THAT STORY: This piece is a must-read.

The Torture Memos: Putting The President Above The Law

By Stuart Taylor Jr., National Journal

…And was it just a bunch of immoral Bush administration lawyers who “narrowly redefined” torture “so that techniques that inflict pain and mental suffering could be deemed legal,” as The Washington Post implied in a June 9 editorial? No. The definition is in the torture convention itself. It specifies that torture includes only intentional infliction of “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental.” (Emphasis added.) And it was not the Bush administration but the United States Congress that said — in the 1994 criminal statute implementing the torture convention — that mental pain or suffering could be deemed “severe” only if “prolonged,” and only if caused by a few listed techniques. Telling a prisoner that he or his family will be killed unless he talks is not torture, for example, unless the threat is of “imminent” death, under the congressional definition.

Nor is it fair to paint as monsters the officials who have, over top military lawyers’ objections, developed legal arguments for interrogation methods more harsh than those listed in military manuals that were written in an era when people like Zarqawi were not the major concern. …The main job of administration lawyers is to tell the policy makers the outer limits set by international treaties and criminal statutes that are studded with ambiguities.

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