Congressional Interest
Asked to comment about the OPR report and the disclosure that Mukasey blocked its delivery to Congress, staffers for Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse said they were working on a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder to inquire about the circumstances that resulted in the report being kept under wraps.
A year ago, Whitehouse and Durbin discovered the existence of the internal probe after writing a letter to the Justice Department’s watchdog agencies requesting an investigation into the role “Justice Department officials [played] in authorizing and/or overseeing the use of waterboarding by the Central Intelligence Agency... and whether those who authorized it violated the law.”
The questions posed by the senators included whether the legal advice met professional standards and whether the lawyers were “insulated from outside pressure to reach a particular conclusion?” Whitehouse and Durbin also asked what role was played by Bush’s White House and the CIA in possibly influencing “deliberations about the lawfulness of waterboarding?”
Jarrett responded by saying the senators’ concerns were already part of a pending investigation that OPR was conducting into the genesis of the Aug. 1, 2002, legal opinion.
Because Yoo no longer works for the Justice Department, OPR can only recommend state bar associations conduct a review of his work to determine if he breached ethics and should be punished. The punishment could include disbarment.
The report also recommends state bar associations review the work of Jay Bybee, who was Yoo’s boss at the OLC, the sources said. Bybee signed the so-called torture memo and other controversial legal opinions that Yoo helped to draft.
Troubling Narrative
OPR investigators poured over thousands of pages of internal Justice Department e-mails and White House memos over the past four years and built a disturbing narrative about Yoo’s work, the sources said, adding that OPR investigators also examined Yoo’s book for further evidence that he had fixed the law around the administration’s policy interests.
In War by Other Means, Yoo wrote: “The only way to prevent future September 11s will be by acquiring intelligence. The main way of doing that is by interrogating captured al-Qaeda leaders or breaking into their communications.... In an opinion eventually issued on Jan. 22, 2002, OLC concluded that al-Qaeda could not claim the benefits of the Geneva Conventions.”
In the context of explaining why detainees were not entitled to the benefits of the Geneva Convention or prisoner of war status, Yoo wrote:
“When our group of lawyers visited Gitmo, the Marine general in charge told us that several of the detainees had arrived screaming that they wanted to kill guards and other Americans. …
“Many at Gitmo are not in a state of calm surrender. Open barracks for most are utterly impossible; some al-Qaeda detainees want to kill not only guards, but their peers who might be cooperating with the United States. The provision of ordinary POW rights...is infeasible.”
Yoo’s argument that only quiet POWs “in a state of calm surrender” should qualify for Geneva protections might be news to many former U.S. POWs, including Sen. John McCain, who have boasted about their various forms of resistance to their captors.
Yoo added that a few weeks after he returned from Guantanamo “the lawyers met again in the White House Situation Room to finally resolve the issue for presidential decision.”
“If Geneva Convention rules were applied, some believed they would interfere with our ability to apprehend or interrogate al-Qaeda leaders,” Yoo wrote. “We would be able to ask Osama bin Laden loud questions and nothing more. Geneva rules were designed for mass armies, not conspirators, terrorists or spies.”
Long Battle
The OPR probe was launched in mid-2004 after a meeting in which Jack Goldsmith, then head of the OLC, got into a tense debate with then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales about the torture memo. Following the meeting, Goldsmith, who had rescinded the memo, resigned.
According to people familiar with the OPR report, Yoo was briefed on the report in January. Yoo is said to have informed officials at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is a tenured law professor, according to two senior law school officials.
Yoo is now a visiting law professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California, where he teaches foreign relations law. I approached him on campus recently and asked him about the report’s findings but he refused to comment. Chapman University officials also declined to comment.
In a letter to faculty and students last December, Law School Dean John Eastman said “Chapman University officials have received several notes of concern about my decision to offer Professor John Yoo a distinguished visitorship at the Chapman University School of Law.”
“I would encourage those who object to Professor Yoo's appointment here to read his scholarly work on the subject of Executive power, and in particular the memos he authored while serving in the administration,” Dean Eastman wrote Dec. 18, 2008. “You will find that Yoo's position, while disputed, is far from ignorant or disrespectful of the Constitution.”
Dawn Johnsen, who has been tapped by President Barack Obama to head the Office of Legal Counsel, has publicly criticized the work of Yoo and other OLC officials under Bush. In a 2006 Indiana Law Journal article, she said the function of OLC should be to “provide an accurate and honest appraisal of applicable law, even if that advice will constrain the administration’s pursuit of desired policies.”
“The advocacy model of lawyering, in which lawyers craft merely plausible legal arguments to support their clients’ desired actions, inadequately promotes the President’s constitutional obligation to ensure the legality of executive action,” said Johnsen, who served in the OLC under President Bill Clinton.
In a 2007 UCLA Law Review article, Johnsen said Yoo’s Aug. 1, 2002, torture memo is “unmistakably” an “advocacy piece.”
“OLC abandoned fundamental practices of principled and balanced legal interpretation,” Johnsen wrote. “The Torture Opinion relentlessly seeks to circumvent all legal limits on the CIA’s ability to engage in torture, and it simply ignores arguments to the contrary.
“The Opinion fails, for example, to cite highly relevant precedent, regulations, and even constitutional provisions, and it misuses sources upon which it does rely. Yoo remains almost alone in continuing to assert that the Torture Opinion was ‘entirely accurate’ and not outcome driven.”
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).