An article from the symposium issue of the Indiana Law Journal on "War, Terrorism and Torture: Limits on Presidential Power in the 21st Century." The symposium was convened by the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy and the Indiana University School of Law–Bloomington on October 7, 2005.

Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale Law School, delivered the symposium’s keynote lecture: Can the President Be Torturer in Chief? Drawing on his experience as Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor and as a leading human rights scholar, Koh compares the Bush administration’s policies on torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment—“zero accountability” and inconsistency—with the Clinton administration’s approach of unequivocal “zero tolerance.” Koh repudiates suggestions that the President possesses constitutional authority to authorize extreme interrogation techniques in the face of federal legislation to the contrary. He urges that “we should resist the claim that a War on Terror permits the commander in chief’s power to be expanded into a power to act as torturer in chief.” Along with his discouraging account of utterly ineffective human rights enforcement when viewed from the “horizontal” level of nation-states and intergovernmental organizations, Koh offers some cause for hope.

Koh applies a perspective he introduced in his 1998 Addison Harris Lecture, also delivered at Indiana University School of Law–Bloomington: a less appreciated “vertical” or “transnational” story that he urges should inform our understanding of human rights enforcement. Applied to the torture issue, this more promising vertical story includes a transnational network of numerous human rights nongovernmental organizations and citizens that led, for example, to the enactment of the McCain Amendment’s prohibition on the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment against persons in the custody or control of the United States.” – From Foreword by Prof. Dawn Johnsen