Ashcroft defends decisions on interrogations

? Former Attorney General John Ashcroft on Thursday disavowed the now-defunct legal reasoning used to justify harshly questioning terrorism suspects but dug in his heels to defend White House officials who pressured him while he was hospitalized four years ago to approve terror surveillance programs.

At the heart of the House Judiciary Committee hearing was whether U.S. interrogators acted legally in using harsh tactics on captured terror suspects – including waterboarding – in the years immediately after 9/11. Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. Critics call it torture.

Ashcroft was attorney general when he approved two Justice Department legal opinions in 2002 and 2003 that, essentially, approved the use of waterboarding and other harsh methods so long as they did not “cause pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure.”

Both memos were written, in part, by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo. Ashcroft agreed to withdraw both memos a few years later after his advisers said they were concerned that the legal reasoning behind them overstepped the limits of executive authority.

“My philosophy is that if we’ve done something that we can improve, why would we not want to improve it? Why would we not want to adjust it?” Ashcroft told the committee, noting that he had relied on Yoo and other Justice Department attorneys to give him good advice when he first approved the opinions.

He added: “It wasn’t a hard decision for me to – when they came to me, and I came to the conclusion that these were genuine concerns – get about the business of correcting it.”

Yoo, now a professor at Berkeley School of Law, declined to respond Thursday.

Republicans on the panel argued that waterboarding and other harsh tactics yielded information that may have saved lives, and Ashcroft did not disagree. He also said he does not believe waterboarding or any of the methods allowed under the memos amounted to torture. Both the CIA and the Pentagon two years ago banned its interrogators from waterboarding suspects.

On the topic of the now-infamous March 2004 hospital visit, Ashcroft demurred from giving many details about the encounter at his bedside that pitted then-White House chief of staff Andy Card and counsel Alberto Gonzales against then-Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

Ashcroft said he was “grouchy,” hadn’t eaten in several days and doctors had been “poking needles into me all the time” when Card and Gonzales asked him to approve a classified national security program against the advice of Comey and Mueller. Mueller has said the clash was about the government’s warrantless wiretapping; Gonzales and the White House denied that and said it was about other intelligence activities.

Ashcroft sided with Comey and Mueller, and, ultimately, President Bush agreed to change some aspects of the program to satisfy their concerns.

Of the encounter, Ashcroft would only say this: “You had a situation where there’s people who have differing legal opinions. And eventually somebody has to decide. And the president comes down on the side of the Department of Justice. What’s wrong with that picture? … Eventually you get to the right decision being made. That’s something I would expect a free society to do, involve vigorous debate.

“You know, I’m just right now, next to standing up and singing the national anthem. I think that’s the way the system ought to work.”