The memo, which came directly from Sec. Rumsfeld's offices, said:
We conclude below that the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause is inapplicable to the conduct of interrogations of alien enemy combatants held outside the United States for two independent reasons. First, the Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause does not apply to the President's conduct of a war. Second, even if the Fifth Amendment applied to the conduct of war, the Fifth Amendment does not apply extraterritorially to aliens who have no connection to the United States.
... A second constitutional provision that might be thought relevant to interrogations is the Eighth Amendment. The Eighth Amendment, however, applies solely to those persons upon whom criminal sanctions have been imposed. As the Supreme Court has explained, the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause "was designed to protect those convicted of crimes." ... The detention of enemy combatants can in no sense be deemed "punishment" for purposes of the Eighth Amendment. Unlike imprisonment pursuant to a criminal sanction,. the detention of enemy combatants involves no sentence judicially imposed or legislatively required and those detained will be released at the end of the conflict. Indeed, it has long been established that "'[c]aptivity [in wartime] is neither a punishment nor an act of vengeance,' but 'merely a temporary detention which is devoid of all penal character.'"
... As the Supreme Court has recognized, and as we will explain further below, the President enjoys complete discretion in the exercise of his Commander~in-Chief authority in conducting operations against hostile forces. Because both "[t]he executive power and the command of the military and naval forces is vested in the President," the Supreme Court has unanimously stated that it is "the President alone [] who is constitutionally invested with the entire charge of hostile operations."
... Even if these statutes were misconstrued to apply to persons acting at the direction of the President during the conduct of war, the Department of Justice could not enforce this law or any of the other criminal statutes applicable to the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction against federal officials acting pursuant to the President's constitutional authority to direct a war.
... As we have made clear in other opinions involving the war against al Qaeda, the Nation's right to self-defense has been triggered by the events of September 11. If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network. In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions. This national and international version of the right to self-defense could supplement and bolster the government defendant's individual right.
Simply put, this means that our government approved and committed war crimes. This is about as un-American as it gets!
Not only should the President and his war-mongering friends be thrown in prison for approving this, but so should the entire congress - Democrats and Republicans - and members of the pentagon that allowed this to blindly happen.
What are the methods you may ask:
A resident of Germany who was imprisoned for two months at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan has told an interviewer that his interrogators hung him from a ceiling for five days and that several doctors periodically checked him before authorizing the torture to continue.
Murat Kurnaz said that shortly after his capture in Pakistan in fall 2001, the American interrogators insisted he admit to being an al-Qaeda operative and associate of 9/11 plotter Mohamed Atta. Kurnaz said when he said he did not know Atta or refused to talk, the interrogators punished him by hanging him by his arms to the rafters of a freezing aircraft hangar.
When the 19-year-old student was transferred to Guantanamo in January 2002, U.S. and German intelligence officials quickly confirmed that Kurnaz had no links to terrorist groups and had probably been seized by mistake, according to military records produced years later in court proceedings.
