The Journal let loose what should amount to a pretty interesting story outlining a memo prepared last year on the legality of certain torture-esque preocedures that are outside the bounds of the Geneva Convention.

Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department.

The advice was part of a classified report on interrogation methods prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld after commanders at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, complained in late 2002 that with conventional methods they weren't getting enough information from prisoners.

The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national-security considerations or legal technicalities. In a March 6, 2003, draft of the report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, passages were deleted as was an attachment listing specific interrogation techniques and whether Mr. Rumsfeld himself or other officials must grant permission before they could be used. The complete draft document was classified "secret" by Mr. Rumsfeld and scheduled for declassification in 2013.

The draft report, which exceeds 100 pages, deals with a range of legal issues related to interrogations, offering definitions of the degree of pain or psychological manipulation that could be considered lawful. But at its core is an exceptional argument that because nothing is more important than "obtaining intelligence vital to the protection of untold thousands of American citizens," normal strictures on torture might not apply.

Importantly, Professor Muller remembers a recent appearance in front of the Supreme Court:

The article reports that Justice Department lawyers reviewed this opinion on specific interrogation practices in or before April of 2003. Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement told the Supreme Court that the Executive did not engage in "mild torture" or "things of that nature" in April of 2004. We now have further evidence that this was a false representation by DOJ. The memorandum described in the WSJ article carefully parses what does and does not amount to "torture" technically defined -- so when the Justice Department told the Court that DOJ does not engage in "mild" torture "or things of that nature," this was at the very least grossly misleading, and more likely recklessly false.