Fort Wayne News Sentinel, IN
For more than three years, President Bush has been using the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and legal sophistry produced by attorneys appointed to key positions in the White House, Justice Department and the Department of Defense to justify the exercise of essentially unlimited and unchecked presidential power.
In the spring and summer of 2002, White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, the president's chief legal adviser, presided over discussions of abusive techniques military and civilian U.S. interrogators could use to extract information from prisoners in their custody. Out of these discussions emerged the official legal position of the American government, spelled out in a Justice Department memo to Gonzales dated Aug. 1, 2002. It has come to be known as the "torture memo."
After its contents became public last summer, the memo provoked widespread outrage, mostly over the nauseating perversion of language that rationalized a definition of torture so narrow that virtually all conduct by interrogators was lawful.
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