Indeed, last week, Obama's Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit filed against torture memo author John Yoo by Jose Padilla, a US citizen who was arrested in 2002 for allegedly planning to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" and detained in a Navy brig on US soil for three years as an enemy combatant, where he says he was tortured as a direct result of Yoo's legal authorization.
The Obama administration argued, in a friend-of-the-court brief filed with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that DOJ lawyers who advise on torture or other human rights abuses are entitled to absolute immunity from lawsuits.
"The Holder Justice Department insists that they are absolutely not responsible, and that they are free to act according to a far lower standard of conduct than that which governs Americans generally," wrote Scott Horton, a human rights attorney and constitutional expert in a column published on the Harper's web site. "Indeed, this has emerged as a sort of ignoble mantra for the Justice Department, uniting both the Bush and Obama administrations."
Constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley said the Obama administration "has gutted the hard-fought victories in Nuremberg where lawyers and judges were often guilty of war crimes in their legal advice and opinions."
"If successful in [the Padilla] case, the Obama Administration will succeed in returning the world to the rules leading to the war crimes at Nuremberg," Turley said. "Quite a legacy for the world's newest Nobel Peace Prize winner."
What's remarkable about the Obama Justice Department's amicus brief in the Padilla case is that it didn't need to be filed to begin with. Yoo hired a private defense attorney, albeit one who is paid for with taxpayer dollars, earlier this year when the Justice Department backed out of representing Yoo due to undisclosed conflicts.
Suicides
In court papers filed last week, the Obama administration took a hard line in another case, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling that gave detainees the right to challenge their indefinite imprisonment doesn't apply to the cases of Yasser Al-Zahrani and Salah Al-Salami, two Guantanamo prisoners who committed suicide in June 2006.
The fathers of the men, who were never charged with a crime, sued Bush administration Defense Department officials in federal court, arguing that the torture their sons endured drove them to hang themselves on June 10, 2006 after being detained for four years.
But the Obama administration said in a legal brief that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 stripped the courts of jurisdiction to hear lawsuits that challenged the "detention, transfer, treatment or conditions of confinement" of "enemy combatants."
Moreover, in court papers filed in June, the Obama administration said, "Judicial intrusion into this politically sensitive area by creating a damages remedy for detainees could subvert these military and diplomatic efforts and lead to 'embarrassment of our government abroad.'"
Besides, the Obama administration said, just as John Yoo is entitled to absolute immunity, Defense Department officials are entitled to "qualified immunity" because the "Fifth and Eighth Amendments do not extend to Guantà ¡namo Bay detainees."
Earlier this week, a report prepared by the Seton Hall University School of Law Center for Policy & Research called into question the veracity of the government's official version of the deaths of the two men and that of a third prisoner, who was also found hanging in his cell on June 10, 2006. The government attributed the suicides to "asymmetrical warfare."
"Both the time and exact manner of the deaths remain uncertain, and the presence of rags stuffed in the detainees throats is unexplained," the report said.
CIA Renditions and State Secrets
The Obama administration has also mounted an aggressive defense of the Bush administration in another high-profile case, this one related to a lawsuit filed in 2007 against Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of Boeing. Jeppesen DataPlan is accused of knowingly flying people kidnapped by the CIA to secret overseas prisons where they were brutally tortured during the course of their interrogations.
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