Responses To The Torture Memos
| This section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this section if you can. |
Bybee signed the legal memorandum that defined "enhanced interrogation techniques" including waterboarding, which are now regarded as torture by the current Justice Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, medical experts in the treatment of torture victims, intelligence officials, military judges, and American allies. In 2009 a Spanish judge considered conducting a war crime investigation of Bybee and five other Bush administration figures, but the Attorney General of Spain recommended against it. Bybee was investigated by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility. (See below.)
In addition, Jack Goldsmith, who succeeded Bybee as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, withdrew the torture memos weeks before resigning in June 2004. He later said he was "astonished" by the "deeply flawed" and "sloppily reasoned" legal analysis in the memos.
David Luban, a law professor at Georgetown Law School, testified before Congress on May 13, 2009, that the memos were "an ethical train wreck" and had been drafted to "reverse engineer" a defense for illegal actions already committed.
Read more about this topic: Torture Memos
Famous quotes containing the words responses to, responses and/or torture:
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“When a man of genius is denied of his great love, he goes mad. His brain, instead of being clear to do his work, is tortured, so he begins to think of torture. Torture for those who have tortured him.”
—David Boehm, and Louis Friedlander. Dr. Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi)