Office of Professional Responsibility not so responsible
The long-awaited Office of Professional Responsibility’s (OPR) report investigating the now infamous “torture memos” written by former Bush administration attorneys John Yoo (now a professor at UC Berkeley Law) and Jay Bybee (currently a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) have generated lots of commentary in the blogosphere. As Human Rights First’s Daphne Eviatar pointed out on Saturday, the initial reports from the mainstream press such as the New York Times and the Washington Post provided a somewhat narrow perspective on what the long-awaited release of the OPR report means. So, here’s what a few interesting bloggers have to say on the subject:
From the Newsweek blog, Michael Isikoff points out a gruesome detail from the OPR report in “Report: Bush Lawyer Said President Could Order Civilians to Be ‘Massacred’.”
On Slate, David Lubin, professor of law and philosophy at Georgetown asserts, “David Margolis Is Wrong: The Justice Department’s ethics investigation shouldn’t leave John Yoo and Jay Bybee home free.”
In a blog from The Atlantic, James Fallows puts the debate surrounding the recent OPR report into a historical perspective with “The OPR report: this era’s ‘Hiroshima’.”
On Salon, Glenn Greenwald takes a particularly critical stance as he advocates that John Yoo and Jay Bybee be held accountable for their work in the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel in “The flailing falsehoods of America’s war criminals.”
In the Washington Post, Bruce Ackerman asks whether reform of the DOJ is needed in light of the lessons learned from the writing of the “torture memos” in How to keep future John Yoos under control.
Along this line of critique of DOJ ethics investigations, Scott Horton writes in Harper’s about The Justice Department Roach Motel.
Finally, a press release from UC Berkeley students themselves regarding Professor John Yoo and Mr. Jay Bybee: “Berkeley Law Students Applaud DOJ Report Findings, Torture Memo Lawyers Engaged in Misconduct: Urge Congress, State Bar and University to Investigate.”
