An ethics investigation conducted by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibilty is currently assessing the role played by Bush administration lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury in devising and drafting the notorious Torture Memoes.
The latter were then used as legal justification by the administration in the abuse of detainees at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.
Begun in 2005, the report should be issued this summer.
As such, according to the Washington Post, those representing Yoo and Bybee have asked former Justice Department and White House officials to intercede on their behalf so that the final report may mitigate their responsibility in the matter...
At this stage, the report reportedly favors referring the lawyers to their bar associations for disciplinary action, and does not recommend criminal prosecution.
Oddly, one of the parties under investigation, Steven Bradbury, participated in the inquiry, as acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, a body which provides legal advice to the president...
One may wonder, therefore, if this obvious conflict of interest will not undermine the report's credibility...
In any case, Some in Washington expect further action.
Senator Durbin (D-Ill) asked, in the current context, the relevant question: It's a question of responsibility. In this chain of command, how far up did it go?
Senator Chris Dodd (D-Ct) whose father, incidentally, was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, supports a commision of inquiry proposed by Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), the aim of which is a comprehensive, nonpartisan, independent review of what happened.
In an interview, Dodd said: I don’t know who the genius was in the room that night when they were discussing this, but if you’re going to make a decision to release the documents (the four Torture Memos released last month), I presume everyone of us here would then have a follow-up question, which is: What are you going to do with that information? And if the answer is, “Well, nothing, we’re just going to release the documents,” I’m amazed, and some of us in the room say, “Wait a minute, you’ve got a problem.” If you’re going to release them, you’re going to have to answer the next question: What are you going to do with them?...
In a sense, not to prosecute people or pursue them when these acts have occurred is, in a sense, to invite it again in some future administration.
And yet, interestingly, even though 60% of Americans, according to a recent poll, conclude that the Bush administration's interrogation program, including waterboarding, was tantamount to torture, 50% still support it.....
As such, it is not surprising that a majority of Americans neither support a congresional investigation (42% yes, 57% no) into the issue, nor an inquiry by an independent body (42% yes, 55% no).
It seems the Amercian people, like President Obama, want to move forward and avoid looking back on the dark side of the Bush-Cheney era...
And yet, it is not that simple.
As a party to the UN Convention Against Torture, the US government is legally bound to investigate and prosecute all violations of the treaty.
Professor Manfred Nowak, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture declared in an interview that the Convention provides unequivocally that states are not merely obligated to make torture a crime, but also to prosecute any incidents of which credible evidence can be found
What, then, will Obama do...?
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