The Justice Department & The UN Convention Against Torture

One of the standards the United States had agreed to abide by that determined how it would treat its prisoners was the UN Convention Against Torture. In the wake of the decision that the Geneva Conventions and those kinds of codes of conduct did not apply to the United States in the War on Terror, the Justice Department set about finding ways to dismantle the convention. John Yoo describes looking at the convention and finding that many crucial words were undefined. He then took them to the farthest stretches of the definition. He defined the "severe physical pain and suffering" forbidden by the document as pain that caused lasting physical or psychological handicaps, such as "organ failure". By using the absence of formal definitions in the document as grounds to define torture so drastically, he and his team made anything short of that legal and permissible.

Albert Mora and other opponents of Yoo's work point out that under their definition, much of what Saddam Hussein had done to his prisoners would not qualify as torture. Many who read the memos were horrified and could not believe that this kind of reasoning had ever seen the light of day, much less become United States official policy. It was very extreme and absolutely turned all existing policy on its head.