BY: NCViking

Is waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques legally considered torture? This seems to be the big middle-ground debate among liberals and conservatives on the issue and what is fueling some on the left to push for war crimes prosecution of Bush and Cheney. Now internal memos released by the Department of Justice state all lawyers at the time found CIA harsh techniques including waterboarding were not prohibited by the federal antitorture statute.

From HotAir:

Previously undisclosed Justice Department e-mail messages, interviews and newly declassified documents show that some of the lawyers, including James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general who argued repeatedly that the United States would regret using harsh methods, went along with a 2005 legal opinion asserting that the techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency were lawful.

That opinion, giving the green light for the C.I.A. to use all 13 methods in interrogating terrorism suspects, including waterboarding and up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, “was ready to go out and I concurred,” Mr. Comey wrote to a colleague in an April 27, 2005, e-mail message obtained by The New York Times…

None of the Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the interrogation question argued that the methods were clearly illegal…

[DOJ lawyer Jack] Goldsmith put a temporary halt to waterboarding. But he left intact a secret companion memorandum from 2002 that actually authorized the harsh methods, leaving the C.I.A. free to use all its methods except waterboarding, including wall-slamming, face-slapping, stress positions and more.

Mr. Levin, now in private practice, won public praise with a 2004 memorandum that opened by declaring “torture is abhorrent.” But he also wrote a letter to the C.I.A that specifically approved waterboarding in August 2004, and he drafted much of Mr. Bradbury’s lengthy May 2005 opinion authorizing the 13 methods…

“There’s no doubt whatsoever that a great deal of coercive treatment that most people would call torture is not prohibited by the federal antitorture statute,” said Benjamin Wittes, a Brookings Institution scholar who has studied interrogation policy.

So it was legal torture … kind of puts the kibosh on war crime prosecution for Cheney and Bush. Allahpundit from HotAir poses this question:

How come the Democrats don’t vastly expand the antitorture statute, then? And yes, that’s rhetorical.

It seems the muddier the water(boarding) keeps getting on this issue, the more valid that question becomes.

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