This morning, Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee to talk about his rocky time in the administration. Much of Goldsmith’s difficulties, of course, centered around his efforts to revise earlier Department memos defining torture, such as the infamous 2002 “Bybee memo” (named after Goldsmith’s predecessor Jay Bybee) that defined torture as “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Goldsmith called that reasoning “severely flawed.”
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=179721