They argued that the president's inherent wartime authority effectively legalized torture short of that which would cause massive organ failure, impairment of bodily function or death.
I explained to him that the risk of leaving the aneurysm untreated was the same as the risk of surgery: devastating brain injury to his language function or death.
Mainly superoxide, hydroxyl radicals, and peroxynitrite cause direct damage to the cells which may result in their worsened function or death.
Ischemic stroke is of major public health significance as it may lead to permanent loss-of-functions or death.
Ever since its notorious "Torture Memo" of August 2002, the administration has attempted to insist that "enhanced interrogations" counted as torture only if the pain endured was "of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death," but these are, in the end, merely feeble attempts at semantic window-dressing.
It was reliance on Yoo's narrow definition of torture — that it must cause serious physical injury, organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death, and that prolonged mental harm must last for months or even years for it to be of concern — that allowed the CIA and its contractors to perform acts in my name that cause me irrefutable shame as a human being and as an American.
The August opinion defined torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death".
The memo concluded that torture amounts to more than inflicting moderate or fleeting pain, and "must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death".
The memo concluded that a coercive procedure could not be considered torture unless it caused pain equivalent to that accompanying "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death".
To qualify, the document said, mistreatment had to inflict pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death".
It was Yoo's legal advice that for an act to be torture it would have to cause pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death".
