Chertoff's Legal Advice Led to First Case of Waterboarding

[Ichingcarpenter]

By Jason Leopold, OpEd News

When the CIA wanted assurances in the summer of 2002 that their agents would not be prosecuted for using brutal interrogation methods against a so-called high-level detainee in custody the agency turned to Michael Chertoff, the former head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

Chertoff, now the director of homeland security, told the agency that an August 2002 legal opinion drafted by John Yoo, then a deputy assistant attorney general at the DOJ’s office of legal counsel, and signed by Jay Bybee, Yoo’s boss, would protect CIA interrogators from criminal prosecution if the methods of interrogation they intended to use against prisoners met any legal challenges, specifically, claims that the interrogators violated federal anti-torture statutes.

For an interrogation to meet the definition of torture, Yoo wrote, “the victim must experience intense pain or suffering of the kind that is equivalent to the pain that would be associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in a loss of significant body functions will likely result.”

Chertoff’s guarantee that CIA agents would not be prosecuted for breaking anti-torture laws led directly to the use of waterboarding against alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu-Zubaydah in August 2002, the first time that method of interrogation was used against a prisoner in the so-called war on terror, according to Pentagon and Justice Department documents, previously published news reports, and several books that have been written about the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.

While Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, has been the recent target of widespread criticism for providing the Bush administration with the legal authority to use harsh interrogation methods against prisoners, it has become increasingly clear over the past several months that it was senior White House officials, such as Chertoff, who gave interrogators the green light to actually waterboard prisoners.>>>>>>snip

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/32856

[elehhhhna]

1. Never forget that CHERTOFF means "of the Devil" in Russian.

[Ichingcarpenter]

2. Son of Devil to be correct

The guy just looks evil too.