Brit judge reviews two books on US torture

"How cruelly is a captor allowed to treat a captive before the pain and fear amount to torture? According to advice given by US Assistant Attorney-General Jay S. Bybee to President's Counsel Alberto Gonzales in 2002, it 'must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.' With the sanction of such morally and legally ignoble advice, the US has been interrogating, and from time to time killing, an unknown number of captives in Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. Meanwhile the author of the advice had been made a judge of the 9th circuit federal appeal court, and the presidential counsel who adopted it is now the attorney general. The solitary governmental voice raised against it was Colin Powell, no longer secretary of state." Two books reviewed -- The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib and Torture and Truth.