On April 27, MSNBC's Dan Abrams interviewed former AG's John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales before a cheering rightwing audience at American Jewish University. Both Ashcroft and Gonzales continue to insist waterboarding was legal when authorized by DoJ lawyers under their supervision. (Full transcript.) Will their hyper-legal defenses keep them out of jail? Stay tuned...

Abrams: Judge Gonzales, I’m going to ask you a very direct question. And it relates to something you just said. Do you believe waterboarding is torture?

AG: Here’s what I’ll say. I think that the U.S. government provided advice to CIA interrogators based upon the best legal reasoning by the lawyers in the Department of Justice. Was it torture, when that advice was given? No. Were the interrogations harsh? Yes. Did they save lives? Absolutely.

[Applause]

Did they get it right? I’m asking your legal opinion. Waterboarding is—they define it in all the memos how waterboarding is defined—and if we need it defined I’m happy to read from it—how torture is defined. Do you think legally that waterboarding is torture?

AG: Dan, when I served in the administration, the position of the administration was that under certain conditions and circumstances, this technique would be lawful.

Now that you’ve had some time to think about it. You’ve been out of office for a while, and you get the opportunity to look back with 20/20 hindsight. Do you look back and do you say to yourself, we got that one right?

AG: Wouldn’t it be great, if all of us in public service, could go back and correct any mistakes that we may have made on behalf of the American public?

Well, you’ve got the opportunity right now.

AG: —We don’t have that opportunity.

You have the opportunity to say you know what, we blew it. We messed this one up, we got this one wrong.

AG: I will say that I made my fair share of mistakes in government. But I will also say that I, and the people that I work with, took actions to the very best of our abilities to protect our country in a very difficult period in our nation’s history. [Applause.]

Let me follow this. The U.S. military prosecuted our own troops for using waterboarding in the Philippines, tried the Japanese for war crimes for using it against the Allies and the U.S. troops in WWII. And yet, we’re suggesting that it’s not torture. [Applause]

JA: First of all, the word waterboarding can be defined in a lot of ways.

Let’s talk about the definition that was used in these memos—this is a legal document—of the definition of waterboarding. “Lying on a gurney that is inclined with an angle of 10-15 degrees from horizontal, with the detainee on his back. . . head toward the head end of the gurney, cloth pasted over the detainees’ face, and cold water poured on the cloth approximately 16-18 inches—this is the definition. The question is—

AG: Dan, the opinions have been withdrawn. There are no longer binding position of the department…

I understand that, but that doesn’t mean, as lawyers, we can’t sit and discuss whether this was a correct legal assessment. Because it seems to me, in my opinion, that it is impossible to explain how this particular procedure would not be considered torture. [Applause]

JA: Members of the department went and underwent the procedure.

Once or twice, not 266 times.

JA: Many members of our military in training undergo the procedure—

Once or twice.

JA: Were you there?

No, the memos explain it. It’s once or twice.

JA: OK. I don’t know how many times they underwent it. Let me just put it this way. We relied—I relied—on the best judgments of the lawyers in the department. There are 110,000 employees in the department, the lawyers are expert, and they came up with an opinion that became part of a memo. Later, some lawyers came to me and said "We’re not confident that that memo best expresses the law here." And I said to myself, "Well, I’m the attorney general, and if we have stuff out there that’s not the best expression, we ought to amend it. We ought to get the best information we can." You know we’re in a war, you give it to the president, you give information to the other individuals, but you say, you know, they deserve the best judgment. They reworked the memo, and they came a second time, these professionals did, and according to the definition of torture, they came to the conclusion that the procedure as provided along with the advice to our personnel did not amount to legal torture.

Did they get it wrong?

JA: I don’t think they got it wrong. It’s different now.

It’s different in what sense?

JA: Because the law has been changed. [John Ashcroft called me after the event to correct a mistake he made. He wanted to let me know that, in retrospect and after conducting more research on the matter, he realized that no such change in the law was ever enacted.]

The definition of torture?

JA: Yes! The definition of torture.

So the answer then, it sounds like, is the only reason you still believe the legal assessment was correct was because there’s been a change in the law?

JA: I believe that the work of the department by these professionals came to the right conclusion.

That waterboarding is not torture.

JA: That, as described, and as commented on in their memorandum, that it was not torture.

Judge Gonzales, are any of the following torture, and these were all things that were in the memo.

AG: Dan, I’m not—

Nudity, facial grasp, facial slapping, abdominal slap, cramped confinement, stress positions, water dousing—including 41-degree water—sleep deprivation, and waterboarding. Are any of those torture?

AG: Dan, as John said, and again I’m [saying] that what you’re reading from represents the work of the department. The lawyers within the department looked very, very carefully at the words of the statute, looked at the conditions and circumstances in which these procedures would be undertaken, and rendered a legal conclusion that under these circumstances, it would not violate the statute. Now, my understanding of the legal positions of the department has now been changed. So we can spend all evening debating the merits of a legal opinion of the Department of Justice, which by the way, opinions get changed—I don’t want to say all the time—but it’s not unusual to have opinions change and be modified as conditions change, as administrations change, as the Supreme Court renders a decision, opinions change.

[Applause]

So let me ask, in your view, this was a close call. It sounds like you’re saying this was a close call because there was a legal judgment made, and you think that they made the right call.

AG: It was a very close call. These are very, very difficult issues.