A memo about harsh interrogation techniques shows that a former US state department official strongly dissented from the Bush administration's secret legal view in 2005 that an international treaty against torture did not apply to CIA interrogations in foreign countries.
Until now, the February 2006 analysis by Philip Zelikow has been a high-level, classified internal critique of the Bush administration's controversial interrogation policies. At the time he wrote his criticism, Zelikow was secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's representative on terrorism issues to the national security council's deputies committee.
The state department released Zelikow's memo Tuesday under the freedom of information act to the National Security Archive, a nonprofit advocacy group for openness in government.
In late 2005, Bush signed an amendment sponsored by John McCain that the Republican senator believed applied international standards of cruel and degrading treatment to US interrogation practices.
However, a May 2005 secret justice department interpretation of the law exempted CIA interrogation practices like waterboarding.
In his five-page memo, Zelikow wrote that the state department earlier had agreed with the justice department's view. But "that situation has now changed" in light of McCain's amendment, Zelikow wrote.
It "appears to us that several of these techniques, singly or in combination, should be considered 'cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment'," Zelikow stated.
"The techniques least likely to be sustained are the techniques described as 'coercive', especially viewed cumulatively, such as the waterboard, walling, dousing, stress positions and cramped confinement," Zelikow's analysis concluded.
In an interview Tuesday following the document's release, Zelikow said: "I believe that the department of justice's opinion was an extreme reading of the law and because the justice department opinion was secret, the only way the president could hear an alternative interpretation was for someone like me to offer it.
"It was bureaucratically and personally awkward for a state department official to challenge the department of justice on the interpretation of American constitutional law, but I had worked on constitutional law years earlier," said Zelikow, a dean and professor at the University of Virginia.