Justice Dept. Rewrites Advice on Detainees
By CURT ANDERSON, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The Justice Department is rewriting its legal advice on how far U.S. interrogators can go to pry information from detainees, working under much different circumstances from the writers of earlier memos that appeared to justify torture.
The first memos were written not long after the Sept. 11 attacks, while the new advice is being crafted against the backdrop of prisoner abuse in Iraq.
Justice Department lawyers will spend several weeks reviewing and revising several key 2002 documents, especially a 50-page memo to the White House on Aug. 1, 2002, that critics have characterized as setting the legal tone for the mistreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison.
"The reason the original memo was so damaging was that it was consistent with a pattern of conduct from Afghanistan (news - web sites) to Guantanamo Bay to Iraq," Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, said Wednesday.
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