Poor judgement indeed. Yoo and Bybee are now well known for their role in enabling the atrocities that went on in black sites and at Guantánamo. Waterboarding. Extreme sleep deprivation. Stress positions. Some detainees were tortured to death. We all know the results of those legal memos.
Included in the OPR report is this quote from Yoo: "I had actually thought that we prohibited waterboarding. I didn't recollect that we had actually said that you could do it."
But the key to remember is the OLC is tasked with providing the executive branch legal advice. They're "the President's lawyers." So that makes the OLC's clients the highest levels of the Bush administration. There's no denying it: senior Bush administration officials knowingly authorized torture, and the OLC lawyers gave them the false legal framework to carry it out.
more:
http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/opr-report-finally-released................
Yoo Lawyer: OPR Acting Like "Junior Varsity CIA"— By Nick Baumann
| Fri Feb. 19, 2010 4:55 PM PST
If you want to get a sense of the tone of John Yoo's response to the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility report finding he was guilty of "professional misconduct," take a look at this excerpt from his lawyer's letter to the OPR:
The Office of Legal Counsel's job was to give legal advice based on the facts as presented by the Central Intelligence Agency, not to assume the role (as OPR now has) of Junior Varsity CIA. OPR appears to think that the proper role of OLC attorneys was to reweigh the operational facts adduced by the CIA and play roulette with the lives of thousands of Americans.
more:
http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/02/yoo-lawyer-opr-acting-junior-varsity-ciahttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35487219/ns/politics-white_house/http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/archive/2010/02/19/report-bush-lawyer-said-president-could-order-civilians-to-be-massacred.aspx
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