Bush Lawyers to Be Held Accountable?
This article from Michael Isikoff in Newsweek provides a glimmer of hope:
“An internal Justice Department report on the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics is causing anxiety among former Bush administration officials. H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the department’s ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility(OPR), confirmed last year he was investigating whether the legal advice in crucial interrogation memos “was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.” According to two knowledgeable sources who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters, a draft of the report was submitted in the final weeks of the Bush administration. It sharply criticized the legal work of two former top officials — Jay Bybee and John Yoo — as well as that of Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time the report was submitted, the sources said. (Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)”
This report — started under AG Mukasey (and he has objections to this report, but keep in mind when this report got underway for the inevitable charges of partisanship) — will be submitted to AG Holder:
“If Holder accepts the OPR findings, the report could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary action. But some former Bush officials are furious about the OPR’s initial findings and question the premise of the probe. “OPR is not competent to judge [the opinions by Justice attorneys]. They’re not constitutional scholars,” said the former Bush lawyer.”
Disciplinary actions by State Bar Associations! What will the world come to? Especially since the DOJ OPR may actually notify Congress and perhaps even the public of their findings:
OPR investigators focused on whether the memo’s authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted, according to three former Bush lawyers who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing probe. One of the lawyers said he was stunned to discover how much material the investigators had gathered, including internal e-mails and multiple drafts that allowed OPR to reconstruct how the memos were crafted. In a departure from the norm, Jarrett also told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last year he would inform them of his findings and would “consider” releasing a public version. If he does, it could be the most revealing public glimpse yet at how some of the major decisions of Bush-era counterterrorism policy were made.
If John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury never practice law again, I’ll consider that a darn fine step towards some accountability for the torture regime. I’m not counting chickens yet, but I really hope these guys are nervous as hell.
Tags: torture
Yoo is a tenured professor at Berkeley, so I think it probably won’t matter much for him. There is an effort by faculty at Berkeley to review his hiring, but I doubt it will go anywhere. I guess the disbarrment probably means that Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury will never be judges?
I’m not holding my breath either, but the fact that this issue has grown some legs is encouraging.
I read that Brad DeLong (prof at Berkeley) has written his management to remove Yoo.
Bybee is already a judge on the 9th Circuit. No idea though if being a lawyer is a real prerequisite to being a judge or if that is just relatively recent tradition.
The fact that Yoo continues to have a job anywhere in the law is nauseating.
The fact that it is as a teacher of law is dangerous.
On another front, from Bruce Fein :
“Then-Sen. Obama descried the Bush-Cheney invocation of executive privilege to prevent former White House officials Karl Rove and Harriet Miers from even responding to congressional subpoenas for testimony about the firings of nine United States attorneys. That extravagant and unprecedented claim would have enabled President Nixon to muzzle his Watergate nemesis, former White House counsel John Dean, from testifying before the Senate Watergate Committee about Oval Office conversations implicating the president in obstruction of justice. Mr. Obama, however, is now hedging over whether to defend Mr. Rove’s non-responsiveness to a new congressional subpoena.”
Let’s hope President Obama doesn’t suddenly decide that forcing Rove or other Bushies to testify before Congress is now an unacceptable threat to executive power, now that he wields it.
Let’s hope President Obama doesn’t suddenly decide that forcing Rove or other Bushies to testify before Congress is now an unacceptable threat to executive power, now that he wields it.
now that’s funny…