February 13, 2008 at 23:22:39
Headlined on 2/13/08:
"Torture Memo" Author Used Health Care Statute to Form Legal Basis for Waterboarding
by Jason Leopold Page 1 of 2 page(s)
http://www.opednews.comJohn Yoo, the author of the infamous August 1, 2002
"torture memo" that formed the legal basis for so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques arding against high-level terrorist detainees,
used a statute governing health benefits when he provided the White House with a legal opinion defining torture, according to a former Justice Department official.Yoo's legal opinion stated that
unless the amount of pain administered to a detainee results in injury "such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions" than the interrogation technique could not be defined as torture. Waterboarding, a brutal and painful technique in which a prisoner believes he is drowning, therefore was not considered to be torture.
Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel, said that Yoo, a former OLC attorney who now teaches at the University of California at Berkeley,
arrived at that definition by relying on statute written in 2000 related to health benefits.more at:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_jason_le_080213_author_of__22torture_m.htm