The Justice Department and the UN Convention Against Torture

John Yoo of The Justice Department, at the time working under Alberto Gonzales, set out to interpret the wording of the UN Convention Against Torture in order to find out how far the United States could go when interrogating captured enemy combatants.  He concluded in a memo in August of 2002, that physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent to organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death, paving the wave for brutal interrogations.  He believed that this was an acceptable explanation since the original wording of the Conventions had been vague.

John Yoo

Critics of the Yoo memo claim that he limited the definition of torture so narrowly that almost anything was legal as long as the combatant was not killed or did not receive severe bodily injury.  They likened his conclusion to allowing the same type of treatment that Saddam Hussein had previously done in his prisons.  One critic could not fathom that Yoo's memo was actually US policy when he felt it should have been discarded as the mad writings of a lowly lawyer.