"Torture memo" lawyers cleared in Justice review
By MATT APUZZO
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Justice Department lawyers showed "poor judgment" but did not commit professional misconduct when they authorized CIA interrogators to use waterboarding and other harsh tactics at the height of the U.S. war on terrorism, an internal review released Friday found.
The decision closes the book on one of the major lingering investigations into the counterterrorism policies of George W. Bush's administration. President Obama campaigned on abolishing the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding and other tactics that he called torture, but he left open the question of whether anyone would be punished for authorizing such methods.
An initial review by the Justice Department's internal-affairs unit found that former government lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo had committed professional misconduct, a conclusion that could have cost them their law licenses. The Justice Department's top career lawyer reviewed the matter and disagreed.
"This decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies those memoranda," Assistant Deputy Attorney General David Margolis wrote in a memo released Friday.
Margolis, the top nonpolitical Justice Department lawyer and a veteran of several administrations, called the legal memos "flawed" and said they gave interrogators as much leeway as possible under U.S. torture laws. But he said Yoo and Bybee did not knowingly give incorrect advice, the standard for misconduct.
The Office of Professional Responsibility, led by another veteran career prosecutor, Mary Patrice Brown, disagreed.
"Situations of great stress, danger and fear do not relieve department attorneys of their duty to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice," her team wrote.
Yoo is now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bybee is a federal judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in San Francisco. The decision spares them any immediate sanctions, though state bar associations could independently take up the matter.
While the decision ends the debate within the administration, Democrats indicated they aren't finished discussing it. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., scheduled a hearing Feb. 26.
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