How far does presidential authority go? A controversial military memo tests the limits.

The Bush administration publicly disclosed the 2003 Justice Department memo this week. Written by John Yoo, then the second-ranking official at the Office of Legal Counsel, the memo largely exempts military interrogators from laws prohibiting assault, maiming, and other harsh treatments.

It also narrowly defines torture: pain intense and severe enough to “be associated with serious physical injury” producing death, organ failure or permanent physical damage.

It uses the president’s authority as commander-in-chief to grant interrogators the power to use extreme interrogation methods. “In wartime, it is for the President alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy,” the memo states (Memo: part 1/ part 2). According to a New York Times article, the memo gave the Pentagon much the same authority that another memo gave the CIA months earlier.

Officials eventually withdrew both memos, “But they show how sweeping the Justice Department viewed presidential power to be after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

“This is a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency,” Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School and the Washington College of Law at American University, told NYT. Thomas J. Romig, who at the time was the Army’s judge advocate general, told the Washington Post that the memo appears to argue there are no rules in a time of war. Slate Magazine agreed, saying the memo implies that “military interrogators didn’t have to follow the law because they were defending the country.”

Last year, Bush narrowed the list of approved interrogation techniques in an executive order. According to NYT, intelligence officials have said that such methods as waterboarding are not on the list of currently approved techniques, but that President Bush could still authorize their use during an emergency.

In an article posted in February, Slate argued that Americans are becoming slowly calloused to torture:

Our views on water-boarding seem to be on the same trajectory as our views on sexual humiliation and stress positions—it looked sort of awful at first, but after a few months it seemed more like a fraternity prank. That’s the road we’re headed down with water-boarding. We’ve gone from banning it to trivializing it to justifying it. We are becoming inured to torture at approximately the same rate that it’s becoming legal. How convenient.