Several times during his presidential campaign, Barack Obama repeated Dr. Martin Luther King's counsel:
"...the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice"
I love that thought; the advice to be patient but unwavering and that, ultimately, right prevails over wrong.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Justice Department's Offlice of Legal Counsel (OLC) provided opinions to the president written by John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury. The opinions asserted the president has, for all intents and purposes, nearly unlimited rights to conduct a "war on terror" and is not bound by any law or precedent in doing so. Those opinions became the foundation for modifying and justifying detainee interrogations and warrantless surveillance. When those opinions became public, they were roundly criticized by Constitutional scholars as groundless, and without a Constitutional basis. The Administration, nonetheless, continued to maintain all their policies were "legal" based on the Yoo/Bybee memos.
That moral universe arc bent slightly last year when it was announced the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), the Justice Departments internal ethics review, was investigating whether the advice provided in those opinions "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys."
Newsweek has reported that internal review was submitted the last several weeks of the Bush Administration and was sharply critical of the Yoo/Bybee opinion. That Justice Department review will now be provided to new Attorney General Eric Holder for his review.
OPR investigators focused on whether the memo's authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted, according to three former Bush lawyers who asked not to be identified discussing an ongoing probe. One of the lawyers said he was stunned to discover how much material the investigators had gathered, including internal e-mails and multiple drafts that allowed OPR to reconstruct how the memos were crafted. In a departure from the norm, (OPR head, H. Marshall) Jarrett also told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last year he would inform them of his findings and would "consider" releasing a public version. If he does, it could be the most revealing public glimpse yet at how some of the major decisions of Bush-era counterterrorism policy were made.
Should General Holder accept the OPR findings, it's expected the report will be forwarded to the state bar associations for possible disciplinary action against Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury. And that would, in turn, raise questions about the motivation for the opinions - were those opinions the actions of incompetent attorneys or nothing more than a sanctioned rubberstamp to provide cover for illegalities committed by Bush Administration officials?
John Yoo famously argued it was entirely within the presidents authority to order "chrushing the testicles" of a child to force the testimony of a detainee. Even more distressing is the presidents willingness to accept that advice and use that attorney's counsel to justify the Administration's actions.
"...the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice"
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