Report faults two authors of Bush terror memos

The ethics lawyers,in the Office of Professional Responsibility,concluded that two department lawyers involved in analysing and justifying waterboarding and other interrogation tactics — Jay S Bybee,now a federal judge,and John Yoo,now a professor at the University of California,Berkeley — had demonstrated “professional misconduct”. It said the lawyers had ignored legal precedents and provided slipshod legal advice to the White House in possible violation of international and federal laws on torture.

But David Margolis,a career lawyer at the Justice Department,rejected that conclusion in a report of his own released on Friday. He said the ethics lawyers,in condemning the lawyers’ actions,had given short shrift to the national climate of urgency in which Bybee and Yoo acted after the attacks of September 11,2001. “Among the difficulties in assessing these memos now over seven years after their issuance is that the context is lost,” Margolis said.

Indeed,the documents released on Friday provide new details about the atmosphere in which Yoo and the Justice Department prepared their initial findings in August 2002,shortly after the capture of Abu Zubaydah,suspected of being an operative for al-Qaeda.

The report quotes Patrick Philbin,a senior Justice Department lawyer,as saying that he had advised Bybee to sign the memorandum,despite what he saw as Yoo’s aggressive and problematic interpretation of the President’s Commander-in-Chief powers in trumping international and domestic law.