Reagan's DOJ prosecuted Texas sheriff for waterboarding prisoners!
WASHINGTON - April 27, 2009 - George W. Bush's InJustice Department said subjecting a person to the near drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn't even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan's Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.
Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case - which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later - was never mentioned in the four Bush regime opinions released last week.
The failure to cite the earlier waterboarding case and a half-dozen other precedents that dealt with torture is reportedly one of the critical findings of an InJustice Department watchdog report that legal sources say faults former Bush regime lawyers Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury for violating "professional standards."
Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury also shocked many who have read their memos in the last week by their use of clinical and legalistic jargon that sometimes took on an otherworldly or Orwellian quality. Bybee's August 1, 2002, legal memo - drafted by Yoo - argued that waterboarding could not be torture because it does not "inflict physical pain."
During the procedure, a subject is strapped down to a bench with his head lower than his feet and his face covered by a cloth that is then saturated with water, cutting off his breathing and inducing the panic reflex that a person feels while drowning.
"You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm," Bybee wrote. "Thus, although the subject may experience the fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning, the waterboard does not inflict physical pain. The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering."
