“This is a monument to executive supremacy and the imperial presidency,” said Eugene R Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School and the Washington College of Law at American University. “It’s also a road map for the Pentagon for fending off any prosecutions.”

The memorandum gave the military broad latitude to use harsh interrogation methods. It reasoned that federal laws prohibiting assault were not applicable to military interrogators dealing with members of al-Qaeda because of White House authority during wartime. It also argued that many American and international laws would not apply to interrogations overseas.

“Even if an interrogation method arguably were to violate a criminal statute, the Justice Department could not bring a prosecution because the statute would be unconstitutional as applied in this context,” it reads.

Justice Department lawyers later rescinded both Yoo’s memorandum and the similar one written for the CIA in August 2002.

In a book published last year, Jack Goldsmith, who as head of the Office of Legal Counsel made the decision to rescind the memorandums, criticised the documents, saying they had used careless legal reasoning to provide national security agencies with interrogation authority.

Written to William J Haynes II, who at the time was the Pentagon’s general counsel, Yoo’s document was meant to give legal guidance to Defence Department lawyers as they wrestled with a list of interrogation methods for prisoners at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The document explains that Haynes had asked the Justice Department “to examine the legal standards governing military interrogations of alien unlawful combatants held outside the United States”.

... contd.