Steven Bradbury

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 [...]

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.

John Yoo should be fired, disbarred and prosecuted for war crimes, according to anti-war activists who greeted the University of California at Berkeley law professor when he returned to Boalt Hall, the law school where he has tenure, on Monday.
Yoo, of course, is the author of the infamous “torture memos” that justified the abuse and [...]

Asked this morning when the Justice Department plans to release the highly-anticipated report by its internal ethics office regarding the conduct and legal conclusions of Bush administration Office of Legal Counsel lawyers, such as John Yoo and Steven Bradbury, Holder said they are “pretty close to getting their report finalized,” and “they are making changes [...]

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, a rule-of-law whistleblower who nearly had [...]

More than a year ago, Sens. Richard Durbin (D-Ill..) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) asked the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the conduct of lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, whose work provided legal justifications for waterboarding and other abusive interrogation tactics.
Since then, the two senators (and many others) have been asking [...]

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 — which include former Office of Legal Counsel [...]

So in my piece today I wondered how it could be that the CIA could come to view stress positions as a mechanism to induce sleep deprivation in detainees. The obvious culprit is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, because in the May 10, 2005 “techniques” memo, then-Office of Legal Counsel chief Steve [...]

In one technique, the detainee’s weight is “borne by his legs and feet during sleep deprivation,” ensuring that he had to keep awake, for if he “los[t] his balance” from exhaustion he would feel “the restraining tension of the shackles.”

As to my can-there-be-a-decent-right question about torture, Philip Zelikow, the counselor to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, provides a compelling answer in the affirmative. His post at Shadow Government is a delicate and thoughtful rejection of the Bush administration’s architecture of torture. He makes short work [...]