WASHINGTON, July 16 (UPI) -- A former George W. Bush administration official who approved CIA torture methods for terrorism suspects said he never authorized some tactics prisoners endured.
In closed-door testimony May 26, Jay Bybee told the U.S. House Judiciary Committee the CIA had never sought approval for some practices detainees said they had been subjected to, including prolonged shackling to a ceiling, repeated beatings and cold-water dousing during sleep deprivation, The New York Times reported Friday.
"Those techniques were not authorized," Bybee said, a transcript released by the committee showed.
But Bybee, now a U.S. Court of Appeals judge, told lawmakers he stood by legal advice he had given the CIA in 2002, when he said waterboarding and slamming suspects into walls were legal interrogation tactics.
"We took a muscular view of presidential authority," Bybee said at the hearing. "We were offering a bottom line to a client who wanted to know what he could do and what he couldn't do. I wasn't running a debating society and I wasn't running a law school."
Bybee said he had no first-hand knowledge of what happened in interrogations.
A criminal investigation of the CIA's interrogation program seeks to determine what interrogation techniques had been approved by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which Bybee ran from late 2001 to 2003. The memos, written by a deputy and signed by Bybee, provided key advice about treatment of detainees, the Times said.
President Barack Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., has said the Justice Department would not prosecute anyone for following the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel.
The secret torture memos had not surfaced when Bush appointed Bybee to the federal appeals court in San Francisco in 2003. But after the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandals, some of the memos were leaked to the media, sparking widespread outrage.
