The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

pending review. On April 14 th , 2003, Rumsfeld issued an updated list of approved techniques,
restricted primarily to those methods included in Category II. However, these were only techniques
that could be used at the discretion of USSouthCom; other techniques (not specified) could be applied
with the permission of Rumsfeld himself. (DoD, 04/04/2003) That Category III techniques were not
necessarily ruled out for use in the War on Terror can be seen from the brief by John Yoo at the Office
of Legal Council dated 14 th of March, 2003, and on which the JTF-170 review was based. Here the
highly expansive nature of the administration's claim to be unbounded by either domestic or
international law is on full display. According to Yoo “federal criminal laws of general applicability do
not apply to properly authorized interrogations of enemy combatants, undertaken by military personnel
in the course of an armed conflict. Such criminal statutes, if they were misconstrued to apply to the
interrogation of enemy combatants, would conflict with the Constitution's grant of of the Commander
in Chief power solely to the President.” (OLC, 2003; 1) In other words, there is no law that Congress
can pass limiting the President's actions in the conduct of a war.
The first batch of 20 detainees arrived at GTMO in mid-January of 2002. They were being
flown in from the Afghani theater, and were reputed to be members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. (St.
Petersburg Times, 11/01/2002) By the 24 th the prison held an approximate 158 detainees, and Secretary
Rumsfeld was already having to parry allegations of torture and mistreatment, stemming primarily
from pictures of detainees being unloaded from planes hooded and shackled. (Washington Post,
24/01/2002; Houston Chronicle, 23/01/2002) By May 7 th , the prison population had swelled to 384.
(Reuters, 07/05/2002) In the next several months as the prison complex was expanded, more prisoners
continued to flow in. According to information provided by the Department of Defense, between
January 2002 and May 2006, the camp at Guantanamo held 759 detainees, although not all at one time:
of those 517 would be transferred to the custody of another country, or released outright by the 6 th of
October, 2008. Five others would die in the camp, four of them classified as suicides. (DoD,
'Consolidated …', 'List of Individuals …')
Beginning in 2004, the military began a process for determining how to classify detainees
called the Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT). These tribunals did not involve the judiciary,
and although detainees were allowed to contest their imprisonment before the tribunal, they were not
permitted access to lawyers, nor to secret evidence alleged by the government. (National Journal,
04/02/2006: 6) The government's part in the tribunals was to submit summaries of evidence, outlining
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