No charge for 'good faith' torture, memo says

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department in 2002 told the CIA that its interrogators would be safe from prosecution for violations of anti-torture laws if they believed "in good faith" that harsh techniques used to break prisoners' would not cause "prolonged mental harm."

That heavily censored memo, released Thursday, approved the CIA's harsh interrogation techniques method by method, but warned that if the circumstances changed, interrogators could be running afoul of anti-torture laws.

The Aug. 1, 2002, legal opinion signed by then-assistant attorney general Jay Bybee was issued the same day he wrote a memo for then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales defining torture as only those "extreme acts" that cause pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure.

The Bybee legal opinion defining torture was withdrawn more than two years later. Justice spokesman Peter Carr said Thursday the interrogation techniques currently authorized by the Bush administration are legal. It's unclear, however, which of those outlined in the second memo are still being used. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to address whether waterboarding, for example, is legal since the CIA no longer uses it.

Waterboarding is a form of simulated drowning that critics call torture. CIA Director Michael Hayden banned waterboarding in 2006 but government officials have said it remains a possibility if approved by the attorney general, the CIA chief and the president.

Secret Bush administration memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques have been made public starting in 2004, when the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal revealed detainee mistreatment. Thursday's release adds to the growing record of the still secret program launched after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The new Bybee memo was obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union along with two other previously unreleased documents dealing with the CIA's interrogation program. The Bybee memo specifically approved proposed interrogation techniques that were devised for use against al-Qaida suspects who were resistant to traditional questioning methods.

The standards used to judge how physically rough an interrogation could be are blacked out. But interrogations that stress a detainee psychologically or emotionally were not allowed to cause "prolonged mental harm." That was defined as harm lasting months or even years after the interrogation.

The memo suggests psychiatrists or psychologists should be consulted prior to interrogations to assess the likely mental-health effect on the prisoner.