Judge Orders CIA To Turn Over 2002 Torture Memo
Reuters
Published: Thursday May 8, 2008
Hellerstein has scheduled a review of the document for Monday.
“This memo authorized the CIA to use specific torture techniques – including waterboarding,” Jameel Jaffer, ACLU’s national security project director, said in a statement.
“CIA agents waterboarded prisoners because this memo told them that they could,” he said. “The memo is being withheld not for legitimate security reasons, but in order to protect government officials from accountability for their decisions.”
Waterboarding is a simulated drowning technique.
The ACLU said more than 100,000 pages of government documents have been released in response to its lawsuit.
Among those was a declassified 2003 memo, released by the U.S. Justice Department on April 1, that justified the use of harsh interrogation methods for suspected terrorists held abroad.
A subsequent decision overruled the memo, which said President George W. Bush’s authority as commander-in-chief superseded international law regarding wartime interrogations.
The U.S. military has banned the use of waterboarding and other harsh methods considered by some rights advocates to be torture. The U.S. intelligence community has not.
Bush authorized the CIA to use waterboarding after the September 11 attacks in 2001, but he has repeatedly insisted that the United States does not torture prisoners.
The CIA has said it used waterboarding during the interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who faces murder charges in the U.S. military court at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
(Reporting by Michelle Nichols)
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