Yoo, Bybee may be Disbarred for Torture Memos

Last night on Rachel, Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff revealed that an internal DOJ OPR report strongly criticizes the various memo's justifying and excusing "Enhanced Interrogation" techniques as "sloppy and "unethical".



But it gets even worse, Isikoff explains...

First there is the fact that former Attorney General Mukasey deliberately delayed the report

Mr. Jarrett’s office completed a draft report late last year, but Michael B. Mukasey, the attorney general at the time, and his deputy, Mark R. Filip, insisted that it not be considered final until written responses from Mr. Yoo, Judge Bybee and Mr. Bradbury could be incorporated. The three are now in the process of submitting their responses, according to an official who agreed to speak about the internal report only on condition of anonymity.

Officials said the report assesses the reasoning used in justifying the harsh methods and pressure from the White House to reach particular conclusions. The Office of Professional Responsibility can refer cases for criminal investigation, but legal experts say a more likely possibility is a referral to bar associations for potential disciplinary action.

I think it might be somewhat difficult to continue serving on the Federal Bench - as Jay Bybee currently does - if you aren't a lawyer anymore. (He coule possibly be Impeached!) The same goes for John Yoo who is currently "teaching" law at Berkeley and being on staff at Chapman University). (Correction: Apparently NOT - Yoo has tenure at Berkeley, and would need to be convicted of a crime to be booted!)

Once these responses are received, hopefully, the final report will land on the desk of AG Eric Holder who has already stated not only is Waterboarding is Torture, but that the President doesn't have some "Magical Article 2 Power" to make torture legal with the wave of his pen.



In his appearance on Rachel, Isikoff suggests that the reason disbarment may be the recommendation of the report may be because rather than being the honest opinion and result of an honest view of the law, the opinions from Yoo, Bybee and their boss Steven Bradbury may have been specifically crafted to reach the White Houses desired conclusions. Apparently the reports doesn't recommend prosecution - but if it did there are plenty of fertiles grounds. If Isikoff is correct, the memos weren't legal guidance for the White House to follow - they were excuses and legal cover for the White House to get away with War Crimes.

If that's true - It could be prosecuted as Conspiracy under 18 USC 2441.

(A) Torture.— The act of a person who commits, or conspires or attempts to commit, an act specifically intended 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 for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession, punishment, intimidation, coercion, or any reason based on discrimination of any kind.

What happens when you violate 2441? This:

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

The ACLU has just released formerly classified documents uncovering at least two detainees who were beaten and tortured to death at Bagram AFB in AFghanistan. If - and that's a BIG IF - the tactics used can be traced back to techniques authorized by Bush under justifications provided by Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury - we're talking Grey-bar Hotel and maybe even Old Sparky for the lot of them.

Investigation of two deaths at Bagram. Both detainees were determined to have been killed by pulmonary embolism caused as a result of standing chained in place, sleep depravation and dozens of beatings by guards and possibly interrogators. (Also reveals the use of torture at Gitmo and American-Afghani prisons in Kabul )

The OPR reports doesn't attempt to make such a connection - but perhaps someone should. Particularly since previously released autopsy reports show that those two were only the tip of the iceberg.

""There is no question that U.S. interrogations have resulted in deaths,"" said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. ""High-ranking officials who knew about the torture and sat on their hands and those who created and endorsed these policies must be held accountable. America must stop putting its head in the sand and deal with the torture scandal that has rocked our military.""

The documents released today include 44 autopsies and death reports as well as a summary of autopsy reports of individuals apprehended in Iraq and Afghanistan. The documents show that detainees died during or after interrogations by Navy Seals, Military Intelligence and ""OGA"" (Other Governmental Agency) -- a term, according to the ACLU, that is commonly used to refer to the CIA.

According to the documents, 21 of the 44 deaths were homicides. Eight of the homicides appear to have resulted from abusive techniques used on detainees, in some instances, by the CIA, Navy Seals and Military Intelligence personnel. The autopsy reports list deaths by ""strangulation,"" ""asphyxiation"" and ""blunt force injuries."" An overwhelming majority of the so-called ""natural deaths"" were attributed to ""Arteriosclerotic Cardiovascular Disease.""

Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury have alot to answer for - but then Justice is probably far too much to expect. At the very least we can hope for an Independant Counsel for War Crimes! (Crossing fingers) Pretty Please Mr. Holder?

Vyan


In the name of the Holy
The greatest sins are done
The righteous point a finger
Like the barrel of a gun

From the song "Justified" by ME!

John Yoo Blasts Obama on Torture Ban - Incriminates Bush on War Crimes

In an WSJ Op-ed former OLC Attorney John Yoo blasts President Barack Obama for removing the One and Only Effective Tool for protecting America from the horrors of Terrorism which is - well - using Terrorism.

While these actions will certainly please his base -- gone are the cries of an "imperial presidency" -- they will also seriously handicap our intelligence agencies from preventing future terrorist attacks. In issuing these executive orders, Mr. Obama is returning America to the failed law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before Sept. 11, 2001.

You mean the policy that captured, tried and successfully imprisoned Terry Nichols, Ramzi Yousef, the "Blind Sheikh" and executed Timothy McVeigh under Clinton or the "Ok, Now you've covered you ass" policy of Bush?

He's also drying up the most valuable sources of intelligence on al Qaeda, which, according to CIA Director Michael Hayden, has come largely out of the tough interrogation of high-level operatives during the early years of the war.

Michael Hayden would be the former head of the NSA who illegally spied on Everyone? Yeah, we should take his advice.

Not only does Yoo have a rather distorted view of the past, he can see the future too.

The question Mr. Obama should have asked right after the inaugural parade was: What will happen after we capture the next Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abu Zubaydah? Instead, he took action without a meeting of his full national security staff, and without a legal review of all the policy options available to meet the threats facing our country.

What such a review would have made clear is that the civilian law-enforcement system cannot prevent terrorist attacks.

It can't? You mean that it wasn't civilian law enforcement that prevented the Millenium Attacks on the L.A.X., the bombing of Lincoln and Holland tunnels and Project Bojinka (A plot to blow up 12 planes over the Pacific simultaneously, led by WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef)?

It's not like regular cops, the border patrol and the FBI foiled all these plans using fully legal and humane methods.... except that they did!

What is needed are the tools to gain vital intelligence, which is why, under President George W. Bush, the CIA could hold and interrogate high-value al Qaeda leaders. On the advice of his intelligence advisers, the president could have authorized coercive interrogation methods like those used by Israel and Great Britain in their antiterrorism campaigns. (He could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.)

So Bush and Rice spent 9 months blowing off Richard Clarke who urged we need to take urgent action on al Qeada, and they blew off George Tenet and the August 6th PDB which said that al Qeada was likely to "Hijack Planes and attack New York and Washington" - and their only recourse after 9-11 - is to use Torture - and Yoo Verifies that Bush did exactly that at least three times!. Interesting that he wouldn't say any of that when he was under oath before congress.

Coincidence? I think not.

Then Yoo really starts talking some straight up nonsense.

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America.

No, it doesn't Mr. Boalt Hall Professor. From Media Matters via Thinkprogres.

In fact, the Army Field Manual explicitly permits good cop-bad cop interrogations under the name of “Mutt and Jeff” interrogations, which involve two interrogators “display[ing] opposing personalities and attitudes toward the source.” The Field Manual says the “goal of this technique is to make the source identify with one of the interrogators and thereby establish[ing] rapport and cooperation.”

Wanna go 0 for 6 Professor Yoo? I thought you did.

Mr. Obama has also ordered that al Qaeda leaders are to be protected from "outrages on personal dignity" and "humiliating and degrading treatment" in accord with the Geneva Conventions.

No, actually that Order came from the Supreme Court in Hamdan V Rumsfeld. It's also in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006. Obama is simply following and implementing the law - unlike yourself.

His new order amounts to requiring -- on penalty of prosecution -- that CIA interrogators be polite. Coercive measures are unwisely banned with no exceptions, regardless of the danger confronting the country.

Y'know what - according to the people who actually perform interrogations, including former Special Forces Operative Matthew Alexander, the man who'se techniques led to the neutralization of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi head of Al Qeada In Iraq - Being Polite Works! - while getting all Jack Bauer with it actually puts us and our troops at far greater risk.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse.

...

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

More from Alexander on Countdown.


More Yoo.

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial.

All of which are parts of - um - Our Constitution, y'now that thing you swore and oath to protect and defend as a member of the U.S. Government?

Here's the thing, Yoo notes that the Israelis and the British have used these techniques (against the PLO and IRA) respectively - but he leaves out the fact that both of them found that they generally created a ton of Blowback. Just as Alexander points out - it energizes the forces against you when you use inhumane techniques, Israel is having the problem right now after hitting Gaza with White-Phosphorus and destroying the UN headquarters.

He forgets that in WWII many Italian and even some German soldiers were more than eager to surrender because they knew they would be treated well by American Troops, and this was even true during the first Gulf War when many Iraqi soldiers gave up immediately upon encountering our forces with fighting. Contrast those facts to the rise of the insurgency following Abu Ghraib - and you have the answer to his hypothetical question of "risk vs reward" on the banning of torture in other coercive interrogation techniques. Following the law saves lives - Our Lives and Their Lives Too!

Yoo would seem to believe that techniques such as water-boarding are NOT torture simply because he wrote a memo saying so which re-defined "Torture" as treatment leading to imminent organ failure or death.

Here's the thing, if you stuff a pillow or a rag over someone's nose and mouth - how long will it take for their lungs to fail from lack of oxygen? And if you add water to that - how much quicker will they fail as the person DROWNS? The reason people respond so quickly to waterboarding is because - It's Attempted Murder. They're Killing YOU!

Oh sure, it doesn't leave any bruises - which allows for deniability, something that the Khmer Rouge certainly loved - but it's still attempted murder. The only thing that prevents from being full-on murder is whether they stop soon enough. And it's not that hard to cross that line.

According to Human Rights Watch - this type of "Murder" is not a hypothetical question from their 2006 Report

Since August 2002, nearly 100 detainees have died while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global “war on terror.” According to the U.S. military’s own classifications, 34 of these cases are suspected or confirmed homicides; Human Rights First has identified another 11 in which the facts suggest death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention. In close to half the deaths Human Rights First surveyed, the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced. Overall, eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.

Ya hear that Billo? Get it Johnny? Tortured TO DEATH. NOT "Near Organ Failure" - Not "Simulated" or "Feels Like" - Dead!!

Estimates from the ACLU's review of various autopsy reports are far higher, more than 44 detainees tortured to death. If true, that's 44 War Crimes all punishable by Execution under U.S. Law.

Those deaths - all of them in addition to thousands of needlessly injured, wounded and dead U.S. soldiers - lay directly at the feet on John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales and George W. Bush.

Eat it up Johnny.

Vyan


P.S. Jack Bauer is a Fracking Tool - not a "Hero".

Update from Comments:
FYI - John Yoo's Homepage at UC Berkeley

Torture Hearings : Conyers vs Yoo and Addington

This Youtube clip shows the questions asked off John Yoo and David Addington by Rep John Conyers - and it's not pretty.

Questions asked:

Can the President order that a suspects child be tortured?

Is there anything that the President could not order to be done to a suspect, if he believed it neccesary for national defense?

Can the President order that someone be buried alive?

Was there a Principles meeting to approve interrogations techniques?

Do you believe that the Unitary Executive Theory allows the President to violate the law?

Questions answered:

None.

These guys know they have to dance and dance hard to avoid what might be serious culpability for advising the violation of hundreds of federal laws.

As I've written about previous, it appears based on the reporting of the LA Times that various and sundry Yoo Memo's of infamy, which along with Jay Bybee's memos it was stated that torture isn't "torture" until someone is about die were written after such practices had already been implimented and performed on persons such as Abu Zubaydah.

... Yoo's account of how and why the torture memos were crafted may not hold up. Congress is preparing hearings into the subject, and they have invited Yoo to testify. International law scholar Philippe Sands and other writers have punched holes in Yoo's claims about the facts. It increasingly appears that the Bush interrogation program was already being used before Yoo was asked to write an opinion. He may therefore have provided after-the-fact legal cover. That would help explain why Yoo strained to take so many implausible positions in the memos.

And that is largely why his testimony today made essentially no sense. Now it's clear that John Conyers was being more than a little rough with both Yoo and Addington - but to understand why maybe we need to listen to a bit from Law Professor Phillip Sands.

Sands: From these conversations it became clear to me that the Administration has spun a narrative that is false. It claims that the impetous for the new interrogation techniques came from the "bottom up
". That is not true, the abuse was the result of pressures and actions driven from the very highest levels of the administration. The administration claims that it simply followed the law. My investigation indicated that the administration, driven by ideology, consciously sought legal advice to set aside international constrainst on detainee interroragations. The administration relied on a small number of political appointees, lawyers with no real background on military law, with extreme view on executive power and an overriding contempt for international rules, such as the Geneva Conventions. These are rules that the United States has done more than any other country to promote and put in place.

As a result of these actions War Crimes Were Committed I have no doubt that Common Article III of Geneva was violated, as long as various conventions of the 1984 Convention Prohibiting Torture.

What Sands describes is an Ideological Cabal imbedded deep in the White House intent of bending and twisting definitions of the law to allow for the use of torture and the commission of War Crimes, which - if the subject dies - is punishable by the Death Penalty.

So read several of the 44 US military autopsy reports on the ACLU website -evidence of extensive abuse of US detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan 2002 through 2004. Anthony Romero, Executive Director of ACLU stated, "There is no question that US interrogations have resulted in deaths." ACLU attorney Amrit Sing adds, "These documents present irrefutable evidence that US operatives tortured detainees to death during interrogations."

It's no wonder that they will now then do everything they can to try and GET AWAY WITH IT.

So far at least 24 detainees - are likely far more - have died in custody as a result of mistreatment and abuse - much of that stemming from interrogation techniques that were legally justified and excused by Yoo and Addington.

They are War Criminals.

And tough hard questioning by Conyers is the least they deserve.

Vyan