WASHINGTON, July 15 (UPI) -- The Defense Department expects to release a key "torture" memo on detainee interrogation policy, possibly next week.
Principal Deputy General Counsel Daniel J. Dell'Orto told the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on personnel Thursday the classified memo to the Pentagon general counsel dated March 14, 2003 written by then Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo is currently under review for release. The memo is entitled "Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants."
It was the controlling "legal authority" for the treatment of detainees, superceding the Geneva Conventions which otherwise stipulate how combatants, lawful or otherwise, are to be treated in war.
Military lawyers known as Judge Advocates General objected to the findings of that memo, but were ultimately overruled by the Pentagon.
Dell'Orto also said the military was told "not to rely on the memo" as legal guidance beginning in December 2003, and it was formally revoked in February 2005.
Exactly what the memo says remains a mystery. A Pentagon investigation into detainee operations known as the Church Report described it as "substantially" similar to a Justice Department memo that greatly narrowed the definition of torture, thereby expanding the number of interrogation techniques that could legally be used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
However, that Justice Department memo was not revoked until December 2004, a full year after the Yoo March 14 memo was suspended.
Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, particularly Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., have sought release of the memo for more than a year.
