Judge Bybee Defends the OLC's Torture Memos as a "Good Faith Analysis of the Law"

  "gavel" by walknboston, used pursuant to CC license  | by Damozel | Bush appointee-to-the-Ninth-Circuit Judge Jay Bybee, former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, finally decided to rompre le silence (as the French say).  The New York Times reports:

Judge Bybee said he was issuing a statement following reports that he had regrets over his role in the memorandums, including an article in The Washington Post on Saturday to that effect. Given the widespread criticism of the memorandums, he said he would have done some things differently, like clarifying and sharpening the analysis of some of his answers to help the public better understand the basis for his conclusions

But he said: “The central question for lawyers was a narrow one; locate, under the statutory definition, the thin line between harsh treatment of a high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist that is not torture and harsh treatment that is. I believed at the time, and continue to believe today, that the conclusions were legally correct.”

Other administration lawyers agreed with those conclusions, Judge Bybee said.

“The legal question was and is difficult,” he said. “And the stakes for the country were significant no matter what our opinion. In that context, we gave our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law.”  (NYT)

Jeralyn:

He should have just kept silent. As a Judge, he should know by now that the 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination, even if just in the court of public opinion, is there for a reason: Use it or lose it.

Despite this repudiation of the Post's interpretation, the reports suggest that Bybee really does seem to have known at some level that he was acting as an enabler to the Torture Administration and therefore to the ill it subsequently did do in reliance on his legal opinions:

In March 2004, before the first memorandum was disclosed, Judge Bybee spoke to about two dozen law clerks at the federal courthouse in Pasadena, Calif. It was part of a program in which judges discussed their earlier careers...

Two of the clerks recall his saying that much of the work was dull but that some concerned matters “so awful, so terrible, so radioactive” he doubted that the administration would ever disclose it.... Tuan Samahon, a professor at the U.N.L.V. law school who was a clerk to Judge Bybee in his first year on the bench, said he was initially puzzled by those comments but understood a few weeks later when the first of the memorandums was made public.

Professor Samahon said he interpreted Judge Bybee’s remark to “refer to the nature of the advice sought and not his office’s work product.” (NYT)

In other words, he knew what result the administration needed and he gave it to them -- not necessarily without misgivings.  "Radioactive" is a good word for matters so lethal, so corrosively toxic to the system.

Another clerk at the luncheon, Nina Rabin, who now runs an immigration clinic at the University of Arizona, said she found Judge Bybee’s remarks troubling because he suggested that his role as a lawyer could be divorced from whatever policy was being pursued. “He definitely offered a view that was sanitized,” she said, “and I thought that was disingenuous in that it removed any responsibility on the part of the lawyer for what was happening.”(NYT)

In more gossipy vein, The New York Times reports that Bybee's role in the torture administration caused a rupture with one of Bybee's colleagues at The University of Nevada, Las Vegas, such that a restaurant meal was ruined and the two men have never spoken since.  But that colleague showed much insight in identifying the fatal flaw characterizing most of Bush & Co.'s minions and operatives:

Prof. Christopher L. Blakesley...said that after the first memorandum was released, he was unable to restrain himself from expressing disagreement at a 2004 dinner...that included their wives.

“I asked him how he could sign such an awful thing,” Professor Blakesley recalled in an interview.

He said the judge replied that he could not talk about the matter. The dinner proceeded awkwardly, Professor Blakesley said, and they have not spoken since.

Professor Blakesley said that while he liked Judge Bybee, “he has some basic flaws including being very naïve about leaders.”

“He has too much respect for authority and will avoid a confrontation no matter what,” the professor continued. (NYT)

Which...yeah.

More at Memeorandum.

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Comments

[Thingumbob]

What's in a word? "Harsh interrogation techniques"-- formerly known as torture. Hmm. I guess noticing Orwellian doublespeak has become passe these days.