It really tells you something profoundly disturbing about our country when a lawyer in the Office of legal Counsel cribs from a health benefits law to justify torture.
Jack Goldsmith, who succeeded Bybee at OLC, said that Yoo, a former OLC attorney who now teaches at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., arrived at that definition by relying on a statute written in 2000 related to health benefits.
"That statute defined an ‘emergency medical condition’ that warranted certain health benefits as a condition ‘manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain)’ such that the absence of immediate medical care might reasonably be thought to result in death, organ failure, or impairment of bodily function," Goldsmith wrote in his book, The Terror Presidency.
http://onlinejournal.com/...
Of course, that is exactly the same language Yoo used to define the threshold of torture:
"death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions"
In our twisted and mentally incompetent society, health benefits kick in at the threshold of torture, and not the usual definition of torture outlined in the Convention Against Torture, but Yoo's and Bybee's much more narrow definition! Take a look in the mirror, America! When exactly does exceptionalism turn into self-loathing? I'd think we're well along in that transformation.
At least torturing ourselves with health care is perfectly condoned by law, Congress, lobbyists, etc., because we are a nation of laws. Unfortunately for BushCo, their self-approved methods repeatedly exceeded their own definitions of torture.
A simple fact is being overlooked in the Bush-era torture scandal: the number of cases in which detainees have been tortured to death. Abuse did not only involve the high-profile cases of smashing detainees into plywood barriers ("walling"), confinement in coffin-like boxes with insects, sleep deprivation, cold, and waterboarding. To date approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death.
That's a curious and assiduously maintained oversight, given Yoo's definitions of "severe pain" and "torture."
Nothing says "death," organ failure," or "serious impairment of body functions" like death. Nothing says "working the dark side, if you will," like beating a man to death. Nothing haunts the conscience of a nation of laws quite like a "ghost detainee," or a hundred dead ones.