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Former Attorney General John Ashcroft spoke at the fifth part of a hearing entitled “From the Department of Justice to Guantanamo Bay: Administration Lawyers and Administration Interrogation Rules.” Ashcroft defended the Department of Justice’s action in Guantanamo Bay, saying that they worked within the framework of the law and never supported torture.

Ashcroft said that after 9/11, the Bush Administration’s overriding goal was to do everything within its power and within the limits of the law, to keep this country and the American people safe from terrorist attacks. He spoke about the Administration’s efforts to work within the law and follow Supreme Court rulings about torture and interrogations in Guantanamo, and that water boarding was never ruled as torture and has “proved very valuable.” Although the Supreme Court ultimately ruled against certain features of Administration policy in each of these cases, the “Justices themselves were closely divided and the courts of appeals had uniformly upheld the Administration’s positions.”

Ashcroft spoke in defense of the several memos in the Department of Justice about interrogation techniques and anti-torture, saying they were all legal and worked off Supreme Court decisions. Ashcroft said that the Administration’s continual quest for legal guidance and specific authorization for measures necessitated by the “war on terror” is evidence of a government striving to keep within the limits of law, not one seeking to ignore or evade those limits.

Also at the hearing was Benjamin Wittes, follow and research director in public law at the Brookings Institute. Wittes said that the Army Field Manual contains a great deal of specificity about the interrogation tactics used and it is a mark of how successful the policy changes have been that not even human rights groups today complain much about contemporary military interrogation policies. However, the current state of the law is inadequate due to the vagueness which gives the Administration enough interpretive latitude to authorize some pretty extreme tactics, such as water boarding, Wittes said.