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"Far from inventing some novel interpretation of the Constitution, [Office of Legal Counsel, where Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury worked] was really doing little more than following in the footsteps of the Clinton Justice Department and all prior Justice Departments."
It's unknown whether Yoo made a convincing argument to OPR in defending his reasons for not citing the landmark ruling.
But a July 10, 2009, report by the inspectors general of the CIA, National Security Agency, DOJ and Defense Department into the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which were based on legal opinions written by Yoo, also took Yoo to task for failing to cite Youngstown.
Yoo "omitted any discussion of Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, a leading case on the distribution of government powers between the Executive and Legislative Branches," the report said.
"Justice [Robert] Jackson's analysis of President Truman's Article II Commander-in-Chief authority during wartime in the Youngstown case was an important factor in OLC's subsequent reevaluation of Yoo's opinions," the report said.
Ironically, as Congress continues to try and pass a health care bill that Democrats say wil expand insurance benefits to millions of Americans, the issue also plays a particularly important role in the OPR report.
The early draft of the OPR report concluded, legal sources said, that Yoo misinterpreted an obscure 2000 health benefits statute and wrongly applied it to August 2002 and March 2003 interrogation opinions he wrote, according to the DOJ officials.
Again, expanding upon a defense that first appeared in his book, Yoo placed some of the responsibility on Congress for forcing him to rely upon the statute to narrow the definition of torture in a way that permitted techniques such as waterboarding.
In passing an anti-torture law, Congress only prohibited "severe physical or mental pain or suffering," Yoo wrote. "The ban on torture does not prohibit any pain or suffering whether physical or mental, only severe acts. Congress did not define severe ... OLC interpreted 'severe' as a level of pain 'equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions. [Emphasis added.]
"OLC's first 2002 definition did not make up this definition out of thin air. It applied a standard technique used to interpret ambiguous phrases in law. When Congress does not define its terms, courts commonly look in the United States Code for the use of similar language. The only other place where similar words appear is in a law defining health benefits for emergency medical conditions, which are defined as severe symptoms, including 'severe pain' where an individual's health is placed 'in serious jeopardy,' 'serious impairment to bodily functions,' or 'serious dysfunction of any bodily organ or part.'"
Jack Goldsmith, who succeeded Bybee at the OLC in October 2003 after Bybee was confirmed as an appeals court judge on the Ninth Circuit, wrote in his book, "The Terror Presidency," that Yoo's torture memo "was legally flawed" and sloppily written and he was harshly critical of Yoo's use of a medical benefits statute to define torture.
"That statute defined an 'emergency medical condition' that warranted certain health benefits as a condition 'manifesting itself by acute symptoms of sufficient severity (including severe pain)' such that the absence of immediate medical care might reasonably be thought to result in death, organ failure, or impairment of bodily function," Goldsmith wrote.
"The health benefits statute's use of 'severe pain' had no relationship whatsoever to the torture statute. And even if it did, the health benefit statute did not define 'severe pain.' Rather it used the term 'severe pain' as a sign of an emergency medical condition that, if not treated, might cause organ failure and the like.... OLC's clumsily definitional arbitrage didn't seem even in the ballpark."
Goldsmith rescinded the torture memo in mid-2004 and resigned shortly thereafter. His questions as to whether Yoo and Bybee provided the White House with sound legal advice sparked the OPR investigation.
