The Bush Administration apparently looked at Slim Fast and Jenny Craig diet plans to justify the calorie-restricted diets it fed prisoners who were being interrogated.

From the Huffington Post:

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1,000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1,000 kcal/day for sustained periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” the footnote reads. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Rachel at the F-Word blog wonders what that means for those looking at such diets:

The fact that the same calorie restriction employed by commercial diet mongers is also used alongside such torture techniques as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and sexual and physical abuse is, in my view, even more telling.