john yoo

Michael Isikoff reports:
The federal judge who helped draft Justice Department memos on torture has set up a legal defense fund to pay the costs of defending against possible disciplinary or impeachment proceedings. Jay Bybee, a U.S. Court of Appeals judge in Las Vegas, quietly set up the fund last July following widespread news reports that [...]

Responding to a question from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who’s asked frequently when the Justice Department will finally release the repeatedly delayed report by the Office of Professional Responsibility on the conduct of lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel under President Bush, Holder said that he expects it will be released by the end [...]

The International Center for Transitional Justice usually focuses on bringing to light and holding perpetrators accountable for such heinous crimes as genocide, mass murder and systematic torture, often in far-off war-torn countries with dismal human rights records.
So it’s significant that today they’ve released a report calling on the United States to follow its legal obligation [...]

Praising an Italian court’s recent ruling that CIA agents broke the law in an extraordinary rendition case, The New York Times today highlights a growing phenomenon that hasn’t received sufficient attention: European courts appear more willing than their American counterparts to enforce the laws protecting basic human and civil rights.

Earlier this year when Arlen Specter was still a Republican, the Pennsylvania senator was among the harshest critics of Dawn Johnsen, the Indiana University law professor who is President Obama’s pick to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The OLC is the office that housed such Bush-era luminaries as John Yoo and Jay Bybee, [...]

The Washington Post’s story today about liberals who are frustrated that the Obama administration isn’t pressing harder to win confirmation for liberal-leaning judges to the federal courts should also serve as a reminder that there are a whole lot of key Justice Department posts still not confirmed yet, either. Whether that’s because the White House [...]

The Spanish newspaper Público reported Saturday that Judge Baltasar Garzón is pressing ahead with a case against six senior Bush administration lawyers for facilitating the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, according to Andy Worthington.
In March, Judge Garzón announced that he was planning to investigate the legal architects of the Bush detention and interrogation policies, [...]

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the former U.S. Attorney who’s been pointing out for more than a year that waterboarding is and always has been torture, made the key point yesterday (and the same one I made here) that the criminal investigation of “enhanced interrogation techniques” that turned into torture would be an ordinary and obvious [...]

On the same day that the government produced the 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report on interrogations, it also turned over seven more memos and letters from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.

Patrick Appel, who is filling in for Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish, yesterday suggested that I was accusing John Yoo & Co. in the Bush Justice Department of the “crime” of approving vague CIA interrogation guidelines. Appel writes:
This seems more likely to be raised in defense of the CIA interrogators than against the lawyers. [...]