Torture: In search of a legal justification

The administration’s “torture regime” has now been laid bare, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. In a newly declassified 2003 memo, John Yoo of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel advanced the astounding argument that the president of the United States, in the name of national “self-defense,” can ignore federal statutes and international treaties and engage in the sort of harsh interrogation techniques that any civilized society considers torture. The general outlines of this policy have long been known, but the torture memorandum now proves that the Bush administration was seeking a legal “fixing” to justify the policies that led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guant