A Firsthand Experience Before Decision on Torture
By Scott Shane, New York Times
The debate over torture here can get heated, as it did this month when a dispute over the legal status of waterboarding threatened to sink the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey as attorney general. Still, it usually remains a matter of strictly abstract legal analysis.
But three years ago, Daniel Levin, then the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, decided to bring reality to bear on his deliberations on the torture question. He went to a military base and asked to undergo waterboarding.
Mr. Levin, 51, a graduate of Harvard and the University of Chicago Law School, had served in several senior posts at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department since the administration of the first President Bush. But he had never served in the military, where American pilots, special operations troops and others for decades have undergone waterboarding to prepare them for possible treatment if captured by an enemy.