Whitehouse and Durbin also asked what role was played by Bush's White House and the CIA in possibly influencing "deliberations about the lawfulness of waterboarding?"-
Less than a week later, Jarrett responded by saying the senators' concerns were already part of a pending investigation that OPR was conducting into the genesis of the Aug. 1, 2002, legal opinion widely known as the "torture memo."-
The memo, which gave a legal stamp of approval for the Bush administration's torture policies, was written by Deputy Attorney General John Yoo, who worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and was signed by his boss, Jay Bybee, who is now a federal appeals court judge. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
The OPR inquiry is expected to be completed by early March. An aide to Whitehouse did not respond to questions about whether the senator has received any update on the investigation. A spokesperson for Durbin did not return calls for comment. Whitehouse is a member of the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence committees; Durbin is the Senate Majority Whip and close ally of President Barack Obama.
John Bradshaw, the chief policy officer for PHR, said at the Brown University conference that "accountability"- is the paramount concern to his organization.
"We need to re-establish the fact that no one is above the law,"- Bradshaw said.
For the medical professionals who attended the PHR conference, the Yoo-Bybee torture memo was particularly disturbing because it was derived from a legal opinion about a statute written in 2000 regarding health benefits.
"They got that standard, from all places, from health-care reimbursement law,"- Whitehouse noted. "The words happened to be useful to them, but they were taken out of context."-
The Yoo-Bybee legal opinion stated that unless the amount of pain administered to a detainee results in injury "such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions" then the interrogation technique could not be defined as torture. Since waterboarding is not intended to cause death or organ failure "" only the panicked gag reflex associated with drowning "" it was deemed not to be torture.
Whitehouse said Yoo's opinion, and the fact that the Bush administration relied upon it, was "beyond malpractice"- and "raises the specter that these things were overlooked"- just to advance policy.
Jason Leopold has launched his own Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org.
Published from http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2009/020209d.html
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