Word: memoed
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...curtain falls on the Bush Administration, one set piece of the Administration's policy on torture has finally been ushered offstage. The Bybee Memo, a 2002 opinion authored by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, was brushed aside last week by a federal judge overseeing the nation's first-ever criminal trial of an American accused of torture abroad. The public defenders representing torture suspect Chucky Taylor, a U.S. citizen and the son of former Liberian military strongman Charles Taylor, submitted it for consideration as part of potential jury instructions. But Federal Judge Cecilia Altonaga rejected the terms...
...humiliating epilogue to the Bush Administration's attempt to integrate what many critics describe as undeniable torture into U.S. military and intelligence policy. The Bybee memo, (named for Jay Bybee, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel) was largely authored by John Yoo, then Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Office of General Counsel. It provided legal guidance for civilians engaged in interrogating terrorism suspects. Administration officials feared that CIA employees and other nonmilitary personnel could face indictment under the federal law that upholds U.S. obligation to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. The memo narrowly defined torture...
From the outset, critics of the memo viewed the legal thinking behind it as flawed. Then Navy general counsel Alberto Mora identified it as a "dangerous document" that "spots some of the legal trees, but misses the constitutional forest. Because it identifies no boundaries to action - more, it alleges there are none - it is virtually useless as guidance." What particularly troubled Mora and other critics of the memo was that, as a document from the Office of Legal Counsel, its opinions were binding as the Administration's interpretation...
...memo was eventually rescinded after Mora and other critics raised objections directly to the Pentagon leadership that was developing detainee interrogation procedures. It was resurrected by Taylor's defense attorneys in their attempt to win acquittal for their client, in the apparent belief that it could provide legal cover to the acts he was accused of committing, which included electrocution of genitals, melting plastic onto a victim's flesh, pouring scalding water on a victim's hands. Instead, Judge Altonaga summarily dismissed the memo and, on Oct. 27, Taylor, an American citizen, was convicted on five counts of torture under...
...American I’m just desensitized to obesity, but the last time I went to Tokyo, I don’t think I saw a single fat person. And that was in March, right before the slim-down program went into effect. It seemed like a memo for the States had gotten mixed up somewhere along the Pacific. Why was Japan, one of the slimmest countries in the world, where sweetened red beans count as dessert, undertaking such an ambitious weight loss program? Puzzling over this question, I was excited to learn that the executive director of Harvard University...