The Pros And Cons Of The Golden Shield Defense

927 Words4 Pages

Golden Shield Defenses The lawyers of the Justice Department who were working in the Office of Legal Counsel, by writing a memo formally gave the legal authority and empowered the government interrogators to make use of the harsh and abusive methods on detainees. This happened in the month of August 2002, giving this memo the name of “Golden Shield” for the agents of CIA worrying to be held criminally liable on the tortuous interrogations coming to the knowledge of the public. For the purpose of empowering acute techniques against the suspected terrorists, CIA destined that not the agency but the White House is given the ultimate authority. A demand was made by the then Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet for the White House mandate …show more content…

The report has been under Pentagon review since before its release, focuses only on interrogations carried out by military, and not on CIA interrogations; it further rejects claims by former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld and other officials of the Bush administration that policies made by the Pentagon could not have played any role in the torture of prisoners in US …show more content…

Amnesty International has criticized the act for giving mandate to a system that can use torture, consuming the apparatus for judicial review created by Hamdan v Rumsfeld (548 U.S. 557 (2006), and thereby constituting a parallel legal framework below international qualifications. A significant part of the act was the amendment which retroactively rewrote the War Crimes Act, and made the policy makers as well as the implementers (i.e. CIA and U.S. soldiers) no longer subject to any kind of legal action under U.S. law for torture, which was previously defined as a war

More about The Pros And Cons Of The Golden Shield Defense