A March 14, 2003, memorandum written by Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel granted military interrogators broad authority to use harsh methods in questioning suspects deemed “unlawful combatants.” Yoo’s memo, the subject of which was “Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outside the United States,” was addressed to William J. Haynes II, general counsel of the Department of Defense. Haynes had requested that the Justice Department examine the legal standards governing military interrogations of such unlawful combatants.

The memo, made public on April 1 following declassification in response to a request by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, rambles on in often detached, clinical language for 81 pages. For example, a section sub-headed “Severe Pain or Suffering” states: “The key statutory phrase in the definition of torture is the statement that acts amount to torture if they cause ‘severe physical or mental pain or suffering.’ [Legal case citation] makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the pain or suffering must be ‘severe.’... Thus, the adjective ‘severe’ conveys that the pain or suffering must be of such a high level of intensity that the pain is difficult for the subject to endure.”

Yoo applied an end-justifies-the-means constitutional standard when he wrote: “If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch’s constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions.”

In response to the release of the memo, Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said it revealed policies that threatened “our country’s status as a beacon of human rights.”

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