“

Twenty-six years ago, President Reagan’s Justice Department prosecuted law enforcement officers for waterboarding prisoners to make them confess. The case is called United States v. Lee. [5] Four men were convicted and drew hefty sentences that the Court of Appeals upheld. [6]

The Court of Appeals repeatedly referred to the technique as “torture.” This is perhaps the single most relevant case in American law to the legality of waterboarding. [7] Any lawyer can find the Lee case in a few seconds on a computer just by typing the words “water torture” into a database. But the authors of the torture memos never mentioned it.

— Balkinization