DOJ report blasts John Yoo for not citing high court opinion in torture memo

The Public Record:


A Department of Justice investigation into the legal work John Yoo and two other former DOJ officials performed for the Bush administration was harshly critical of the former agency attorneys for failing to cite legal precedent and existing case law in legal opinions they prepared for the of Bush administration on a wide-range of controversial policy issues, including torture and domestic surveillance, according to several legal sources who have been briefed on the contents of the still classified report.

Moreover, the report prepared by H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), that carefully traced the genesis of one part of an August 2002 memorandum prepared by Yoo and signed by his boss Jay Bybee that provided the Bush administration with the legal justification to authorize interrogators to subject suspected terrorists to outlawed techniques, such as waterboarding, was drafted after the brutal method was used against one prisoner at least a month earlier, these sources said.

The implication of that specific finding appears to be that Yoo, in close coordination with senior White House officials, prepared the Aug. 1, 2002 memos to provide interrogators with legal cover for using methods—as well as ways to avoid prosecution—that were not yet explicitly authorized, these sources said.

Yoo did not respond to numerous messages left at his office at Chapman University School of Law, where Yoo in now a visiting professor, nor did he reply to e-mails about the report’s findings. Messages left for Bybee at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco were also not returned.

And this:

Yoo’s claims that Ashcroft was kept in the loop, however, are contradicted by documents and in interviews Jarrett’s OPR investigators conducted with officials who said Yoo worked closely with David Addington, Cheney’s attorney, and Gonzales on the August 2002 torture memo and kept Ashcroft in the dark. Though Ashcroft protested to the White House, Bush officials continued to bypass him, legal sources familiar with the OPR report said.

Last week, Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse sent a letter to Jarrett to inquire about the circumstances that resulted in the report being kept under wraps and asked when it will be released. They asked Jarrett to respond by Monday.