The legal reasoning in the 2002 memo, which covered treatment of Qaeda detainees in CIA custody, was later used in a March 2003 report by Pentagon lawyers assessing interrogation rules governing the Defence Department’s detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The 2002 and 2003 memos reflect the Bush administration’s desire to explore the limits on how far it could legally go in aggressively interrogating foreigners suspected of terrorism or of having information that could thwart future attacks. In the 2002 memo, the Justice Department defined torture in a much narrower way, for example, than does the US Army, which has historically carried out most wartime interrogations.

Human rights groups expressed dismay at the Justice Department’s legal reasoning on Monday. Mark Corallo, the Justice Department’s chief spokesman, said ‘‘the department does not comment on specific legal advice it has provided confidentially within the executive branch’’.

The memo named seven techniques that courts have considered torture, including severe beatings with truncheons and clubs, threats of imminent death, burning with cigarettes, electric shocks to genitalia, rape or sexual assault, and forcing a prisoner to watch the torture of another person. —(LAT-WP)