Gitmo Galore--Random Notes

In the forthcoming Newsweek, Michael Isikoff reports that an internal Justice Department report on the conduct of the senior lawyers who approved waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics could prove to be a problem for Bush Administration lawyers such as Jay Bybee and John Yoo as well as Steven Bradbury, who was chief of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the time.

Last year H. Marshall Jarrett, chief of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) confirmed he was investigating whether the legal advice in the torture memos "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." Then Attorney General Mike Mukasey strongly objected to the draft and requested that the three principals be allowed to respond. A final version of the report will be presented to Attorney General Eric Holder.

If Holder should accept the OPR findings, the report could be forwarded to state bar associations for possible disciplinary actions. Anonymous Bush lawyers were furious with the initial findings because they claimed "the OPR is not competent to judge. They're not constitutional scholars." Oh, like--say John Yoo, practitioner of the unitary theory of the executive. Like that type of constitutional scholar.

The OPR probe began after conservative John Goldsmith took over the OLC in 2003 and protested that the legal arguments in the torture memos were "deeply flawed" and "sloppily reasoned". He particularly objected to the assertion of Yoo and Bybee that the President could unilaterally disregard a law passed by Congress banning torture.

The OPR investigators focused on whether the torture memo's authors deliberately slanted their legal advice to provide the White House with the conclusions it wanted.
The investigators gathered internal e-mails and multiple drafts of the memos that have allowed then to reconstruct how they were crafted. The OPR told members of the Senate Judiciary Commitee last year that it would consider releasing the report to the public.

Last week the Obama Administration began the process of reviewing files of detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to determine who can be prosecuted and who can be transferred to other countries. The executive order requires Eric Holder to identify all informations on the detainees to "the extent reasonably practicable." Evidence against the detainees apparently has been collected by different agencies or by different parts of the Defense Department and alot of it remains classified and scattered in multiple locations.

The review will have to develop rather new and creative ways to prosecute some detainees. If evidence of detainees' larger alleged crimes is too tainted to use because of torture, the government may have to charge them with lesser crimes, such as conspiracy or material support for terrorism."

Meanwhile, British officials are en route to Gitmo to visit Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who has been there for five years after having been renditioned because of his consulting a satirical article about building an H-Bomb. The team includes a doctor,who will assess Mr. Mohamed's condition. His military defense attorney, Lt.Col Yvonne Bradley said he had been on a hunger strike since January and that he has lost so much weight that his life is at risk.

Apparently, the Obama Administration has placed a priority on the review of Mohammed's case so that he might be returned to Britain.

The London Guardian reports today the British Foreign Office (FO) actually solicited the letter from the State Department that forced British judges to block the disclosure of CIA files documenting the torture of Binyam Mohamed. A former State Department official said it was the Foreign Office that initiated the cover-up that claimed the US would refuse to share intelligence with the UK if the information was released. Human rights advocates and lawyers for Mohammed are claiming the UK wanted to hide the fact that UK intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture.

Amnesty International this past week released documents from the United States Government that shows that several captured persons had been tortured to death and that Defense Department officials know this.

Yesterday, the Associated Press pubished a story about Army Pvt. Brandon Neely, who was a guard at Guantanamo, and dealt with the first group of detainees . Neely describes a time when soldiers lacked any clear rules for dealing with the detainees and that the detainees were only offered basic comforts just before the International Red Cross arrrived. Neely, who is a policeman in Texas, recounted beatings and humiliations of detainees whose sole purpose was physical or psychological pain. In part, he said that was the emotional reaction to the events of 9-11 and being told that the detainees were "the worst terrorists in the world". Because of his desire to come clean, he went to the University of California at Davis' Guatanamo Testimonials Project, which is an effort to to document accounts of prisoner abuse.

The continued unraveling of the torture and Guatanamo issue heightens the pressure on the Obama Administration to investigate and prosecute responsible officials from the Bush Administration. According to a USATODAY/ Gallup poll published this week, 38% of Americans want a criminal investigation into these abuses, while 24% want some time of independent panel to look into this. International lawyers are telling the Obama Administration that, despite the urgency of the economic situation, the United States has both a moral and legal responsibility to investigate and criminally prosecute the culprits.