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Tag Archives: John Yoo

The Case of the Vanishing Justice Department E-Mail

27 Saturday Feb 2010

Posted by Craig in Justice Department, Obama, Politics, torture

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interrogation techniques, John Yoo, Justice Department, missing e-mail

The legacy of Rose Mary Woods is alive and well at the Justice Department:

“Large batches of e-mail records from the Justice Department lawyers who worked on the 2002 legal opinions justifying the Bush administration’s brutal interrogation techniques are missing, and the Justice Department told lawmakers Friday that it would try to trace the disappearance.”

And in a stroke of what I’m sure is pure coincidence, what’s missing just happens to be from a crucial time period:

“The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility…pushed to get access to a range of e-mail records and other internal documents from the Justice Department to aid in its investigation.

But it discovered that many e-mail messages to and from John Yoo, who wrote the bulk of the legal opinions for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, were missing…Also deleted were a month’s worth of e-mail files from the summer of 2002 for Patrick Philbin, another Justice Department lawyer who worked on the interrogation opinions. Those missing e-mail messages came during a period when two of the critical interrogation memos were being prepared.”

But never fear, the Obama DoJ is on the case. Kinda, sorta, maybe:

“Gary Grindler, the acting deputy attorney general who represented the Justice Department at Friday’s hearing, said he did not think there was “anything nefarious” about the deletion of the e-mail messages, but he could not explain what happened to them.

He said he had directed administrative personnel at the Justice Department to review the situation and determine whether there were problems in the department’s system for automatically archiving internal documents. He said the review would also seek to recover the missing e-mail messages if possible.”

Why do I get the feeling that in the spirit of the cover-up looking forward, not back, recovering the missing messages will be found impossible. Just a hunch.

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Yoo: The President Could Order the Massacre of a Village

22 Monday Feb 2010

Posted by Craig in Dick Cheney, Justice Department, Politics, torture, Uncategorized, war on terror

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Dick Cheney, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, OPR report, torture memos, waterboarding

Michael Isikoff at Newsweek.com has more on the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report in which David Margolis, senior lawyer in the Obstruction of Justice Department, found John Yoo and Jay Bybee guilty of nothing more than “poor judgement” in authoring the torture memos.

The report also contains an excerpt of an investigator’s interview with Yoo on the subject of the expanded powers of the president:

“At the core of the legal arguments were the views of Yoo, strongly backed by David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, that the president’s wartime powers were essentially unlimited and included the authority to override laws passed by Congress, such as a statute banning the use of torture. Pressed on his views in an interview with OPR investigators, Yoo was asked:

“Sure,” said Yoo.”

“What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally—”

“Yeah,” Yoo replied, according to a partial transcript included in the report. “Although, let me say this: So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.”

“To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?” the OPR investigator asked again.

CarolynC at The Seminal comments on the fallout from Margolis’ decision:

“Because of the actions of men like John Yoo, our country’s moral standing in the world has been eroded. The country of Washington, Lincoln has become a country where legal justifications of torture are now viewed as a matter of “poor judgment,” as the OPR report concluded in its findings.”

One can only conclude that the extermination of an entire village would also fall under the “poor judgment” umbrella as well.

“… But far from being condemned and disgraced, our domestic war criminals live in comfort and ease, their opinions are eagerly sought by our slavish media, and they are treated with the utmost respect in the corridors of power.

…thanks to John Yoo, the President can now commit everything up to and including genocide. Nothing seems to have changed, but everything has changed. Most of us were brought up to consider ourselves citizens of a democratic country; now we are dangerously close to being mere subjects of a monarchical leader, whose powers know no bounds.”

Dick Cheney is so confident that he is in no danger of being held accountable that he triumphantly broadcast his guilt on national television; he admitted last Sunday that he personally ordered the CIA to waterboard detainees. No matter. He will still be treated with deference as an elder statesmen by the Beltway Elite. And John Yoo will continue to practice law, teach, give interviews and write books on the virtues of unlimited executive power, and the books will be greeted with glowing reviews.

Obama DOJ: Authorizing Torture Just "Poor Judgment"

30 Saturday Jan 2010

Posted by Craig in Justice Department, Obama, torture

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2002 memo, DOJ, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Newsweek, OPR, torture

The Obama administration Department of Looking Forward, Not Back has come to the conclusion that the authorization of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” torture is nothing more than “poor judgement.” From Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman at Newsweek:

“..an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations.

While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed “poor judgment,” say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry.”

Meet the new DOJ, same as the old DOJ.

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