SALON

Wednesday, Feb 18, 2009 11:15 AM UTC

Did Bush’s attorney general hide internal dissent over torture?

In a letter to the Department of Justice, Sens. Durbin and Whitehouse request an update on the status of the Office of Professional Responsibility's report on torture.

By

Topics: Department of Justice, Torture, Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., Sheldon Whitehouse, Eric Holder,

The Bush administration had a problem when it decided to embark upon a torture program. Torture, after all, violates both U.S. and international law. The Bush team’s solution was to ask some attorneys at the Justice Department to change the definition of torture. If it’s not “torture,” it’s not illegal, and no one can be held accountable.

But what if that legal opinion isn’t worth the paper it’s written on? That’s what two Senate Democrats want to know.

The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is, effectively, the executive branch’s lawyer. When White House officials want an official legal opinion, they call up OLC. If you were in the market for a favorable “reinterpretation” of the law, you might look for some pliant political appointees at OLC; hence, the Bush administration’s so-called torture memos.

On Aug. 1, 2002, OLC issued the torture memos after input from Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, who were at the time, respectively, White House counsel and counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney. The memos defined torture away, calling it treatment “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

But just as there were DOJ attorneys telling the Bush administration what it wanted to hear, there were also other DOJ lawyers looking over their colleagues’ shoulders. There is an office inside the Justice Department responsible for, among other things, preventing government attorneys from issuing questionable legal opinions just to make the White House happy. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility acts as a sort of internal watchdog.

According to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, the Office of Professional Responsibility last fall issued a draft report that “sharply criticized” the OLC attorneys behind the torture memos, Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Stephen Bradbury. The report is not toothless. Had he so chosen, then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey could have forwarded the findings to state bar associations for possible disciplinary actions against the attorneys involved. Instead, says Isikoff, Mukasey objected to the draft, apparently stalling completion.

So what became of that report? That is among the questions Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., ask in the letter reproduced below. “We write to inquire about the status of the Office of Professional Responsibility’s (OPR) investigation of Justice Department attorneys who provide legal advice regarding waterboarding and other abusive interrogation techniques.”

When it comes to the torture memos, former Bush administration officials, including ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft, have argued: 1) We were really scared after 9/11 so give us a break; and 2) Reasonable people disagree about the logic of the OLC memos.

Critics have responded with: 1) That’s no excuse to jettison the rule of law and the time-tested tools of gathering effective intelligence; and 2) No, they don’t.



 

Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon based in Washington, D.C. Read his other articles here. More Mark Benjamin.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 3 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations