DOJ Report On Bush Torture Memos: No Misconduct

NRP.org:

Bush administration lawyers did not violate legal ethics rules when they wrote memos authorizing harsh interrogations for terrorism detainees, the Justice Department said Friday, releasing the long-awaited results of its investigation into the memos.

The report focuses on three men who worked at Justice under President Bush: John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury. All three worked in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, crafting the standards for interrogating high-value terrorism detainees.

According to the cover letter accompanying the report, the investigation originally found professional misconduct by Yoo and Bybee. But the career official in charge of overseeing the office of professional responsibility overruled that finding.

Now the report says the men "exercised poor judgment." That means the men will not face disbarment or criminal punishment.

The final report is hundreds of pages long and includes extensive e-mails between the Justice Department, the White House and the CIA.

As one congressional staffer said, "If the torture memos were the movie, this report is the making of."

In other words, get over your Bush Derangement Syndrome.

No Sanctions For Bush Lawyers Who OK'd Torture

Newsmax.com:

Bush administration lawyers who drafted legal theories that led to waterboarding and other harsh treatment of terrorism suspects showed poor judgment but won't face sanctions for professional misconduct, according to a published report.

A forthcoming government ethics report initially concluded the two key authors of the so-called torture memos, Jay Bybee and John Yoo, who were officials in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration, had violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted the memos that allowed the use of harsh interrogation tactics.

But a senior Justice Department official, David Margolis, later softened the department's finding to say the authors simply showed poor judgment, Newsweek reported.

Margolis, who is a career lawyer and not a political appointee of the Obama administration, has supervised the department's internal discipline through several administrations from his post in the deputy attorney general's office.

He declined to comment Saturday to The Associated Press.

The finding is likely to unsettle interest groups who contended there should be sanctions for Bush administration lawyers who paved the way for tough interrogations, warrantless wiretapping and other coercive tactics. Bybee is now a federal appeals court judge in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals covering several Western states, and Yoo is a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

Good for Jay Bybee and Prof. Yoo, two of our nation's brightest intellects who have smeared for years by far-leftist loons who still hate former President Bush and believe in coddling terrorists. All Yoo did was make a legitimate argument that there is no binding law constraining the powers of the presidency in times of national emergency, and that Congress has the obligation to constrain the president once the line has been crossed. Physically abusing and humiliating prisoners has been going on since the beginning of time, it's not something that the Bush lawyers invented. And these people weren't just prisoners, they were terrorists, the kind of scum that would kill innocent people at the drop of a dime. I don't care how much they were tortured, the fact that anyone involved with planning or participating in 9/11 is still alive is fair enough.

John Yoo Fights Back Against The Left's On-Going Bush Derangement Syndrome

John Yoo, a target of leftwing bullies still suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, defends himself against malpractice allegations in the Inspector General report on warrantless electronic surveillance in an op-ed in today's Wall St. Journal:

It was instantly clear after Sept. 11, 2001, that our security agencies knew little about al Qaeda's inner workings, could not detect its operatives' entry into the country, nor predict where it might strike next.

Suppose an al Qaeda cell in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles was planning a second attack using small arms, conventional explosives or even biological, chemical or nuclear weapons. Our intelligence and law enforcement agencies faced a near impossible task locating them. Now suppose the National Security Agency (NSA), which collects signals intelligence, threw up a virtual net to intercept all electronic communications leaving and entering Osama bin Laden's Afghanistan headquarters. What better way of detecting follow-up attacks? And what president -- of either political party -- wouldn't immediately order the NSA to start, so as to find and stop the attackers?

Evidently, none of the inspectors general of the five leading national security agencies would approve. In a report issued last week, they suggested that President George W. Bush might have violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by ordering the interception of international communications of terrorists without a judicial warrant. The report also suggests that "other" intelligence measures -- still classified only because they are yet to be reported on the front page of the New York Times -- similarly lacked approval from other branches of government.

It is absurd to think that a law like FISA should restrict live military operations against potential attacks on the United States. Congress enacted FISA during the waning days of the Cold War. As the 9/11 Commission found, FISA's wall between domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence proved dysfunctional and contributed to our government's failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

Under FISA, to obtain a judicial wiretapping warrant the government is supposed to show probable cause that a specified target is a foreign agent. Unlike, say, Soviet spies working under diplomatic cover, terrorists are hard to identify. Yet they are vastly more dangerous. Monitoring their likely communications channels is the best way to track and stop them. Building evidence to prove past crimes, as in the civilian criminal system, is entirely beside the point. The best way to find an al Qaeda operative is to look at all email, text and phone traffic between Afghanistan and Pakistan and the U.S. This might involve the filtering of innocent traffic, just as roadblocks and airport screenings do.

In FISA, President Bush and his advisers faced an obsolete law not written with live war with an international terrorist organization in mind. It was to meet such emergency circumstances that the Founders designed the presidency. As John Locke first observed, foreign threats "are much less capable to be directed by antecedent, standing, positive laws." Legislatures are too slow and their members too numerous to respond effectively to unforeseen situations. Only the executive can act to protect the "security and interest of the public."

The power to protect the nation, said Alexander Hamilton in the Federalist, "ought to exist without limitation," because "it is impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies, or the correspondent extent & variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them." To limit the president's constitutional power to protect the nation from foreign threats is simply foolhardy.