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Senate Torture Probe Uncovers Missing Emails
NEW YORK -- The Justice Department investigation into whether the authors of the George W. Bush-era "torture memos" were guilty of professional misconduct did not have full access to the emails used by those lawyers and by other key figures in the investigation, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former counsel to the Vice President David Addington.
Amnesty International activists protest near the U.S. Capitol. They are calling for an independent investigation into alleged human rights abuses by the Bush administration. The missing emails came to light during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee Friday. Committee chairman Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont, described the vanishing emails as "suspicious".
He urged the sole witness before the committee, Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary G. Grindler, to investigate further to determine who deleted the emails and whether they could be recovered.
The email issue recalled the 2006 investigation into the firing of eight U.S. Attorneys during the administration of President George W. Bush, and whether the White House pressured the Justice Department to cover up the details of the firings.
Administration officials insisted that millions of emails from senior Bush figures including political advisor Karl Rove were irretrievably missing. The emails were later recovered. The disclosures were important factors in the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The Justice Department's investigation into the torture memos, conducted by the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), was highly critical of its authors but concluded that they were guilty of poor judgment rather than professional misconduct meriting referral to state legal organizations for possible disbarment.
The authors of the memos were Jay Bybee, who was deputy assistant attorney general, and his assistant, John Yoo. Both worked in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Bybee is now a federal judge and Yoo is a law professor.
OLC is one of the most important offices within the Department of Justice. It is to this office that the president directs questions about the legality of actions the administration plans to take or policies it intends to adopt.
Human Rights First, a legal advocacy group that has closely followed this issue, is urging members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to address questions that remain unanswered following the release of Department of Justice's OPR report.
HRF called the conduct of Bybee and Yoo "unethical and unprofessional."
The organization noted that the Judiciary Committee hearing "should lay the groundwork for further investigation and address the need to empanel a non-partisan commission to conduct a comprehensive review of these policies."
Daphne Eviatar, a Human Rights First attorney who monitored the Senate hearing, told IPS she was "disappointed" that "there was no indication that DOJ has any intention of following up on the evidence revealed in the report indicating that the Office of Legal Counsel was pressured by the White House to create legal justifications for illegal techniques that the administration had already decided to use."
"And if that's true, then we're talking about a criminal conspiracy, which the department is obligated to investigate further," she added. "I was disappointed to hear that the Justice Department's attitude towards the matter was that it's now over."
Leahy's call for a further investigation drew strong objections from the Committee's ranking Republican member, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and another Republican member, Senator John Cornyn of Texas. Both strongly defended the actions taken by the Bush administration following the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001 as being necessary to protect U.S. national security.
HRF said the OPR report "highlights the lack of independent judgment and perverse legal reasoning that shaped the 'torture memos' and underscores the need for an independent review of how torture and other abuse of prisoners were authorized after 9/11."
"It provides the clearest picture to date of a flawed process by which the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to render independent legal advice, was instead subverted to provide conclusions justifying detainee abuse that principals within the Bush administration wanted to hear," the group said.
The organization said the report also highlights in detail the flawed legal analysis by the three principal authors of the legal memoranda who gave a green light to the use of torture techniques documented in the CIA Inspector General's report made public in August.
It sharply criticized the quality of the legal work in the memoranda, concluding that "of the lawyers who wrote these memos, Yoo committed intentional professional misconduct and Bybee acted in reckless disregard of his obligation to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice."
"Although the Associate Deputy Attorney General declined to adopt this opinion, choosing instead to characterize the lawyers' work as an exercise of 'poor judgment', the fact remains that the individuals who investigated and analyzed the evidence found that Yoo's misconduct was 'intentional' and that Bybee's was 'reckless.' That calls into question the good faith of both of these lawyers, and demands further investigation," HRF charged.
Following his earlier review of the OPR report, as well as the May 2004 CIA Inspector General's report that detailed appalling abuses committed against prisoners in the CIA's interrogation program, Attorney General Eric Holder announced in August 2009 the appointment of a prosecutor to conduct a preliminary review into only those prisoner abuses that exceeded the bounds of what was deemed permissible in the flawed OLC "torture memos."
"The United States, to its credit, has a strong record of criticizing arbitrary detention and detainee abuse in other countries. In order to restore its credibility and leadership on human rights, the United States must engage in a full accounting of how policies of cruelty were authorized. A thorough and public examination of the past is vital in order to guard against future authorization of abuse in the name of national security," Massimino concluded.
Other human rights and civil liberties groups took similar positions.
Laura W. Murphy,director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said, "It is critical today that senators make clear that, given the information in the OPR report and the wealth of other evidence in the public domain, the Justice Department's criminal investigation into the torture program must be broad enough to include those who authorized and legally sanctioned these shameful acts."
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28 Comments so far
Show Allemails are recoverable by those who know how to do it... if you don't destroy the hard drive, they are recoverable.
Don't give'em ideas!!!
emails will exist and linger in several possible places - the PC drives of sender and receiver, the servers of the enterprise, the servers of the email provider or email intermediaries, in routine backup tapes or drives, many of which are sent to off-site secure storage facilities. emails and other files will oftne be recoverable even if officially erased. It would be quite a feat to get rid of all traces. That's why I never believed that the missing emails were really missing. It was a story for people who know little about computers.
Joe
Germany had legitimate security concerns after its preemptive invasions of Poland and France. It needed to torture to get information about imminent French underground terrorist attacks. After all, French terrorists killed hundreds or even thousands of German soldiers. And France was right on the German border, making Germany's security concerns even more compelling. Republicans, being the scholars of history that they are, have not forgotten the lessons of World War II.
Why don't you find a time machine, dial in the time of Nazi Germany, hit send, join up with Hitler, and spare the rest of us in this time of your presence.
Don't recognize sarcasm when you see it? Or do you yourself support the use of torture?
The point is, for those sarcastically challenged, that we have in a very real sense become what we fought against in WWII. Our reasoning is no different than, and based on the same premises, as those used by the Germans in WWII. I certainly do NOT support the use of torture. I was merely drawing a sarcastic analogy.
Apology accepted.
Kakistocrat February 28th, 2010 5:52 pm -- I got it first time around. But the point needs to be expressly laid out: the conservatives really believe torture "works." As long as that's the case, and they don't buy into Kant's categorical imperative, they'll justify torturing detainees. The ways to combat that: prove that torture doesn't work, and prosecute people who actively planned and carried out illegal torture of detainees (taking away law licenses wouldn't be prosecuting, but it would be a decisive step in that direction).
lay off yoo and bybee; they were just following orders.
Bill Clinton was a sitting President when his law license was pulled when he lied about Paula Jones.
Now we have a sitting judge Jay Bybee on the 9th circuit the second highest court in the land who is accused of "poor judgement"for advising Bush that torture was legal in the USA but Judge Jay Bybees license is NOT pulled.
PEOPLE MUST INSIST THAT THOSE WHO DECLARED TORTURE TO BE LEGAL IN THE USA BE PUNISHED BY REMOVAL OF THE LAW LICENSE.
call elected officials at the capitol switchboard ;
202-225-3121 and thank Senator Leahy as well as inform your own Congresspeople about this important issue and call the White House 1-202-456-1111 and tell Obama you dissapprove of the Department of Justice decision to give a slap on the wrist for this serious mistake.
THIS IS YOUR REPUTATION as a US citizen which is being dragged thru the mud-- the Nurnberg trials were conducted by Robert Jackson and he was appointed to the Supreme Court. Will this now be meaningless is what Professor of Law Jonathan Turley of Georgetown U asked?
Metamorph:
Just a small point, here. Yoo and Bybee were not actually advising Bush that torture was legal in those memos. They were providing retroactive "cover" for torture which had already been taking place for some time.
Yawn.
Pardon me for dragging a metaphor out to logical absurdity, but let's face it: it wouldn't make any difference if they found a shopping cart full of smoking guns, each bearing bloody fingerprints from all of the elected and appointed members of the Bush Crime Family, PNAC, etc.-- and Obama and Holder's equally bloody fingerprints all over the shopping cart, along with a few fresh drone casings and necklaces of bloody Af-Pak-Ye baby teeth.
This would provoke a ripple of responses from the tiny community of worthwhile independent journalists, including segments on "Democracy Now"; Scott Horton, Jeremy Scahill, Andy Worthington, et al would expertly connect the dots and make the case for bringing these treacherous malefactors to justice.
And that would be THAT. If the corporate media covered it at all, it would be a matter of taking cursory and transient notice of a lingering contretemps with no particular relevance to the pressing issues of the moment. Garrison Keillor would pen another homely paean to the need to Move Forward forgetfully.
I wish I were wrong; I'm still drawn to the fantasy that a virtuous person or persons with actual authority and power, and most importantly the will to pursue justice, could bring the rotten Amerikan Tower of Babel crashing down.
But this latest stinky disclosure will wind up on the shelf with the others-- a row of rotten cheeses growing mold and gathering dust.
· Yr Obd't Servant
I think every little thing that is revealed helps to build public consciousness of what's going on. There is widespread skepticism about our government, which means little without organization, but is a prerequisite.
Joe
Agree, this info doesn't raise an eyebrow with most Americans. They live in an unending self-denial that our government is anything but a beacon of Democracy and never-ending pursuer of liberty for all. The best I can say is that fortunately because of the internet, the evidence of torture, government spying... are being collected for a history lesson that will someday be told.
Time for another 'smoking gun' hunt?
Bring America Back !!!!
****Of course they're missing, Cheney's no dummy, thats
exactly what the Repubbies learned from the Nixon Watergate years==don't turn over tapes, documentation, or evidence of slush funds==destroy the suckers !!!! Or just refuse to give it up as did King George !!
**And don't worry ACLU. Justice Dept won't investigate or come up with nuttin' on those emails===Team Obama is still playing the "No-Rear-View-Mirror" game, because all this stuff makes Pelosi look like a fruitcake taking criminal impeachment off the table, & all !!
**Prez Barak knows when he looks in the mirror there are
a bunch of guilty Demmies popping up there too, one of which is heading up his Dept of State !! Did they die like the Truth Commission, remember that one ???
**Plus, the knowledge of the missing emails has been out now for about 2 years==just where have our so called reps been ??
We got Pearl Harbor, the attack on the Turner Joy and Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, the long gun man Oswald, the WMD's of Saddam, and Sirhan Sirhan another lone gunman, and Building 7 of the WTC.
Any questions?
IF no one is punished for the immoral torture performed by the USA, then the USA will torture again, and again, and again.
SOMEBODY has to be held to account.
WAKE UP OBAMA!!
"after all the rationales....
The True Purpose of Torture ...is to Torture"...
it was said by someone that studied its pscyhology. i forget who.
in the meantime -- the much =touted Capture of a Top Taliban leader (baradar) ...by the
USA/NATO/Pakistani forces which was front page news 2 weeks ago including bragging about how he was already "cooperating" with information...turns out to have been a DUD...
according to a truthout.org article...
the "CIA is Frustrated" that the pakistanis clearly intend to physically keep the prisoner and not hand him over to the USA...and that he is going to stay in his country and not go to the USA"....
and clearly frustrated that "the CIA has been denied access for interrogation" to the prisoner...."and the jailings of taliban commanders is more like a SAFE HAVEN than actual imprisonment...being allowed to stay in contact with their outside Taliban Counterparts".....
the USA Empire's cohorts or "partners" keep MISBEHAVING.....and seem to have a mind of their own.......isn't that a surprise?............
oh -- wait -- they're PAKISTANIS with their own country - they're NOT AMERICANS!!!!
What we have done to others, viz. torture, others can do to us.
What a headline! Explosive stuff. ITS SUSPICIOUS? What does that indicate to anybody?
if it's suspicious, detain it indefinitely!
Torture is not fighting terrorism ... Torture is terrorism.
NearlyNormalWarren March 1st, 2010 9:29 am -- Now that's something I've not heard before. And it's obviously a good point. People like Cheney are terrorizing, or think they're terrorizing, Muslims by suggesting that the U.S. will torture them if they're suspected of being terrorists and get caught by U.S. agents. Obama's refusal to "look back" sends the same terrorizing message -- that torturing Muslims is okay with him, notwithstanding his public pronouncements to the contrary.
I think they take some sort of strange drug when they get in office...a murdermind drug. They lose all sense of humanity, believe they are above the laws of land and God, the kind of face one sees in Randy Flagg or Hannibal Lector. These people become evil and we are working to battle it in a not too effective way. Bush Sr never got his for the things he did, Clinton for his sanctions and killing of thousands of children, etc...adinfinitum...now we have an incredibly scary scenario with a supposed president for change and compassion, and we may have bought into the scariest Ludlum/Kingesque novel yet. If you haven't read Caldwell's 'Devil's Advocate' yet, you may want to know where this is going. She knew it in 1952. Much scarier than '1984'.
Keep digging, keep marching, keep your friends close.
PS...You savvy computer geeks..thank you. I knew that was true, just needed confirmation. And OBTW, Israel has two private companies with equipment that records and saves EVERYTHING, from the White House to your home phone.
It is all tied in , the Mar. 10, 2007 report about FBI Agents illegally obtaining records,the U.S. attorneys who were fired, The prisoners who were tortured and the over 300 U.S. muslim citizens who have been arrested as terrorist suspects because the Bush Administration needed support to renew the Patriot Act.I know for a fact that one of those terrorism prosecutions was a Muslim who dedicated his life to saving lives and he had nothing to do with terrorism,a word that was not allowed to be mentioned at his trial. This denied him the right to a fair trial where he could prove that terrorist link charges were bogus. I know that torture is extremely painful and should never be permitted but I also believe that sending a man who did good works to prison for life because he saved the lives of children in Iraq who when they grew up fought the invaders of Iraq during the preemptive strike is tantamount to torture.
In '45, when Spring had sprung,
The guilty Japanese gently swung.....