OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: FOIA Request Filed for OPR Report on Bush's Lawyers

Charlotte Dennett, investigative journalist, attorney, 2008 candidate for Attorney General of Vermont, and author of The People v. Bush: One Lawyer's Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encounters Along the Way (Chelsea Green, January 2010).

Valeria Gheorghiu, attorney.

Jeanne Mirer, President of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers.

Chris Pyle, a Professor at Mount Holyoke College, where he teaches Constitutional law, Civil Liberties, Rights of Privacy, American Politics and American Political Thought, and is the author of many books and articles, including Getting Away with Torture: Secret Government, War Crimes, and the Rule of Law..

Elaine Scarry, the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, and winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

Peter Weiss, vice president of the Center For Constitutional Rights, of New York City, which was recently involved with war crimes complaints filed in Germany against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others.

Andy Worthington, British journalist and author of The Guantanamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (Pluto Press, 2007).

Kevin Zeese, attorney, activist, serves as Executive Director of Voters for Peace and Prosperity Agenda. He has filed complaints with bar associations seeking the disbarment of 15 Bush-Cheney lawyers for facilitating torture (two who also served Obama-Biden) as part of the Disbar Torture Lawyers Campaign of Velvet Revolution on whose board he serves.

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http://lawsnotmen.org

January 7, 2010

The Robert Jackson Steering Committee
c/o Lawrence Velvel
500 Federal Street
Andover, MA 01810

Ms. Marlene M. Wahowiak
Special Counsel for the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts
Office of Professional Responsibility
Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue
Suite 3529
Washington, D.C. 20530

Dear Attorney Wahowiak:

Included with this letter is a Freedom of Information Act request for production of the long-overdue ethics report of the Office of Professional Responsibility regarding the performance of Bush administration lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel from 2002-2007.

You will see that we are also requesting the OPR report completed in December 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey's rebuttal of that report, and a number of specific documents relating to unsolicited objections from interrogators and government attorneys regarding the torture program envisioned by the OLC attorneys. As we understand it, OPR is responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct by Department attorneys that relate, inter alia, to their authority to provide legal advice. The documents requested in the attached document relate to such misconduct; as such, they should not be exempted as either predecisional or postdecisional formulations of policy, but rather considered as evidence of how the OLC attorneys skewed their legal opinions to justify illegal torture techniques.

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