Torturing the history of torture

Detroit: Re “A torture report for the dustbin” (op-ed, Dec. 9): John Yoo, author of the torture memos, says he gave the legal go-ahead for waterboarding and other barbaric interrogation methods based on information provided to him by the Bush administration. “If it turned out that the facts on which I based my advice were wrong, I would be willing to change my opinion of the interrogation methods,” he writes.

But Yoo’s infamous 2002 memo stated that an act is not torture unless it produces pain equivalent to that accompanying “death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function.” How much worse would the administration’s description of its methods have to have been for Yoo to change his mind? Killing detainees, resurrecting them and then killing them again?

By suggesting this patently absurd alternative reality, Yoo is simply deflecting attention from real nature of his advice. As countless accounts have shown, the memos were not good-faith analyses of the law and facts but produced solely to provide legal cover for the interrogators if their actions were ever challenged. Their reasoning and factual basis were immaterial to that end. Gregory H. Fox Director, International Legal Studies

Wayne State University Law School