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John Yoo v. Alice Fisher and Michael Chertoff

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Man, if you had to choose whom to believe between John Yoo or Alice Fisher and Michael Chertoff who would it be? John Yoo is a hack–but he’s an unashamed hack, proud of his accomplishments. Alice Fisher? Michael Chertoff? They’re more of the dishonest hack type.

The reason I ask is that there’s a seeming contradiction between what Yoo claims in his March 2003 torture memo regarding DOD practices and Alice Fisher and Michael Chertoff’s statements to DOJ’s OIG regarding related events. At issue is whether the Criminal Division of DOJ–Fisher was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in 2003, and just resigned from Criminal Division Chief; Chertoff was head of the Criminal Division when the Administration was developing its torture policies–told OLC how they would treat certain actions criminally. The Yoo Torture Memo claims that OLC had consulted with the Criminal Division about which statutes would not apply to the military during the conduct of war:

The Criminal Division concurs in our conclusion that these canons of construction preclude the application of the assault, maiming, interstate stalking, and torture statutes to the military during the conduct of a war.

But the DOJ OIG report on torture records Alice Fisher stating that the Criminal Division did not give advice–at least not on the techniques themselves.

Fisher stated that at some point she became aware that the CIA requested advice regarding specific interrogation techniques and that OLC had conducted a legal analysis. She also said she was aware of two OLC memoranda on that topic, but they did not relate to the FBI. Fisher also told the OIG that Chertoff was very clear that the Criminal Division was not giving advice on which interrogation techniques were permissible and was not "signing off" in advance on any techniques. (page 70fn; 113/438)

And Chertoff claims that he was asked–but refused to give–sign off on particular techniques.

Chertoff said that the Criminal Division was asked to provide an "advance declination" in connection with the CIA’s use of some techniques, but that he had refused to provide it.  (page 100-101; 143-4/438)

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Mukasey’s Troubling Historical Argument

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Mukasey’s defense of John Yoo in his commencement address at Boston College Law School has drawn a lot of attention.

Today, many of the senior government lawyers who provided legal advice supporting the nation’s most important counterterrorism policies have been subjected to relentless public criticism. In some corners, one even hears suggestions—suggestions that are made in a manner that is almost breathtakingly casual—that some of these lawyers should be subject to civil or criminal liability for the advice they gave. The rhetoric of these discussions is hostile and unforgiving.

But few people have examined Mukasey’s rationale for defending Yoo.

Essentially, Mukasey is making an argument that everyone concluded after 9/11 that timid lawyering had contributed to 9/11, and so if we criticize Yoo (and Addington and Gonzales and–I would argue, John Rizzo, Acting Counsel for CIA when the torture tapes were destroyed) for their decisions made under pressure to make lawyering less timid, our nation will be less secure as a result.

To make this argument, Mukasey relies on Jack Goldsmith’s discussion of risk aversion in his book Terror Presidency. But Mukasey grossly misrepresents what Goldsmith describes as the primary root of risk aversion. Repeatedly, Goldsmith compares the difference between the legal means Roosevelt used in World War II with those the Bush Administration uses, and goes on to suggest that the rise of human rights in the intervening years had constrained presidential action. Goldsmith mentions, among other things, prohibitions on torture (most of them international) and assassination. Significantly, of the many legal developments he cites specifically as creating new limits on presidential action, only one–FISA–was a law passed in the US in response to intelligence operations gone legally awry (Goldsmith also mentions EO 12333, which is an order signed by Saint Ronnie, not a law passed by Congress or an international body, and he mentions "an aggressive post-Watergate Congress … crafting many of the laws that so infuriatingly tied the President’s hands in the post-9/11 world").

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The Yoo “Exclusivity” Opinion: More Outrageous Hackery

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After significant efforts, Senator Whitehouse has finally gotten the Administration to declassify the fourth of the four outrageous opinions John Yoo wrote to justify the warrantless wiretap program (the other three Pixie Dust provisions basically allow the President to write his own laws). This one pertains to the exclusivity provision of FISA, which states clearly that FISA was the "exclusive means by which electronic surveillance … and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic communications may be conducted."

Here’s what that purported genius, John Yoo, did with FISA’s exclusivity provision:

Unless Congress made a clear statement in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that it sought to restrict presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches in the national security area — which it has not — then the statute must be construed to avoid [such] a reading.

As it happens, DOJ actually appears to be somewhat cognizant of the legal hackery of this Yoo opinion. When he learned DNI had declassified the passage from the opinion, Brian Benczkowski sent a letter to Senators Whitehouse and DiFi, trying to claim that Yoo’s opinion is unremarkable:

The general proposition (of which the November 2001 statement is a particular example) that statutes will be interpreted whenever reasonably possible not to conflict with the President’s constitutional authorities is unremarkable and fully consistent with the longstanding precedents of OLC, issued under Administrations of both parties.

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Yoo Issued an Opinion on 9/11 about Scrambling Planes

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Still reading through the Yoo side of the Esquire transcript. At times, it’s very frustrating, since Esquire gave only Yoo’s side of the conversation, without the questions. But by putting this passage of the final article…

So let’s go back to that moment in the heat of battle. The way Yoo tells the story, he was sitting at his desk at the Justice Department when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. He had only been working there two months, hired to answer the White House’s questions on foreign-policy laws at a time when the biggest legal issue before him was a treaty about polar bears. When the order came to evacuate Washington and people began heading out into the streets, someone from the attorney general’s office told him to stick around.

Soon the questions came:

Is this a war?

Do we need to declare war?

Can we scramble planes?

And again: Is this a war?

Together with these two answers from the transcript…

Yes, that was a question [Can planes be scrambled to shoot down any remaining hijacked aircraft]. That was earlier: Can we use force?

I must have. I can’t tell you what I said. No, I don’t think that’s actually public. Can you use force in response? What kind of force? What are the standards that guide the use of force?

I think it’s fairly safe to say that sometime on 9/11, Yoo gave an opinion about whether or not the US could shoot down remaining hijacked planes.

Only he’s not going to tell us what that opinion said.

The opinion is relevant, of course, because one thing Dick Cheney attempted to hide from the 9/11 Commission was that he–without consulting George Bush–issued an order to shoot down any remaining planes. He even tried (unsuccessfully) to get the 9/11 Commission to reverse its finding that Cheney gave the shoot-down order before speaking to Bush.

Now, Yoo’s opinion almost certainly came after Cheney issued the order and after he told Bush he had made it. According to Libby’s notes, Cheney issued the order between 10:15 and 10:18; according to Ari’s notes, Cheney informed Bush of the opinion shoot-down order at 10:20. In other words, Yoo’s opinion probably didn’t contribute to Cheney’s extra-constitutional order.

Still, it’s notable that they went to Yoo for such an opinion, presumably after the fact. And it’s notable that this is yet another of Yoo’s opinions they haven’t released.

Update: Read more →

John Yoo’s Non-Ephemeral Writings

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I’m reading the transcript of John Yoo’s side of the Esquire interview, and found this rather amusing bit.

Yoo explained that he had considered becoming a journalist. But didn’t do it because it was too ephemeral.

I gave a lot of thought to becoming a journalist. I was an intern at the Wall Street Journal under Al Hunt in the summer between college and law school. I gave that a lot of thought. It was very exciting. I had a great time. But there was something — no offense, but there was something about journalism that was very ephemeral. You write the story and then it’s gone and nobody remembers it.

I guess we ought to consider Yoo a success, then. Because it’ll be a long time before people forget his most famous writings. 

Just Making It Up on Classification

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A number of you have pointed to smintheus’ excellent post on Bush’s new classification, Controlled Unclassified Information.

On Friday afternoon, with George Bush in Texas for his daughter’s wedding, the White House finally released its new Executive Branch rules for designating and disseminating what used to be known as "sensitive" information. The most common term in the past for such material has been "Sensitive But Unclassified" (SBU), though there was an alphabet soup of competing classifications in various agencies. In part, the new rules create a uniform standard across the Executive by replacing SBU etc. with a new classification, "Controlled Unclassified Information" (CUI).

The Friday memo states that its purpose "is to standardize practices and thereby improve the sharing of information, not to classify or declassify new or additional information." The initial impetus for change came in a December 2005 memo in which Bush called for a new policy for information sharing between agencies. The alphabet soup of "sensitive" designations too often played into the hands of officials who sought to hoard information rather than to share it.

[snip]

Though the material to be regulated is nominally "unclassified", this new system is in fact a much more sweeping program for keeping information secret than the ostensibly higher grades of secrecy for "classified" material. And at the same time, the system for designating "unclassified" information is in significant ways far less regulated than for "classified" information. This new memo represents the opposite of reform.

I agree with smintheus that this classification is simply an invitation for bureaucratic games that result in less information sharing rather than more.

But at the same time, with the increasing evidence that it doesn’t matter what Bush says the classification guidelines are, key players in his Administration will just do as they please anyway, I’m not sure the CUI is the worst of our worries.

Consider the example offered by Bill Leonard in his statement for Russ Feingold’s April 29 30 [thanks selise] hearing on Secret Law. Leonard focused most of his attention on the improper classification of the Yoo Torture Memo authorizing the military to torture; he offered quite a striking soundbite about the memo:

To learn that such a document was classified had the same effect on me as waking up one morning and learning that after all these years, there is a "secret" Article to the Constitution that the American people do not even know about.

But I found the details of Leonard’s discussion even more interesting. Read more →

“It’s Not that Yoo Engaged in Really Bad Lawyering, Really It’s Not”

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I’m fascinated by this op-ed by David Rivkind and Lee Casey, arguing that we’re all beating up on poor little John Yoo because we believe international law should trump US law.

In truth, the critics’ fundamental complaint is that the Bush administration’s lawyers measured international law against the U.S. Constitution and domestic statutes. They interpreted the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention forbidding torture, and customary international law, in ways that were often at odds with the prevailing view of international law professors and various activist groups. In doing so, however, they did no more than assert the right of this nation – as is the right of any sovereign nation – to interpret its own international obligations.

[snip]

That is why these administration attorneys have become the particular subjects of attack.

The central thrust of the op-ed is, of course, one giant shiny object. The role of international law has absolutely nothing to do with calls for Yoo to be held liable for his egregious opinions authorizing torture and warrantless wiretap. As I have pointed out, Looseheadprop has pointed out, and apparently Jack Goldsmith and other lawyers have pointed out, the problem was rather that Yoo ignored the key precedent in US law when he formulated his opinions. From Lichtblau’s book:

When Goldsmith and other Justice Department lawyers dusted off the early legal opinions on the NSA program, they were shocked to find that Yoo had not even factored into his legal analysis a seminal Supreme Court precedent on presidential power: the Youngstown steel case.

If I, a non-lawyer, can poke giant holes in Yoo’s legal opinions with a 30 second PDF search, then those opinions should clearly not be relied upon as valid. The question, though, is why the opinions were so shoddy: deliberate intent or incompetence? Using Rivkin and Casey’s assertion that Yoo is one of "the country’s finest legal minds," I have to conclude that the opinions are so shitty because Yoo could only authorize the things he did by ignoring US law–and that his effort to sidestep US law was indeed, an ethically and perhaps legally problematic act. The fact that Jack Goldsmith agrees with me about the shoddiness of these opinions–someone who fully agrees with Yoo about the appropriate role of international law in the US–proves that our complaints have nothing to do with international law.

So Rivkind and Casey are clearly trying to misrepresent to the WSJ’s readers what’s at issue here. Read more →

Analogies for Yoo: The Merck Scandal

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There’s been more discussion of the appropriate analogy to use to determine whether or not John Yoo should–or could–be fired from Berkeley. But I wonder whether the incipient Vioxx scandal won’t offer us the best analogy. As the NYT reports, Merck appears to have sent out drafts of reports to professors to have them submit them for publication under their own name.

Combing through the documents, Dr. Ross and his colleagues unearthed internal Merck e-mail messages and documents about 96 journal publications, which included review articles and reports of clinical studies. While the Ross team said it was not necessarily raising questions about all 96 articles, it said that in many cases there was scant evidence that the recruited authors made substantive contributions.

One paper involved a study of Vioxx as a possible deterrent to Alzheimer’s progression.

The draft of the paper, dated August 2003, identified the lead writer as “External author?” But when it was published in 2005 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the lead author was listed as Dr. Leon J. Thal, a well-known Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Thal was killed in an airplane crash last year.

The second author listed on the published Alzheimer’s paper, whose name had not been on the draft, was Dr. Ferris, the New York University professor. Dr. Ferris, reached by telephone Tuesday, said he had played an active role in the research and he was substantially involved in helping shape the final draft.

“It’s simply false that we didn’t contribute to the final publication,” Dr. Ferris said.

A third author, also not named on the initial draft, was Dr. Louis Kirby, currently the medical director for the company Provista Life Sciences. In an e-mail message on Tuesday, Dr. Kirby said that as a clinical investigator for the study he had enrolled more patients, 109, than any of the other researchers. He also said he made revisions to the final document.

“The fact that the draft was written by a Merck employee for later discussion by all the authors does not in and of itself constitute ghostwriting,” Dr. Kirby’s e-mail message said.

This story is just breaking. But I suspect that there will be substantial scrutiny of the scientists involved, or at least those still at research universities. And I suspect we’ll start seeing longer lists of professors who rented their name out in support of drug companies.

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Bush: The Country Is at War, Therefore We Do Not Torture

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While I wait patiently for the press to notice that George Bush admitted to instituting a regime of torture last Friday, I wanted to call your attention to one of Bush’s most famous statements purportedly denying that we torture. The statement came on November 7, 2005, just after Dana Priest’s Black Sites article appeared, and in the middle of Congress’ efforts to forbid torture. The statement came within days–if not hours–of the time when the CIA (supposedly working on its own) destroyed the evidence of torture.

The statement starkly follows the logic of John Yoo.

Q Mr. President, there has been a bit of an international outcry over reports of secret U.S. prisons in Europe for terrorism suspects. Will you let the Red Cross have access to them? And do you agree with Vice President Cheney that the CIA should be exempt from legislation to ban torture?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people. The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people. And we are aggressively doing that. We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.

And, therefore, we’re working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible — more possible to do our job. There’s an enemy that lurks and plots and plans, and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet, we’ll aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law. And that’s why you’re seeing members of my administration go and brief the Congress. We want to work together in this matter. We — all of us have an obligation, and it’s a solemn obligation and a solemn responsibility. And I’m confident that when people see the facts, that they’ll recognize that we’ve — they’ve got more work to do, and that we must protect ourselves in a way that is lawful.

Note the logic of the statement:

  1. Our country is at war
  2. The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people
  3. Read more →

Yoo and Academic Freedom

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Via Marty Lederman, John Yoo’s Dean, Chris Edley, writes a provocative (though unsurprising) letter regarding John Yoo and academic freedom (h/t scribe). I’ve interspersed some comments and questions between the excerpts below.

Professor Yoo began teaching at Berkeley Law in 1993, received tenure in 1999, and then took a leave of absence to work in the Bush Administration. He returned in 2004, and remains a very successful teacher and prolific (though often controversial) scholar. Because this is a public university, he enjoys not only security of employment and academic freedom, but also First Amendment and Due Process rights.

As I’ve shared with a number of people in comments before, I had a conversation with the Provost of a prestigious private university recently; we spoke about his efforts to ensure the law faculty included good, but conservative, thinkers. I raised Yoo and it was clear that Yoo has become every Dean’s worst hiring nightmare–the young, controversial, but apparently brilliant academic who goes on to do horrible things in government after he has gotten tenure. This whole question would be different, after all, had Yoo not had tenure before he had written these memos.

That said, I’m disappointed that Edley didn’t say more about my biggest worry: Yoo’s teaching. It’s one thing to keep a controversial scholar on faculty because of academic freedom. It’s one thing for that scholar to (as Edley describes elsewhere in his memo) air unpopular views. It’s another thing to have someone who–more than anyone save David Addington on Bush’s legal staff–assaulted the Constitution, doing real damage in the short and potentially long term.

It’s one thing to guard Yoo’s right to write controversial academic articles. It’s yet another to have him teach future lawyers Constitutional Law.

So I’m curious how Edley measures Yoo’s teaching when he compliments it here? Is Yoo well-liked by students? Challenging? Rigorous? But just as importantly, is he teaching future lawyers to do as he has done, deliver the goods for the client even if doing so fundamentally conflicts with the Constitution? Is Yoo training the next generation of lawyers who will approach the law and the Constitution itself with a utilitarian attitude? Do students like Yoo because he teaches them to be the best sophists they can be? I don’t know the answer, but I’d sure like to.

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