There were no laws in the early 2000’s, like there are now, to hold back the Bush Administration from using EITs (enhanced interrogation) and there were actually some regulations supporting President Bush in his endeavors to find Osama Bin Laden through the use of EITs. The Military Commissions Act of 2006, for example, authorized the President to conduct military tribunals of enemy combatants and to hold them indefinitely without judicial review under the terms of habeas corpus, which is an order to bring a jailed person before a judge or court to find out if that person should really be in jail. It also ruled that, “Testimony coerced through humiliating or degrading treatment would be admissible in the tribunals”. Unfortunately, this didn’t last long because the U.S. Field Manuals on Counterinsurgency and Human Intelligence Collector Operations, released later that same year, which stated that, “no person in the custody or under the control of DOD, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, in accordance with and as defined in U.S. law.” This means, however, that the government had several years where torture was at the height of use before its downward…
