Report: No discipline for Bush's "torture" memo writers

Feb 20, 2010, 3:08 GMT

Washington - Lawyers for the Bush administration who wrote the legal rationale for water boarding and other harsh interrogation methods of terrorism suspects will not face discipline, according to information sent Friday to US lawmakers by the Justice Department.

The Washington Post, which obtained a copy of the correspondence, reported that justice officials found that John Yoo and Jay Bybee had 'exercised poor judgement' but did not need to face disciplinary actions by state legal disciplinary panels.

The report was conducted by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which ruled that Yoo and Bybee had not violated legal ethic rules when they wrote memos authorizing the interrogation techniques which in the eyes of many represented torture.

An earlier report from the same department had found the lawyers had committed 'professional misconduct.' But that report was overruled by David Margolis, a career lawyer in the Deputy Attorney General's office, according to the documents sent to legislators Friday.

The 'poor judgement' finding triggered calls from human rights organizations for a broader, deeper criminal investigation into the conduct of Yoo, Bybee and a third lawyer, Steven Bradbury.

'Justice Department lawyers have an obligation to uphold the law, so when they write legal opinions that were designed to provide legal cover for torture, they need to be held accountable with more than a slap on the wrist,' said Andrea Prasow, the senior counter-terrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) called on the Justice Department to 'expand its criminal investigation of the torture programme.'

The Senate judiciary committee is to hold a hearing on the report on February 26.

The 2003 memo sent by Yoo to the Pentagon exempted the military from federal laws against assault and other crimes. Yoo wrote that the Justice Department had determined that then-president George W Bush's war-time authority overode laws protecting people from harmful treatment during interrogations, giving the US military the right to physically abuse al-Qaeda detainees in the war on terrorism.

The ACLU noted Friday that the 'Bush administration's torture programme' had done 'extraordinary damage to America's moral standing.'

In August, President Barack Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, appointed a special prosecutor to re-examine nearly a dozen cases of CIA interrogators who allegedly abused terrorism detainees in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Yoo is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Bybee is a federal appeals court judge based in Nevada.