While Egyptian security was discussed during the interrogation, Justice Department lawyers said, that was only because Mr. Higazy had raised the subject.
Mr. Mintz would later become an adversary of Mr. Chertoff in an extraordinary episode of political theater, the interrogation of State Supreme Court Justice Peter Verniero in 2001.
"I went out and bought Police Interrogation and American Justice, the 2008 book by Richard A. Leo that explains tried-and-true methods officers use to obtain confessions from potential criminals," Kaufman writes.
The New York Times says administration officials briefed by Tenet were not aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading the CIA to use waterboarding had never conducted a real interrogation and that the justice department lawyer most responsible for declaring the method legal had "idiosyncratic ideas" that the department would later renounce.
Since Justice Garson's interrogation several months ago, the typically unwatched world of the Brooklyn judiciary has been radically transformed.
The ancient technique that forces water into the lungs of a subject but stops just before he dies had previously been prosecuted by the United States as a war crime but now found its way into the "enhanced interrogation" programme authorised by the justice department and employed by the CIA.
Now the justices are considering interrogation tactics that sneak around it.
The CIA's office of medical services played a critical role in advising the justice department that "enhanced interrogation" methods, such as extended sleep deprivation and waterboarding, which are recognised as forms of torture, were medically acceptable.
Our intellectual pluralism also encourages ongoing interrogation of the concept of social justice, which is central to the mission of social work.
The slippery defense that memos from Justice Department lawyers authorizing "enhanced interrogation" was legal is, of course, a travesty of justice but it was also a moral and ethical failure of the first magnitude.
Video-recorded interrogations can help avert catastrophes of justice like the infamous Central Park Five case, which resulted in false confessions for the five defendants, who were later exonerated.
