Sure, the associate attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department is supposed to be in charge of the office. But in 2001, then-OLC chief Jay Bybee “was never read into” the President’s Surveillance Program and instead, his deputy, John Yoo, was the only one More…
Interesting fact about the soon-to-be-declassified report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility on the propriety of the Bush-era torture advocates at the department: while the office has gone out of its way to accommodate former Office of Legal Counsel officials John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, More…
Former Bush administration officials are urging the Justice Department to soften the criticisms contained in an ethics report examining the work of the lawyers who justified torture and other harsh interrogation techniques, reports The Washington Post.
According to two anonymous sources, lawyers for the subjects of the investigation — More…
U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Jay Bybee shocked a lot of people this week when he told The New York Times that has no real regrets about signing off on the Office of Legal Counsel memorandums that have since horrified much of the American public. Sen. Pat More…
Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) has invited Jay Bybee, the former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer and current judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, reports Ryan Grim of The Huffington Post. Is this the beginning of a broader More…
So much for the quid pro quo explanation. Jay Bybee, the former Office of Legal Counsel chief who issued the 2002 torture memos and who has since become a federal judge, issued a statement saying he mostly stands by his work. The New York More…
Hidden in plain sight in the Office of Legal Counsel memos on the CIA interrogation is a mystery: How did the “enhanced interrogation” technique of sleep deprivation come to depend on stress positions?
Somehow, between 2002 and 2005, CIA interrogators began using what the International Committee of the Red Cross More…
Assume that the senior officials in the Bush administration acted in good faith from March until August of 2002, when senior officials in Washington were debating what CIA interrogators could and should do to captured al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah. Assume they wrestled with the moral and practical complications of More…
As I mentioned, Marcy has a question about something from retired FBI agent Ali Soufan’s op-ed in The New York Times. Soufan’s whole op-ed is about how a joint FBI/CIA team interrogating Abu Zubaydah from March to June 2002 yielded valuable intelligence. But Jay Bybee’s Office of More…
You know an op-ed’s going to be good when it starts out like this:
FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified.
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