Washington: As former Vice President Dick Cheney argued on Sunday that the CIA’s aggressive interrogation of terrorism suspects did not amount to torture, the man who provided the legal rationale for the programme said in some cases it had perhaps gone too far.
Former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo said the sleep deprivation, rectal feeding and other harsh treatment outlined in a U.S. Senate report last week could violate anti-torture laws.
“If these things happened as they’re described in the report ... they were not supposed to be done. And the people who did those are at risk legally because they were acting outside their orders,” Yoo said, the Reuters reported.
As Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel in 2002, Yoo co-wrote a memo that was used as the legal sanction for what the CIA called its programme of enhanced interrogation techniques after the September 11 attacks.
The memo said only prolonged mental harm or serious physical injury, such as organ failure, violated the Geneva Convention’s ban on torture. Aggressive interrogation methods like waterboarding fell short of that mark.
Yoo’s comments on Sunday contrasted with those of Cheney and former national security officials who invoke his memo to argue that the harsh treatment of detainees was legal.
“They specifically authorised and okayed what we did,” Cheney said.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s review of 6.3 million pages of CIA documents found that some captives were deprived of sleep for more than a week, at times with their hands shackled above their heads, while others were abused sexually.
“Looking at it now, I think, of course, you can do these things cumulatively or too much that it would cross the line of the anti-torture statute,” Yoo said on the C-SPAN television network.
