The CIA demanded legal cover for their interrogations.

This was no doubt passed along by the White House to the Justice Dept. The Justice Dept. then provided the legal cover, to which Bybee's signature is attached.

CIA now gets to say "we did our due dilligence, it was legal", the WH gets to say "We asked the Justice Dept. and they said it was legal." And now Bybee gets to say "Torture is legal, I make no apologies."

It's clear that Bybee's best defense is to claim that the memos speak to his informed legal opinion. And that is why he broke his silence. He is protecting himself by claiming that even if the claim was idiotic and seemingly farcical, it is what he believed and continues to believe. Otherwise, he is setting himself up for conspiracy charges.

He is an evil liar.

Maybe when this is all over he can be put in charge of the "curing homosexuality" projects at the BYU.

Nonsense. Setting aside the fact that there is no uniform agreement on what constitutes torture, the whole point of the memos was for Bybee to give his opinion on what he thought was legal. For a prosecutor to show malfeasance here, he'd have to prove Bybee was actually advocating breaking the law.

I've read some conservative commentators who think Bybee made a poor argument. That's fair game. But to say he committed conspiracy to break the law is really silly.

Yeah, it's really silly to think that Bybee was ordered to produce a document that provided legal justification for torture.

Let me put on my tinfoil hat for even thinking of such an outrageously improbable thing.

I submit that no sane prosecutor would attempt to bring charges on such a flimsy premise without more evidence than we now have.

You're talking about using the law to punish political differences. That's dangerous ground.

that's why we need an independent prosecutor. to investigate this.

You saying it is silly doesn't make it silly.

Let's take an extreme hypothetical: let's say Bybee wrote a memo that said it is ok for the president to commit murder. It clearly is not ok, but Bybee wrote a document purporting to give him legal justification to commit murder. That would certainly be conspiracy to commit murder (he wrote the document knowing it would be relied upon and knowing what he wrote wasn't an accurate statement of the law).

Now back to this scenario: Bybee knew torture is illegal (he mentions that fact in his memo). His employer (the DOJ) had prosecuted many people in the past (successfully) for violating that law by waterboarding American citizens. Waterboarding has been declared torture by the US government multiple times in the past and has prosecuted people who waterboarded others. Now Bybee wants to claim he didn't know it really was torture or that the position his employer took routinely in the past was that it was torture? He knew it would be relied upon (that is the point of a legal memo), and knew (or should have known) that it was illegal. Conspiracy to commit torture. It isn't a stretch at all.

Waters is exactly right when he says that is why Bybee is publicly claiming he really believed what he wrote. That is his only possible defense (if ignorance can be a defense to this form of conspiracy). What he is saying publicly doesn't square with what he is saying privately, by the way.

Of course not. Which is why I explained my reasoning.

Totally absurd. Again, setting aside the fact that murder is far more clearly defined than torture, I still don't see the "conspiracy" here. Were Bybee to have written a memo that stupid, he should be fired, not prosecuted. Give me a break.

Again, I'm no lawyer, but the commentary I've read suggests that a prosecutor would have to prove he knowingly advocated illegal behavior. It is impossible to come to that conclusion (based on the info we have) without a tinfoil hat. In fact, the whole point of the memo was to legally justify it.

No prosecutor is going to touch this. Moreover, the American people are not interested in seeing it happen either. This is a lose-lose for Obama, politically and legally.

Is there not a little bit of hypocrisy in sending low-level Nazi concentration camp collaborators to death sentences and life-in-prison while at the same time stating "no one who committed torture under orders will be held responsible"?

Bybee is feeling the heat, because if anyone will be the designated scapegoat, it is him. But he must be comforted by the knowledge that both the GOP and leaders in the Democratic party were complicit. That is, the people that hold the power to take him down, are also aligned with his interest in covering this up.

I wonder what it would feel like, to be in a stake meeting, and hear Bybee's name called during a sustaining. What it would feel like to stand up, raise your right arm, and loudly say, "I am opposed." Ah, just dreams.....

"Political differences?" That is how you view the subject of torture now? Just another political difference?

If you don't see the conspiracy here, you won't see it anywhere. Give me a break.


Torturing people is illegal, and we already know that Bybee knew torture was illegal (he says so in the memo). So did he know that waterboarding was torture? Based on the fact that he has privately been telling close friends that he was uncomfortable issuing the opinion but did so because he believed it wasn't going to be relied upon (he was told the administration wanted a wide variety of opinions discussing many possible ways torture could be viewed and his assignment was to write an opinion that could justify the legal use of torture), he could be in hot water, especially since I understand there to be at least one email from him on this topic to a close friend from January of 2007.

Irrelevant to whether he committed a crime.

Personally, I'd love to be in the room when you try to convince the presiding authority that you aren't a complete nut after citing your reasons.

The debate about waterboarding (which is really what this is) is most definitely a political one.

What is clear is that Tex knows the avoidance of the issue is what is political. And craven.

Seeing non-existent conspiracy is what your tinfoil hat does for you. Wear it with pride.

We shall see. I think it's an exceptionally shaky case.

In any case, as Waters (unintentionally) points out, this is all just a "Get Bush" witchhunt by proxy. It's just that you folks are too cowardly to actually try to indict a former president.

I'm not. Indict Bush. If he broke the law, indict him. If you don't want to see him indicted (and he broke the law), then pardon him.

Although Tex would have the world believe this is just a political issue, today's Washington Post has the following to say:

"A draft report of more than 200 pages, prepared in January before Bush's departure, recommends disciplinary action by state bar associations against two former department attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel who might have committed misconduct in preparing and signing the so-called torture memos. State bar associations have the power to suspend a lawyer's license to practice or impose other penalties."

When was the report prepared? In January. While Bush was president. It recommeneded disciplinary action by state bar associations against two former department attorney's who prepared the torture memos.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

At least someone in the Justice Department is still interested in justice.

But Obama is not.

So since the report was prepared a few days before Bush left office, that makes it non-political?

Heh.

It is a 200 page document. Are you under the impression they typed it up the night before Obama arrived and conducted all inquiries that day?

Do you believe everyone in the Justice Department is Republican? They had two months between the election and inauguration (even more since the writing was on the wall about who was going to win the election) to have this report compiled and ready for Obama's witch hunt as soon as he was in power to do anything about it.

Are you under the impression that on Jan 20th, everyone in the Executive suddenly becomes a Democrat?

Cali, Tex believes it is not possible for a lawyer to have broken the law with a legal memo, provided he says that it was his opinion.

Nor is it possible for a lawyer to act unethically or unprofessionally as long as it was hish legal opinion.

Quite the loophole Tex has identified. I should begin plotting all sorts of crimes and label them all as my legal opinion. Then, when people act them out and pay me for my planning efforts, I have no culpability at all. Genius.

New York Times reporting the report was done in December and the investigation began much earlier than that. But keep saying it is totally political, Tex. No moral issue here. We are only discussing torture, after all.

If anything, it illustrates that there was some healthy disagreement over the procedures, and rightfully so. It's a very murky thing, and I'm not surprised there might be conflicting opinions.

What it does not illustrate is that it wasn't politically motivated. Unless you seriously believe that every individual in the Executive over the last 8 years was 100% loyal to Bush.

The Office of Legal Counsel is filled with appointees of a president. Yes, there are several career attorneys, but they hardly fill the top ranks. Those positions are appointed. (by the way, Republicans are blocking some of Obama's choices for OLC right now). The OLC does not investigate two of its attorneys and recommend them for disbarment without tacit approval of the appointees in the OLC. It wasn't political. And it doesn't show that there was "healthy disagreement" over a "murky" topic. It shows that OLC was willing to crucify its own because what they did was absolutely beyond the pale and immoral and deserving of reprimand. That you think this is a political witch hunt shows how broken your moral compass really is.

Sure it does.

Sounds like a internal disagreement to me.

The end of the article indicates what this is really all about:

Now past the 100 Days even, and the Get Bush crowd is still alive and well.

If I am ever a president of something in the church, I am going to want Tex as my counselor. he would definitely take the fall for me if asked.

Who said there wasn't internal disagreement? Point?

If you're not disagreeing with that, then we're all good.

Where did you get that the point of disagreement between us was whether or not there were internal disagreements over the use of torture at the DOJ?

...

So you focused solely on the word "disagreement" and extrapolated from there?

I'm not going to get into a fresh argument, arguing about how we argued the previous argument. (Is it any wonder people hate lawyers?)

To sum up:

You apparently think this report shows the OLC recognizing its mistake and recommending rectifying it, and because it was under a Bush administration, you think there's no politics involved.

I think the report is simply one more piece of evidence reflecting the complex moral problem waterboarding represents. And I think the present-day attempts to "crucify" people for their opinions is all about politics.

We've both made our cases. Time to move on.

But that is just it, Tex. Waterboarding isn't a complex moral problem. Even the OLC under the Bush administration determined that one of their own should face sanctions by his state bar association for his conduct in writing the memos. You and your ilk want to make waterboarding out to be "murky" and a "complex moral problem." It isn't. It is clear. It is torture. Bybee advocated torturing people, and then people were tortured using Bybee's logic as their rationale. The fact that bad people advocated bad ideas and that people then acted on those bad ideas does not make the subject "murky." Numerous US cases have consistently held that waterboarding is torture. We have publicly decried regimes for their use of waterboarding as torture. The SERE program teaches people to resist torture, including waterboarding. You guys have so completely lost your moral compass that you think this is just a political question. I hope to never be like you.

That's all your opinion, and you're welcome to it. Obviously I and a lot of other fine, moral upstanding people feel differently.

thanks for the chuckle.

Supercilious bastard.

Bybee back in the news. Tragedy.

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/57...judge.html.csp