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Jay Bybee

The 11th Anniversary of 9/11

E.J. GraffSep 11, 2012

I've been looking at the crisp blue sky and remembering when the world went silent. The unspeakable images—which we have not yet shown to our son—are seared into all of us who were adults, then. How strange is it that a generation of young people has come of age who were sitting on school buses or in schoolrooms that day, who didn't watch as hundreds of people burned cruelly to death, as New York City was coated with human ash?

Obama Administration Suffering From Dearth of Hacks

PaulJun 22, 2011

Not long ago, the Obama administration argued that they didn't need congressional approval for the military operation in Libya, because according to their interpretation of the War Powers Act, it doesn't qualify as "hostilities." This position was roundly mocked from all quarters.

Dawn Johnsen's Withdrawal.

Adam SerwerApr 12, 2010

Mostly lost in the news about the retirements of Michigan House Democrat Bart Stupak and Justice John Paul Stevens was Dawn Johnsen's withdrawal from her nomination to head the Office of Legal Counsel, the office in the Justice Department whose job it is to tell the executive branch what is and isn't legal for it to do. Theoretically, the OLC is the first line of defense against executive overreach.

Mukasey Takes The Olson View.

Adam SerwerMar 10, 2010

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal taking the Ted Olson view that criticism of the Justice Department lawyers smeared as terrorist sympathizers and criticism of John Yoo and Jay Bybee are somehow equivalent.

Ted Olson's Two-fer.

Adam SerwerMar 08, 2010

Ted Olson, a former solicitor general under George W. Bush who lost his wife in the September 11 attacks, has become the latest conservative luminary to come out against Liz Cheney's McCarthyite ad, which accuses Justice Department lawyers who did work on behalf of suspected terror detainees of disloyalty.

Olson, though, seems to think that there's an equivalence between say, criticizing John Yoo and Jay Bybee's rubber-stamping of torture and ensuring detainees have due process (via Ben Smith):

Why They Don't Want To Call It Torture.

Adam SerwerMar 04, 2010

The conservative attempt to redefine torture as "enhanced interrogation techniques" has led to some of the greatest rhetorical dissembling in history. Despite GOP claims that John Yoo and Jay Bybee were "exonerated" by the OPR report, the truth is that their legal reasoning for arguing such techniques weren't torture was so poor that their successors said the memos couldn't be relied on.

Going On Offense.

Adam SerwerMar 03, 2010

The torture wing of the GOP is a lot of things, but I don't think they're too dumb to understand how the American legal system works. Attorneys who defend rapists do not approve of rape, attorneys who defend murderers do not approve of murder. There's nothing sinister about believing the government should prove its case against those it accuses of crimes -- that kind of basic accountability is essential to a functioning democracy. As Thomas Paine said, "He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression."

Justice Department Report Set To Clear Torture Lawyers.

Adam SerwerFeb 01, 2010

When the Obama administration declassified the torture memos, it created an ethical obligation for itself that the previous administration had denied. The Bush administration had maintained that torture done by Americans was legal as long as the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel rubber-stamped it. Therefore, the Bush administration was under no obligation to hold the legal architects of torture "accountable," because they denied they had done anything wrong -- and indeed, the OLC, by rubber-stamping torture, was only giving the White House what it wanted.

Hitting The Torturers' Alibis.

Adam SerwerSep 03, 2009

Via Daphne Eviatar, a new report from Physicians for Human Rights concludes that the physicians who oversaw the interrogation and torture of suspected terror detainees may have been involved in "human experimentation" and are calling for an investigation: