Victoria Toensing on Torture

Or more specifically, what is not torture. In the 1980s, Toensing started the Justice Department's Terrorism Unit where she "supervised the legality of apprehending terrorists to stand trial." Her standard, she says, was that the treatment of terrorists could not "shock the conscience of the court," but the lawyers at OLC were asked to define what treatment was legal for detainees who would not be prosecuted in U.S. courts. Among the precedents these lawyers relied on:

The European Court of Human Rights in the case of Ireland v. United Kingdom (1978) specifically found that wall standing (to produce muscle fatigue), hooding, and sleep and food deprivation were not torture.

The U.N. treaty defined torture as "severe pain and suffering." The Justice Department witness for the Senate treaty hearings testified that "[t]orture is understood to be barbaric cruelty . . . the mere mention of which sends chills down one's spine." He gave examples of "the needle under the fingernail, the application of electrical shock to the genital area, the piercing of eyeballs. . . ." Mental torture was an act "designed to damage and destroy the human personality."

The treaty had a specific provision stating that nothing, not even war, justifies torture. Congress removed that provision when drafting the 1994 law against torture, thereby permitting someone accused of violating the statute to invoke the long-established defense of necessity.

Read the whole thing. She also goes after some of the liberal wanna-be legal scholars who've taken to attacking the Bush administration lawyers on the op-ed pages of the Times and the Post, and she explains why these particular techniques were approved and why certain restrictions were attached -- to make sure that no detainee was subjected to torture. These were the anti-torture memos.