The Justice Department has declassified a 2003 legal memo that said U.S. criminal laws and international treaties did not apply in the military treatment and interrogations of "enemy combatants" taken from the battlefield and held outside the United States.



The now defunct legal guidance, written by then-Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, went to the Pentagon to provide military interrogators with broad latitude for the use of harsh techniques in questioning prisoners in Afghanistan.

The administration adopted the term "enemy combatants" to refer to members of the Taliban and al Qaeda -- fighters they contended weren't prisoners of war when captured because they did not fight for a country.

"Federal criminal laws of general applicability do not apply to properly authorized interrogations of enemy combatants, undertaken by military personnel in the course of an armed conflict," Yoo wrote in the 81-page memo.

"Such criminal statutes ... would conflict with the Constitution's grant of the Commander in Chief power solely to the President."

The memo, which was declassified Tuesday, further asserted that the wartime circumstances also allowed the president to supercede international obligations.

"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the President is free to override it at his discretion," the memo said.

more: http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/02/interrogation.memo/index.html