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DOJ Report on Torture Memo: Yoo Said Bush Could Order Civilians "Exterminated"
 Jason Leopold - t r u t h o u t
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February 21, 2010
| | (Lance Page/t r u t h o u t) | |
For background on Jason Leopold's extensive work on the Yoo/Bybee torture memo report please see here, here, here, and here. Leopold will also be writing a thorough analysis of the voluminous report this weekend.
A long-awaited report into the legal memos former Justice Department attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee prepared for the Bush administration on torture was released Friday afternoon and concluded that the men violated "professional standards" and should be referred to state bar associations where a further review of their legal work could have led to the revocation of their law licenses.
But career prosecutor David Margolis, who reviewed the final version of the report, changed the disciplinary recommendations to "exercised poor judgment." [There are three versions of the report, all of which can be found here.]
That means Yoo and Bybee will not be punished for having fixed the law around Bush administration policy that allowed the CIA to subject suspected terrorists to torture techniques, such as waterboarding, beatings, and sleep deprivation, as the report notes.
Yoo is a law professor at UC Berkeley and Bybee is a 9th Circuit Appeals Court judge. Former Justice Department official Steven Bradbury also authored several torture memos and was criticized in the OPR report. Investigators said they had "serious concerns about his analysis." But the report did not charge him with ethical violations.
Former Attorney General John Ashcroft and Michael Chertoff, who was head of the Justice Department's criminal division at the time the torture memos were prepared, were also criticized for not conducting a critical legal analysis of the memos, though neither was charged with misconduct.
Ashcroft, who the report said had requested President George W. Bush issued preemptive pardons for CIA interrogators who tortured detainees, refused to cooperate with the investigation. Ashcroft's pardons proposal was ultimately rejected.
According to a January 5 memo Margolis sent to Attorney General Eric Holder, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) issued a final report on July 29, 2009 and "concluded that former Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee engaged in professional misconduct by failing to provide 'thorough, candid, and objective' analysis in memoranda regarding the interrogation of detained terrorist suspects."
Yoo specifically was found to have "committed intentional professional misconduct when he violated his duty to exercise independent legal judgment and render thorough, objective, and candid legal advice."
Bybee was found to have "committed professional misconduct when he acted in reckless disregard of his duty to exercise independent legal judgment and render thorough, objective, and candid legal advice."
The report says that Yoo believed that George W. Bush's Commander-in-Chief powers gave him the authority to unilaterally order the mass murder of civilians.
In the final version of the report, an OPR investigator questioned Yoo about what he referred to as the "bad things opinion," where Yoo discussed what the president could do during wartime.
"What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred?" an OPR investigator asked Yoo. "Is that a power that the president could legally—"
"Yeah," Yoo said.
"To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?" the questioner replied.
"Sure," Yoo said.
But Margolis, who suggested Yoo and Bybee's flawed legal work was due to efforts to prevent another 9/11, said he was "unpersuaded" by OPR's "misconduct" conclusions and declined to endorse its findings.
An earlier version of the report rejected that line of reasoning.
"Situations of great stress, danger and fear do not relieve department attorneys of their duty to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice, even if that advice is not what the client wants to hear," says the earlier draft of the report from OPR head Mary Patrice Brown. Her report, like the original draft, was sharply critical of the legal work that went into the torture memos and found that it lacked "thoroughness, objectivity and candor."
"OPR's own framework defines 'professional misconduct' such that a finding of misconduct depends on application of a known, unambiguous obligation or standard to the attorney's conduct," Margolis wrote in the 69-page memo. "I am unpersuaded that OPR has identified such a standard. For this reason...I cannot adpot OPR's findings of misconduct, and I will not authorize OPR to refer its findings to the state bar disciplinary authorities in the jurisdictions where Yoo and Bybee are licensed."
Despite dozens of cases highlighted in the report that showed Yoo twisted the law in order to advance the Bush administration's torture policy, Margolis said he did "not believe the evidence establishes [that Yoo] set about to knowingly provide inaccurate legal advice to his client or that he acted with conscious indifference to the consequences of his actions." [Please see this report where former Vice President Dick Cheney admitted last week that he and other Bush administration officials ordered Justice Department lawyers to fix the law around the torture policy.]
“While I have declined to adopt OPR's findings of misconduct, I fear that John Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and convictions clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, view of executive power while speaking for an institutional client," Margolis added.
Margolis concluded his review, stating that "these memos contained some significant flaws.
"But as all that glitters is not gold, all flaws do not constitute professional misconduct," he wrote. "The bar associations in the District of Columbia or Pennsylvania can choose to take up this matter, but the Department will make no referral."
Margolis described himself in the memo as a "Department of Justice official who [beginning in the 1990s] has resolved challenges to negative OPR findings against former Department attorneys, most often in the context of proposed bar referrals.”
Yoo's attorney, Miguel Estrada, said in an October 9, 2009 rebuttal to the final version of the report that "this perversion of the professional rules and myopic pursuit of Professor Yoo and Judge Bybee, can be explained only by a desire to settle a score over Bush administration policies in the war on terror."
"But policy disputes are for the ballot box, not for the bar," Estrada said. "Professor Yoo and Judge Bybee did nothing more than provide a good-faith assessment of the legality of a program deemed vital to our national security."
Estrada claims that Yoo and Bybee were well aware of what the "CIA wanted" in the areas of subjecting detainees to brutal torture techniques.
"Of course the attorneys at OLC knew what the CIA wanted, since they knew the agency was attempting to get information to thwart further terrorist attacks, and indeed OLC obviously was being asked to opine on specific interrogation techniques that it knew the CIA wished to use if it legally could do so," he said.
OPR investigators noted that during the course of their four-and-a-half year probe, they were unable to obtain all of the evidence they needed. For example, they said that "most" of Yoo's emails they sought during the critical time period the memos were drafted prior to August 2002 "had been deleted and were not recoverable."
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, whose office released the report, said he will hold a hearing to discuss the findings "shortly."
In a statement accompanying the report, Conyers said the report makes clear that the torture memos "were legally flawed and fundamentally unsound."
"Even worse," Conyers said. "It reveals that the memos were not the independent product of the Department of Justice, but were shaped by top officials of the Bush White House. It is nothing short of a travesty that prisoners in US custody were abused and mistreated based on legal work as shoddy as this."
Senate Judicary Chairman Patrick Leahy also condemned the findings and announced that he will hold a hearing on the report's findings next Friday. In a statement, Leahy said the report "is a condemnation of the legal memoranda drafted by key architects of the Bush administration’s legal policy, including Jay Bybee and John Yoo, on the treatment of detainees."
"The deeply flawed legal opinions proffered by these former OLC officials created a ‘golden shield’ that sought to protect from scrutiny and prosecution the Bush administration’s torture of detainees in US custody. In drafting and signing these unsound legal analyses, OLC attorneys sanctioned torture, contrary to our domestic anti-torture laws, our international treaty obligations and the fundamental values of this country," Leahy added. "I have serious concerns about the role each of these government lawyers played in the development of these policies. I have said before that if the Judiciary Committee, and the Senate, knew of Judge Bybee’s role in creating these policies, he would have never been confirmed to a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. The right thing to do would be for him to resign from this lifetime appointment."
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represents several detainees at Guantanamo and others who were tortured by military and CIA interrogators, called for Bybee to be impeached and for Holder to order a criminal probe headed by a special prosecutor.
In a statement, CCR said the report makes it "makes it abundantly clear that the decisions about the torture program took place at the highest level, and the damning description of the program further show that the torture memos were written to order by the lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel who played a key role in creating the program."
"Ultimately Jay Bybee must be impeached, tried and removed from his seat as a federal judge on the 9th Circuit, but he should have the decency to resign immediately," CCR aaid. "We call on Attorney General Eric Holder to order these men criminally investigated by an independent special prosecutor who is allowed to follow the facts where they lead, all the way up the chain of command."
Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, which is largely responsible for bringing to light many of the revelations about the torture program described in the report, said, “The OPR report confirms the central role that the Office of Legal Counsel played in developing the Bush administration’s torture program, and it underscores once again that the decision to endorse torture was made by the Bush administration’s most senior officials.”
“It also makes clear that the investigation initiated by the Justice Department last year, which focuses on ‘rogue’ interrogators, is too narrow," Jaffer added. "Interrogators should be held accountable where they violated the law, but the core problem was not one of rogue interrogators but one of senior government officials who knowingly authorized the gravest crimes. The Justice Department should immediately expand its investigation to encompass not just the interrogators who used torture but the senior Bush administration officials who authorized and facilitated it.”
Jason Leopold is the Deputy Managing Editor at Truthout. He is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller, News Junkie, a memoir. Visit newsjunkiebook.com for a preview. |
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