
“February 7, 2002 remains a grim day in the modern American calendar, and one that, I think, should be marked every year, along with other key dates — August 1, 2002, for example, when the ‘torture memos,’ seeking to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, were issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, written by John Yoo and approved by his boss, Jay Bybee, and December 2, 2002, when Donald Rumsfeld approved his own specific torture program for use at Guantánamo, which was initially intended for use on just one prisoner, Mohammed al-Qahtani, but which ended up being used on one in six of the prisoners, according to a former interrogator who spoke to Neil A. Lewis for a New York Times article in January 2005.”