Jay Bybee Speaks Quavers
NYT has what might be billed as a blockbuster article: JAY BYBEE REVEALS ALL!!!
Except that the article appears to be nothing more than a legalistic CYA statement which I’m sure his hotshot lawyer Maureen Mahoney had a hand in:
Judge Bybee, who issued the memorandums as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and was later nominated to the federal appeals court by President George W. Bush, said in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times that he continued to believe that the memorandums represented “a good-faith analysis of the law” that properly defined the thin line between harsh treatment and torture.
[snip]
“The central question for lawyers was a narrow one; locate, under the statutory definition, the thin line between harsh treatment of a high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist that is not torture and harsh treatment that is. I believed at the time, and continue to believe today, that the conclusions were legally correct.”
Other administration lawyers agreed with those conclusions, Judge Bybee said.
“The legal question was and is difficult,” he said. “And the stakes for the country were significant no matter what our opinion. In that context, we gave our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law.”
The article even reveals why Maureen Mahoney might have encouraged Judge Bybee to issue a statement–to retract comments made by his friends that he regretted the memos.
Judge Bybee said he was issuing a statement following reports that he had regrets over his role in the memorandums, including an article in The Washington Post on Saturday to that effect.
Of course, Bybee has to claim a "good faith analysis of the law"–that’s his only defense.
But if he’s invoking the other lawyers in the Administration who agreed with the memo–undoubtedly including David Addington, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, Jim Haynes, and John Rizzo–that’s not much of a defense. He’s arguing, basically, that a set of lawyers called the "War Council" for the way they collaborated in private on institutionalizing torture, believe his (Yoo’s) memos authorizing torture in spite of the the law and the bogus facts used in the memo was "legally correct." Most children, if you ask them if they like candy, will enthusiastically say they do, too.
And to suggest the stakes of this are important "no matter our opinion" is pretty disgusting, since it suggests Bybee still believes that issuing an opinion that forced the country to stick to proven methods at extracting the truth (rather than false information) would have been a sacrifice for our country. No, authorizing torture and ensuring we get false intelligence and sacrifice our moral standing in the world? That’s significant. But insist that the government follow the law and in so doing, end up getting better intelligence quicker? Yeah, I guess that’s significant, but only when you consider the disaster that Bybee could have averted.
I know John Yoo and Steven Bradbury are in trouble for their role in the torture memos. But this article makes it clear just how worried Bybee is–and how much trouble he believes he may be in.
Heh. Over in cbl2’s Oxdown “Bybee Speaks”, I said:
Bybee speaks—but did Addington’s lips move?
Paraphrased, Molly would have said” Yoo have to dance with the one who brung Yoo”.
Lets take Judge Bybee at his word here. If this is true, it is clear that his legal reasoning is so deeply and unapologetically flawed that he must be impeached. If he believes his work in this instance is up to scratch, then he would see no reason to step down. We must not let a man who appears to not have even a passing acquaintance with the Constitution remain on the Federal Appeals bench.
If he really thought it was good advice he’d acknowledge that he was the man running the dept and he would be saying “I” instead of doing the handoff of “we” so he can stand behind Addington and Yoo.
Bybee seems to put a lot of weight on the words “good faith.” His memos say that will be enough to keep those who torture out of prison. This article is praying that it will be enough to keep him on the bench.
I wonder how often those two words appear in his judicial decisions, as defendants plead to be given a pass on their crimes — and how often they get what they want?
Evidently, he’s on the “media” circuit.
Wonder “how” many MSM outlets will cite the NYT’s without any critical analysis?
I guess the NYT’s was his attempt at putting “context” to his document as well as his regret at the same time. The problem for Bybee is that the “context” for both just dug the hole deeper for him and the “War Council.”
Marcy’s work has effectively mooted the “Good Faith” stance. The timelines make it quite clear.
Well, what we don’t know is Bybee’s role. If he said no to waterboarding and then got snookered into with Haynes’ SERE stuff, then he is legally culpable. But I don’t know that there’s the same paper trail as I suspect there is with Yoo.
If you said no to something due to very strong foundations for your no, and someone keeps coming at you with documentation to make you change your mind; don’t you ever stop to ask, “Why the persistence on this illegal issue?” Especially someone at his level and supposed expert legal background?
And if he did not ask why the persistence, he’s in deep doo doo. I question the SERE “snookered” argument.
As you are asserting, the OLC guys must have initially said no to waterboarding…. “but if you can produce documents that indicate waterboarding is harmless, we can draft an opinion around that.”
EW, please keep digging before August 1. Because their bad faith exposure comes in the wrangling that took place to get waterboarding added to the list of enhanced techniques.
There must be working drafts, emails or journals written contemporaneously that memorialize the discussions, and this is where the bad faith will be exposed.
They did lazy, sloppy work.
No analysis of the history and precedent that constrained them. Some inconvenient laws that did not have cases were just ignored,
The Convention Against Torture makes it a crime for any “person acting under the color of law” to “inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.”
instead of doing the Statutory construction to see if that statute would allow it. Where the laws they did look at were inconvenient, they made up new categories of persons out of whole cloth.
If any panel of lawyers or judges believes this is “good faith analysis of the law” then every single lawyer must be shot and we must start over. This analysis wouldn’t pass a correspondence school quiz.
I don’t think it was lazy and sloppy in the normal sense. It was very careful in some ways – to pick and choose facts to incorporate, to pick and choose cases to reference, to pick and choose other lawyers who would get a copy. No one would do what they did in an advocated situation (where there was someone to make the argument for the other side) and they very carefully picked the situations.
For example, the heart of the program was that they kidnapped people and put them in long term isolation – that fact gets completely skipped. There’s no legal basis for that action, so it gets skipped. The record was replete with things like threats (and fait accomplis)of shipping people to other torture, kidnapping their family, sending their family into torture, threats of raping family members, etc. and all those are left off.
Even on items like trying to draw the SERE comparison for waterboarding, they set up a system of how often and how many times — that completely ignores the fact that we don’t waterboard soldiers in SERE for 20 (later 12) minute sessions of multiple, repeated waterboarding.
And I have to believe that even a lot of the pre-waterboarding harsh interrogations may have been taped – did they ask? Did they review tapes? Did they say whether or not they would be comfortable with ICRC observing those interrogations?
The memos were farce, but not sloppy farce imo. They did a lot of edit, pickthrough, sort and delete to get where they wanted to end up.
according to most of the lawyers I’ve read here the memos were complete trash if you were to use standard comparison against other meaningful legal opinions
What fascinates me about the article is what appears lower down – the evidence that the “court of public opinion” is having an effect. Quotes about losing friends:
The quote of a law professor who asked at dinner how he could possibly have signed such memos (this was years ago!):
The quote of a judge, pretty much saying the same thing:
Ultimately, I believe, the “court of public opinion” will act powerfully to marginalize the lawyers, psychologists, and even the principals of bushco.
You have to laugh to hear him describe his “work” as “good faith” – rather than “good”. Imagine if I had to justify botching a therapy case by going out on a limb “in good faith”. Or imagine a drug sold to the public “in good faith” ONLY! Or food sold “in good faith”.
Writing memos “in good faith” – via “too much respect for authority”. Would that he had respected the authority of the law!!!
More from the Court of Public Opinion. From The Guardian, re bush, giving speeches:
I love the British use of English! “Perhaps they are keen to learn…. in reverse.”
What kind of play would have Shakespeare written about W?
A Farce? A Comedy? A tragedy? A Combination?
Boy, that is a good question!
I don’t think W rises to the level of a tragic hero. Not at all! I see him as a pathetic and comic figure. One surrounded by sycophants. Shakespeare really was not “original” in terms of his subject matter. He took it from life or reworked scenarios that had long been dramatized.
W would have to be presented as a small man. A weak man. Not the kind of person Shakespeare tended to be interested in. So I’m guessing the play would actually be about Cheney and Rummy. With W as this character kind of like a “fool”. Like a court jester who was placed on a throne. As part of a larger, more tragic tale of a nation’s fall. The Nation like the role of the Populace in his play about Julius Caesar. So I would see the tragedy as our tragedy. America’s tragedy. And bush as the “fool” allowed to prance and play – and imagine himself the “decider” – while all the time he ceded power to the real villains of the story.
This is not to say I do not hold W responsible. I do. You’ve asked how Shakespeare might have dramatized it. (Others may see this differently – and I am not a playwright! IANAP!)
I was thinking about Julius Caesar too, TheraP, which is only nominally the tragedy of JC — really, it’s the tragedy of Brutus. Several of the plays are only nominally titled — Richard II, eg.
I agree that W is too weak a character to be central, and Cheney and his merry band would be very strong villains for a playwright to bite into. But where is the balancing force? If only Colin Powell … but he didn’t.
I guess you could just have a villainous romp like Richard III, where Cheney is the cackling genius instead of King Bush, right up to the end where a kind of unbelievable new champion wins out and takes over. Great play; probably a terrible libel of Richard III, but that’s beside the point.
Where is the balancing force? You know what I’d do? I’d bring in characters from American history. I’d make it more like an existential type play. And force the villains to confront some of the Founding Fathers! That’s what I’d do!
And I’d force the Populace to have to face that too. To be forced to understand their history, their institutions.
How’s that?
As much as I know of Shakespeare,seen many performances with Marie, the play would be MacBeth, Georgie Bush as a spear carrier. The Bush family as family of the highest spear carrier turned merchants grasping to be more and finally succeeding to the detriment of all onstage. Im no playwrite either, but this makes sense to me. Pledged another 100 to emptywheel this a.m. from work. Go on and on here please, the country needs it.
“bush as the “fool” allowed to prance and play – and imagine himself the “decider” – while all the time he ceded power to the real villains of the story”
How about this?
“Bottom’s comic confusion in this scene also has echoes of a more famous text. “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen…” is a mangling of St. Paul’s words in Corinthians, in the Bishops’ Bible which was generally used in English churches during Shakespeare’s youth. Readers, and directors, have to decide for themselves whether this is simply a joke about an illiterate craftsman messing up a quotation, or whether the echo means that Bottom’s experience has given him some glimpse of a great vision he cannot articulate properly.”
[emphasis added by moi]
http://shakespeare-comedies.su…..ghts_dream
Ok, add that to my 37. NOW we’re getting somewhere!
You could do it as a tragedy, but Colin Powell would have to be the protagonist. Cheney, of course is the villain but W. and the “War Council” are just a bunch of macabre clowns.
Here’s my concern about Powell. For the play. Did they spy on him? Did they threaten to out something unless he went along with the program?
I like your ideas there.
Well, my semi- sort of- theological answer is that I don’t think Bush was/is possessed by Satan. I think W was far below the status necessary for that. I figure the ancient god of money, Mammon, was the one who communicated with W. Mammon passed on the results of the question “What is our faithful servant up to?” to Beelzebub. Beelzebub then made a report to Satan, who every now and then, would send a reply down the chain of command to W. W was an independent agent who served because he enjoyed doing so.
Tragedy tomorrow, Comedy tonight.
Good faith? As if.
I understand that OPR is investigating OLC e-mails that may shed light on the crafting of these memos. If the lawyers knew the advice was bogus, it was not only bad faith but a conspiracy to violate the laws of this land with respect to torture.
I’m not a lawyer, but this is what I would call legal malpractice.
As I read this, I recall a former boss. I was the Assistant Director of a non-profit about 24 years ago. My boss use to say that the words “assistant” and “director” were key in my title. When there was a “problem” I had to learn when it was best for me to be the “assistant DIRECTOR” or just the “assistant”. I handled delicate issues to deflect or promote the director’s plan of action for the non-profit.
It was a process of discerning issues “in good faith” for the direction the director was taking the non-profit. That fact that I was instructed on the “context” of my title, mooted the “in good faith”. It was the vehicle for progress for the director’s vision.
I quit the job after I got pushed to limits where I understood this was not a “good faith” context.
What was ByBees excuse? Or Yoo’s for that point? They stayed. They signed off.
It is just amazing how many former CIA analyst have come out and said torture does not work and is not worth it
“War Council?” I’m sorry, but Judge Bybee must be confused. There was no “War Council” according to David Addington’s live testimony at the HJC back in June 26, 2008:
Sorry Judge, there was no “war council”… you must have been acting on your own.
-snip-
Addington spin here.
Bybee acted on is own? You are not serious?
No, just snark.
If the memos were such great pieces of legalistic pandering then why in the hell should he have any regrets?!
What really bothers me about Bybee and Yoo both is their reliance on medical information without asking for a point-blank medical determination for their own use, and then making their own medical assessments of the results of torture.
They are practicing medicine without a license or adequate education, and remotely practicing medicine a la Sen. Frist on Terri Schiavo at best.
They did the same thing with their own psychological assessments. How can any lawyer worth his salt not see this?
[edit: what am I saying? they weren’t doing real legal work, hence no need for real lawyering.]
I’m wondering if Yoo called his folks on this. Both are Psychiatrists in Penn Transsylvania.
I’m with EW, Bybee issued this to protect his legal defense.
And I’m holding to my original prediction: Bybee resigns (retires) and quietly accepts a wingnut welfare job somewhere. Will Benedict Arlen work to protect him from impeachment now? I doubt it. And not all the GOPers will be willing to support him if it comes to a public vote.
Nobody who knows the law is ever going to believe Bybee acted “good faith” and his friends are telling him that.
Here’s the interesting question for me: Bybee likely knows exactly how much “guidence” from above went into the creation of those memos and where the “guidence” came from. Will he spill if he DOESN’T get wingnut welfare? His conscience obviously isn’t going to kick in.
Boxturtle (IMO if Bybee talks he’ll lead right to Bush)
Problem with this line of reasoning is that I looked up the various prohibitions against “cruel & unusual punishment” and ya know what? They’re all pretty vague. They’re almost all of the “I know it when I see it” variety.
Reason for this isn’t hard to suss out, if you’re interested in violating the spirit of the prohibition without actually violating the exact letter of it, then precise definitions are important. If you’re determined to avoid violating the spirit, then precise definitions are irrelevant.
Also, if the “war council” were truly interested in finding the correct definition of how far they could go, they would not have had a problem sharing the results of their research, i.e., they would have published all the memos when they first came to light.
See here for the answer you’re seeking: What does shock the conscience mean? It’s not really that difficult to figure out.
Excellent post! Thanks for the link.
Agree…it is like pornography…you know it when you see it.
and “no redeeming qualities”
on edit: and torture has way more “no redeeming qualities” than pornography.
Torture truly is pornography, you would know it if saw it! Really, how much more perverse can you get than beating a man’s legs to “pulp”? I maintain that people performing bedroom gymnastics should be considered relatively normal. Our emphasis on keeping kids safe from this horribly offensive activity while allowing them to see murder and mayhem every single night and day on television speaks volumes about our sick society. We hide normal human activity from our children as being “dirty”, but glorify the most sinister and illegal of activities.
And saved all the video…
That is an interesting insight. I hope you won’t mind if I steal it sometime (with credit).
I can’t stop thinking that there is something not fully sane in the classical sense (ie: healthy) in the way that these guys discuss and define their “techniques,” and further in the anxiety that so many of their defenders have to keep precise “techniques” secret.
As though sheer brutality could somehow be cleansed by being made to sound scientific.
Yee-haw to that!
Good point on definitions. And it’s interesting that they went to so much trouble to set up a definitional structure for “who,what,when & where” of the torture (defining what makes someone a high value detainee without going through any evidentiary standards for proof of those “facts” of status and defining what type of resistance to questioning had to exist before the torture, that it was taking place out of the US, etc.) without, other than on the location issue, ever even making a pretense of trying to establish why those definitions had any legal impact on the determination. Nowhere do they explain why, legally, someone being [suspected of being – but they treated it all as proven fact] a highly placed al-Qaeda operative makes a difference.
Would it make a difference for Russia and the Tibetan monks if they limited their response to the Dalai Lama and “high up” members of his council? Is it not ok to torture a mass murder [suspect] because he has no structure in which to be “high up” but it is ok to torture someone “high up” in a gang. A gang of 100? 1000? 50? 3?
It’s all farce.
And of course, Gonzales had a nifty letter from the President so he and his biddy-boy Bybee didn’t have to share with lawyers who didn’t agree.
It sure seems to me that Bellinger, who sucked up to Steve Clemons so and who tried to play himself up as a hero in the Cheney Chronicles, has been awfully quiet since the things that he saw and sat on have started coming out. But it would be nice to have someone ask Taft who was counsel at State if he agreed with the memos, as Bybee has indicated that the administration’s lawyers agreed with him and then maybe we could get the headline “Bybee Hid Memos From Powell and State Dept”
They don’t ask Bybee why he’s emphasizing that they were high ranking al-Qaeda members – is he saying that torture is defined differently depending on who you are setting up a long term torture program for? Or ask him what might happen to his analysis if Zubaydah was not, after all, “high ranking al-Qaeda” – is it torture then? Or if it is done on American soil to someone who went to a spoof site on nukes? Or if it is Khalid el-Masri – is it still not torture if it is done to somone with the same name as someone suspected of being a high ranking al-Qaeda terrorist?
And if his analysis is based on the status of the torture victim as a high ranking al-Qaeda operative, then isn’t there a built in reason for the torturers to torture a confession of being … a high ranking al-Qaeda terrorist out of their victim? To make it all “legal?”
And getting back to what it means to set a precedent – what do those opinions mean vis a vis something like the Burdge prosecution? I mean, if someone is suspected of being high ranking member of the mafia, or of a gang, or of… the Quakers — then what are the torture options available to the police? To you neighbor?
I agree with you, Mary. So often when these repubs talk, they speak of harm to “innocent life” and torture to “the worst of the worst”.
Well guess what, harm to the guilty is wrong too! And torture of anyone is wrong!
It galls me that they act as if it’s different when those they deem innocent are harmed from those they deem guilty.
O/T Harman PR revving up?
http://thecable.foreignpolicy……se?ref=fp4
http://tinyurl.com/dedmdg
Bush as Bad Theatre – Sherman Yellen
Wonderful link! (I’m pleased, that being no drama critic, I pretty much was in the same ballpark! Then again, I’m a shrink.) What a great analysis!
Garzon, the Spanish judge, has now opened a second investigation:
http://www.easybourse.com/bour…..403-659321
http://tinyurl.com/dm6639
One last thing on his reference to “other administration lawyers.”
OLC isn’t supposed to be a consensus builder among administration lawyers for what the administration wants to do. It is supposed to be the office that considers all the arguments AGAINST what administration lawyers want to do and apply a rigorous challenge to see if what they want to do can survive. That supposedly is why it got the internal status of being a min-Sup Ct. The Court doesn’t just go to all the prosecutors and get a consensus from them of whether their motions are a good idea. That’s EW’s candy point, but it is very procedurally important. If OLC didn’t even try to gather any competing opinions and weigh them, they were defacto not acting in good faith bc they had a special and different role than admin lawyers. A part of their job was to CHALLENGE and see what could survive. They could have kept classification and yet still solicited info from ICRC, the same as they did from SERE, as to what is deemed torture. They could have solicited info from psychologists and psychiatrists and treatment centers who have treated torture victims. They could have solicited information from prosecutors who have handled torture cases as crimes.
Wow. Key.
very important point!
BTW – where was his damn good faith when he let the nation believe that the soldiers at Abu Ghraib were a few bad apples rather than that they were doing things that he and his office has expressly authorized as “legal”
There is no freaking good faith. None. There is no good faith when yoo engineer and box out any possible dissent, especially in the selective and specific areas you know it will come from. And sure as hell not when you then go about forcefully collecting and destroying what dissent managed to spawn its way up their stream of bullshit. That was precisely what was so powerful about the Zelikow bit a few days ago. Taft and some others that you know are there and waiting to come out are just more icing on the cake. It is a good faith slayer of the highest order. The ability to claim good faith is dead, the main media just don’t know it yet. Make no mistake however, it is dead.
Heck, I bet Saddam Hussein acted in good faith quite a bit too.
I do find it a bit irnonic that many of the loyal Bushies were expecting to ride out their later years reaping the benefits of their time working for Bush and Cheney.
Now it seems, not so much.
-G
He was using his CIC powers when he gassed the Kurds, so that makes it OK. Apparently Haynes put together a working group that said so. I missed their amicus brief for his appeal.
judging from cheney’s breathing in his last interview, I am expecting he’s trying to save the legasy for his offspring
I would like the name “dick cheney” to become synomomous with treason, just as the name ‘benedict arnold
in conversation with someone whenever they tell a clear lie I say;
“wow, there’s a dick cheney if I ever heard one.
I want the man shamed for the rest of time, him, rumsfeld and the bush brood
Another factual predicate that they seemed to rely on, in addition to the person being a high-value detainee, was that there was “chatter” on the level of 9/11.
Why did they think these factual predicates were necessary for their legal analysis?
Also @ 53 and 43/44:
Ah, the stupidity of doing analysis in secret – away from the law and the eyes of those familiar with it! And now they’re forced to watch as so many us pick apart sentence by sentence, assumption by assumption, scientific nonsense by scientific nonsense, and so on. The stupidity of deciding on your conclusions and then working backwards to find pieces of “evidence” to “bolster” them.
If this were an architectural project, it would have fallen on its builders!
Mary/43 and bmaz/44
I think you both are right on!
When Bybee was preparing the OLC Opinions on Torture, he could have/should have drawn from the ICRC.
But he didn’t. Why?
Because, imvho, he was Cherry-picking and Making Shit Up to Fit Bush’s Policy, After the Fact. He was writing Covering Memos, not Good Faith Analysis based on Law.
Will the OPR Report cite the Gross Legal Misconduct of Bybee, Yoo, Addington, Gonzales, and Haynes with respect to Conspiring to Subvert the Rule of Law by Aiding and Abetting Torture?
I’d like to see the opinions solicited by Bushco that told them they were full of shizzola and that it was illegal and don’t do it….Wonder what shredder those went into…cough…well, in any case…the chicken lawyers they asked the opinions of to fix the facts for them are probably too chicken to ever say anything of substance…they are clearly just incompetent, fearful, chickenshizzolas.. I pray someone someday points the elbow at Bruce the Dick for all of this…
“…we gave our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law.”
Subtext: and if you prosecute me, honest advice can never, ever be given by government lawyers again.
I submit that the factual predicates of “high-value Al Qaida terrorist” and “chatter on the level of 9/11″ in the Bybee memo were to fit the opinion into a ticking time bomb scenario. The torture defenders are obviously no longer arguing the ticking time bomb scenario. Why are they not sticking with the ticking time bomb argument?
because they can fly air force one low over new york.
Doesn’t Bybee’s whole “good faith analysis” excuse sort of break down, considering he failed to cite obvious case law such as the Reagan DOJ prosecution of a Texas sheriff for waterboarding? It’s not like the DOJ actions under the most exhalted GOP president ever are going to be obscure.
And if one were in need of good legal advice, wouldn’t you hate to be depending on Alberto? We see where that has gotten us.
Kirk Murphy has a promoted diary upstairs!
Breaking: Virus in Two US ‘Mexican’ Swine Flu Victims Appears Closely Related to 2007 Ohio Swine Flu
Headlines we hate to see: Buymee Bleats
I suspect that there is a connection between dropping the ticking time bomb argument and the waterboarding of Al-Nashiri. I wonder what it is?
Scott Horton at TPM on “ggod faith” vs. the Geneva Article 17 problem. Conclusion? Epic fail.
In response to Horton, and as a followup to my @45 above:
And thus the singular importance of attempted written interventions in dissent such as described recently by Zelikow and previously described of Taft. The dissent was out there, was attempted to be lodged through proper channels by notable officials, yet all evidence of it seems to have not only been not referenced in the written opinions and legally overcome, as a real legal reliance opinion would do, but it has been egregiously suppressed, excised and scrubbed. Thyis is not only evidence of a lack of good faith as Horton discussed, it is conscious wanton and willful bad faith and prima facie criminal intent. That is the key.
Just like a gang initiation, Bybee earned his props with secret legal fictions as part of the Cheney conspiracy, and was rewarded with a life appointment to the federal bench while Libby’s sentence was commuted and his fine paid by Tucker Carlson’s father.
Obama & Holder will have some intense back pedalling to do when the Spanish courts indict all of these hacks on war crimes charges.
Doesn’t say much for America’s legal profession.
These are all excellent descriptions of the tactics used to accomplish this circumvention of the law.The olc was the tool.
What I’m having trouble with is that the olc has this power at all.This is not,as I see it, an argument about the criminalization of policy so much as it is about how the olc was given this kind of authority at all.This is just the executives take on an issue via the olc,it isn’t a law.Maybe there’s an EO in this chain somewhere but it still isn’t a law.
I’m having trouble making myself clear on this but I hope you get the point.Can you help me out on this?
If the DoJ’s OLC worked the way bmaz describes (research the law, finding arguments in support and in conflict with any Executive branch question about the legality of an action it plans to do, and concluding with a good faith summary of the legal findings), then OLC is not writing new law, just educating the Executive Branch whether a proposed action is legal or illegal.
OLC’s neutrality was corrupted by Yoo/Bybee/Bradbury bad faith reviews of the law.
Isn’t he an accessory to Murder, to the over 27 interrogation homicides ,initiated by The cub scout leader??????
What worries me the most about Jay Bybee and his memo and all the other memos is that if Obama had not been elected we probably would still never see these memos…because, frankly, the press and the elite in this country were not interested in talking about this stuff. But the Republicans were booted out of office by our semi-functioning democracy and so we now get to see the craven criminality of these folks in actual documents. But where are the consequences for their actions legally? What is going to happen to our governmental system? Anything? Nothing? Is the slide into mediocrity and rule by fiat going to continue? Or is something going to happen to reverse the crippling course that the Republicans and the believers in torture have set us on?