While I'm happy to see him called to account, I'd sure like to see Yoo's superiors get the credit for demanding the torture rationale:

A federal judge has ruled that John Yoo, a former Bush administration lawyer who wrote crucial memorandums justifying harsh interrogation techniques, will have to answer in court to accusations that his work led to a prisoner’s being tortured and deprived of his constitutional rights.

The government had asked Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco to dismiss the case filed by Jose Padilla, an American citizen who spent more than three years in a military brig as an enemy combatant. Judge White denied most elements of Mr. Yoo’s motion and quoted a passage from the Federalist Papers that in times of war, nations, to be more safe, “at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.”

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From the AP:

Bush administration lawyers who approved harsh interrogation techniques of terror suspects should not face criminal charges, Justice Department investigators say in a draft report that recommends two of the three attorneys face possible professional sanctions.

The recommendations come after an Obama administration decision last month to make public legal memos authorizing the use of harsh interrogation methods but not to prosecute CIA interrogators who followed advice outlined in the memos.

And if that weren't bad enough Jonathan Turley reports:

The Washington Post reports that Bush officials are working the halls and telephones of the Justice Department with the formal end of the internal investigation into former Justice officials involved in the Bush torture program, including Ninth Circuit Judge Jay S. Bybee, Berkeley professor John C. Yoo and Steven G. Bradbury. They are reportedly working over former colleagues to soften the language and recommendations of the department. I will be discussing this and other related stories on tonight’s Countdown.

An earlier draft report recommended disciplinary action by state bar associations against two former Justice officials — pretty light punishment for participation in a war crime. However, even that recommendation was too much for former Attorney General Michael Mukasey who delayed the report and ordered further examination. Mukasey and then-Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip wrote a 14-page letter rebutting the report of its own investigators before leaving office.

The investigation could, however, disclose new information given the five years of work by the department into the matter. The deadline for the investigation ended on Monday of this week.

Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich has informed members of Congress that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Deputy Attorney General David W. Ogden “will have access to whatever information they need to evaluate the final report and make determinations about appropriate next steps.”

The Justice Department continues to insist on total control over the investigation of its own attorneys and department in a clear conflict of interest. Not just political appointees but career attorneys were involved in the program. The department is now reviewing whether the department itself facilitated in the commission of a war crime — a finding that would be an embarrassment to the department as a whole. This is like having a hospital review its own doctors to determine if those doctors and the hospital as a whole committed criminal malpractice.

The fact that there is lobbying going on between current and former Justice Department officials shows the highly inbred aspect of this inquiry. These same former officials would not think of trying to influence a special prosecutor, who is supposed to be appointed in such conflicted circumstances. Not surprisingly, a report from the New York Times indicates that the Justice Department will use this report to conclude that its lawyers should not face criminal charges when facilitating such programs.

In this context, discussion of bar charges appears rather laughable. It is not that such action is not warranted, but rather it is treating participating in a possible war crime as something less than a misdemeanor offense.

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April 21, 2009 CNN

Dave N: Paul Begala and Ari Fleischer debated the release of the Bush torture memos -- and President Obama's indication that prosecutions of the architects of the torture regime may yet face prosecution -- on Anderson Cooper's 360 yesterday.

The fireworks erupted when Fleischer decided that the best defense was to claim that waterboarding really isn't torture:

FLEISCHER: No, again, Anderson, your premise is that it is torture. And I think the only people who can determine that are people from the Department of Justice.

COOPER: But it's interesting, though...

FLEISCHER: If it is torture, if it is torture...

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: ... when the Khmer Rouge did it, when the Khmer Rouge did it at Tuol Sleng prison, and you can go there, and you can see the instruments they used to water-board people, I mean, we labeled it as torture.

FLEISCHER: And, Anderson, that's why I said the only people who are in a position to make an authoritative judgment on it should be career, independent-minded people at the Department of Justice, without anybody at the White House interfering or anybody else interfering.

And then, if they decide it was, then they have got a very careful decision to make about how far and extensive do you prosecute people. Is it the people who did it? Is it the Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill who were briefed on it and didn't object to it? And who in the administration would you have to apply that standard to?

This is where this whole thing can go.

But, going back to the memo, and going back to bipartisanship, you know, it's not just the Bush people who said it was wrong to release that memo. Bill Clinton's head of the CIA said it was wrong to release those memos, because you're teaching al Qaeda operatives exactly what our techniques are.

And why do we want anybody in al Qaeda to know what the limits of our techniques are, Paul?

BEGALA: The techniques that -- the techniques that we no longer use, the techniques that were in "The New York Review of Books" and half of the newspapers and magazines in North America, Ari. I mean, it is...

FLEISCHER: Paul, it was your administration's head of the CIA who objected to the release of those memos.

BEGALA: It doesn't -- it doesn't make...

FLEISCHER: It's a Clinton official who said that.

BEGALA: It doesn't make him right. Torture is always wrong, Ari. We executed...

FLEISCHER: I agree with you that torture is always wrong.

BEGALA: Excuse me for talking while you're interrupting.

(CROSSTALK)

COOPER: Let Paul finish.

BEGALA: We -- our country executed Japanese soldiers who water- boarded American POWs. We executed them for the same crime that we are now committing ourselves. How do you defend that?

The most awkward silence imaginable follows. Finally, Fleischer is able to eke out:

FLEISCHER: Well, again, Paul, I guess you already are the jury, the prosecutor, the judge, and a citizen all rolled into one. You have already pronounced judgment that it is a crime.

Actually, Fleischer could have countered Begala by pointing out that we didn't actually execute the Japanese soldiers convicted of the war crime of waterboarding American prisoners -- we just sentenced them to 15 years' hard labor.

But then, as the New York Times reports this morning, this White House's legal team didn't even bother to research the legal history of waterboarding before issuing their Excuse From Mom.

Waterboarding always was a crime -- until these characters came along. Maybe that's why Ari didn't really try to argue the point any further ...

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April 20, 2009 News Corp

So it wasn't torture, they just liked doing it? This is really sickening:

Waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, was used by C.I.A. interrogators far more frequently on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda than has been previously reported.

A 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum says that C.I.A. officers used waterboarding at least 83 times during August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, who has been described as a Qaeda operative.

A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The May 30, 2005, memo, quoting a 2004 investigation by the C.I.A. inspector general, says that in March 2003, waterboarding was used 183 times against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mr. Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing C.I.A. officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits and to halt his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method used so many times was not previously known.

Charles Lemos over at MyDD notes his close friendship with WSJ reporter Danny Pearl, who was brutally murdered by al Qaeda, and responds to the torture memos:

Those of us who knew Danny are very protective of Danny and his legacy because Danny Pearl was an exceptional human being. It is hard to talk about Danny and not wax eloquent. It is beyond belief to us that when Al Qaeda killed Danny, they killed someone who actually was interested in having their grievances heard. Not that Danny or I sympathized with Islamic terrorism, but there are many who think it important to understand its causes so that we might be able to better mitigate its spread.

In thinking about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the fact that he was waterboarded 183 times in the month of March of 2003, I cannot but express how this denigrates everything that Danny stood for. In waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we have descended to the level of that butcher. We have proved that we are no better than them and I refuse to believe that. The West has a moral obligation to live up to the ideals that Danny Pearl embodied.

April 17, 2009 CNN

From the Cafferty File:

President Obama is being criticized for his decision to release those Bush-era memos about CIA interrogation techniques. Conservatives say releasing them damages our national security by telling the terrorists what we do.

Michael Hayden — who led the CIA under President Bush — says CIA officers will now be more timid and our allies will be less likely to share sensitive intelligence. Human rights groups aren’t happy that the president promised the CIA that officers who conducted interrogations won’t be prosecuted if they used techniques that were authorized at the time.

The president insists there’s nothing to gain by “spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” President Obama spent a month deciding whether or not to release the memos and consulted numerous officials. He reportedly weighed the “sanctity of covert operations” and what impact this could have on national security against the law and his belief in transparency. In the end transparency won.

The documents themselves are quite revealing… They show the CIA used waterboarding, sleep deprivation, slapping, keeping detainees naked and in some cases in a diaper, putting detainees on a liquid diet, and using a plastic neck collar to slam detainees into walls. The memos also authorized keeping suspected al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah, who was apparently afraid of bugs, in a dark, confined space — and then putting a harmless insect in the box with him, while telling him it’s a stinging insect.

President Obama banned the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques — what some call torture — soon after he took office; and has pledged to make sure the actions described in these memos “never take place again.”

Here’s my question to you: Is the release of the Bush era interrogation memos a mistake?

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