"The Bush administration policy is against torture of any kind; it's prohibited by federal criminal law," said John Yoo, a University of California, Berkeley, law professor who helped write the internal memos while at the Justice Department. "The debate is whether you can use interrogation methods that are short of torture. Some who have been critical of the Bush administration have confused torture with cruel, inhumane treatment."
Senator John McCain, a Republican, is pushing to ban the use of torture as well as "cruel and inhumane treatment" and said this week on NBC-TV that he will accept no compromise.
The government has been redefining what counts as torture, said Gregg Bloche, a Georgetown law school professor and fellow at the Brookings Institution. Some interrogation techniques adopted by intelligence agencies and the military for locations like Guantanamo spread to other places like Iraq, he said.
Bloche said it will be difficult for the US to reverse policy changes on aggressive interrogation because that might require an admission of wrongdoing.
"Once you're in the game," Bloche said, "it's hard to get out."
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