Well, there's no denying that this quotation makes Koocher look bad. Koocher seems to be opposing a Geneva Conventions definition of torture. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which concerns the treatment of prisoners of war, arose out of an international commitment to reassert civilizing values after the barbarism of World War I, and thus is a core part of "distracting" international law.
But that anti-international law sentiment wouldn't look so bad if the ruling interpreters of U.S. law at the time were putting out definitions of torture more or less in line with Geneva Conventions definitions. But they weren't.
As noted earlier, by 2002, all kinds of torture had been rendered de facto "legal" in the United States by the Office of Legal Counsel memos--known as the "torture memos." The Department of Justice authors of these memos--John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, Jay Bybee, David Addington--designed them to protect from accountability all U.S. government employees who inflicted "enhanced interrogations" (EI's) on detainees. At the time, the EI's, which were designed by two military psychologists--James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen--who have recently settled with plaintiffs tortured by their methods, included some pretty grisly practices. As noted earlier, these practices included drowning detainees to the point of near death (waterboarding), sexual humiliation, health-threatening extreme variations in temperature, and "stress positions".
Under the 2006 revision of U.S. Army Field Manual (still the guiding legal standard today), interrogators are still permitted to inflict EI techniques like sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, isolation/solitary confinement, exploitation of fears and phobias, and the "futility" technique. All of these practices are known to produce deep and lasting psychological harms. And, infuriatingly, most [1] of the people who have suffered these harms have been innocent of any high level affiliation with Al Qaeda, largely because of the incompetent, contracted-out nature of the detainee-capturing dragnet after 9/11.
Below, to jog your memory (or get burned into it for the first time) is an example of one of those torture memos:
Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death". For purely mental pain to amount to torture "it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g. lasting for months or even years. (Memo from Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General to Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the President, August 1, 2002).
Given the political context of the time, that international law-dismissing quote by Koocher makes it seem like the "torture memo" definitions of torture suited Koocher just fine. They came from legally-anointed interpreters of U.S. law after all, so they're legal. End of story, nothing to see here, move along. Why let the "distraction" of international law interfere with the good definitional work of these made-in-America torture memos?
Maybe, because Koocher's own words make him look complicit in the scandal, the editor and publisher (SAGE) could justify retracting the whole article on the basis of not wanting to defame Koocher's character. [Note: as indicated above, SAGE has expressed recently that they themselves currently have no plans to retract the article, and it is now the editor's decision].
But even if we ignore the fact that an author and editor can easily agree to excise one quote and keep the rest of the article, the quote itself does not rise to the level of defamation. Koocher is a powerful public figure now. He became one as soon as he was elected president of the APA corporation, one with a nine-figure annual budget. And being a highly-intrusive observer in the historically-explosive process of developing APA interrogation ethics policy made him even more public. So people shouldn't have to worry about defaming Koocher any more than they worry about defaming, say, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, or Donald Trump for that matter.
And even with non-public figures, it is not usually considered defamation to accurately quote what people said. It seems especially non-defamatory when, like Handelsman, you're polite enough not to use Koocher's actual name. And Koocher has said a lot of other things consistent with the quote Handelsman accurately attributes to him, such as:
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