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(Also posted at NYT.)
Office of Legal Counsel, which has become controversial because of its legal defense of practices bordering on torture.
"Bordering on" torture? Are you kidding? Is there anything you would consider a legal defense of torture as opposed to "practices bordering on" torture?
Look at the Bybee torture memo issued by the OLC with the definition of physical pain as needing to "be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." And even then the OLC allowed for necessity and self-defense exemptions in case a government interrogator did inflict such intense pain. Yoo, the head of the OLC (now gracing the Times' Op-Ed page BTW), famously argued that the President could (depending on the circumstances) authorize crushing the testicles of the son of a suspect. Does that merely border on torture? Waterboarding and inducing hypothermia were in the past condemned as (and at least in the case of waterboarding, prosecuted as) torture when practiced by other countries. But in your view they're not quite torture when they're authorized by the OLC?
