A couple of days before this finding was released to the public, Dick Cheney ( The Snarl ) was on the NBC National News bragging about how he " was always a fan of waterboarding." He knew about this ruling before it became public so he now feels he and his party are above the laws of moral decency and the laws of the land. IMO, the Supreme Court 5 ruling recently - which in effect handed the future elections over to corporations and this finding - are just examples of how totally morally bankrupt and corrupt this nation and the government has become. Think about it. It's a very sad commentary when the torture of other human beings is considered " just exercising poor judgement."

Here are a couple of articles about this finding and at the end there is a petition site where you can sign a petition letting them know how very sick you find this finding.


Alliance for Justice article:



Today House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) publicly released not only the final Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report, but also the first and second drafts of the report and the responses from Yoo and Bybee.

The long-awaited report is the product of a five-year investigation by OPR, the DOJ's internal ethics review board, of the authors of the "torture memos": John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury, former senior lawyers in DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

The OPR report reveals new facts about the involvement of senior White House officials in the OLC lawyers' preparation of the "torture memos," raising further questions about improper political interference with DOJ's legal work. The released first draft of the OPR report concluded that Yoo and Bybee violated their professional responsibilities in drafting the most infamous 2002 "torture memo," the final report released today has been softened to conclude only that they showed "poor judgment." Under DOJ rules, "poor judgment" does not amount to professional misconduct and therefore does not trigger a referral to state bar associations for disciplinary review.

Regardless of OPR's conclusion about the lawyers' ethical conduct, the report adds to the mounting evidence that warrants a full-scale investigation of those who ordered, designed, and justified torture. Releasing the OPR report is an important first step in promoting transparency, but OPR's investigation alone cannot provide resolution for what led our country to torture. The OPR report is just the latest damning piece of a puzzle that irrefutably calls for an independent inquiry into those who provided legal cover for torture.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) announced that his panel will hold a hearing on the report next Friday morning. He also called for Judge Bybee’s resignation.

We are now reading and analyzing the full report, which tops 300 pages, and will keep you updated over the next week as news develops.



This article is from Care2:



The Justice Department finally issued its report on whether or not Bush attorneys John Yoo and Judge Jay Bybee violated any rules of professional conduct worthy of discipline when they drafted the now infamous torture memos and advised the administration on the treatment of detainees. Not surprisingly, the Department declined to refer either Yoo or Bybee to state bar committees for misconduct proceedings despite nothing short of a scathing assessment of their conduct in authorizing torture.

The lack of surprise comes not from my deepening cynicism that we'll witness any real accounting for those who conceived of and promoted criminal policy in the name of national security. Rather, the lack of surprise comes from an understanding that in self-policing professions like the law, only those who intentionally and deliberately refuse to exercise sound professional judgment are at risk of becoming embroiled in a misconduct hearing. Lawyers tend to protect their own, a fact made abundantly clear in the Justice Department's report.

For Bybee and Yoo the report is hardly vindication of their time spent at the Office of Legal Counsel. In fact, the Department shreds their legal analysis and all but says the men were less lawyers than blinded ideologues, too devoted to their fundamentally flawed view of executive power to craft legally sound opinions. As lawyers, the Department concludes, they failed in their single duty to provide appropriate advice to their client--in this case the President and Vice President. That failure was negligent, and even grossly negligent at times, but it does not rise to the level of professional misconduct.

Yes, only the law could create a distinction that allows one of its lawyers to fail in doing his or her job and avoid any professional repercussions. That is, in part, because professional misconduct proceedings are not the only way we deal with lawyerly mistakes. Typically clients who have received bad advice, and relied on it to their detriment, have the ability to proceed via a malpractice claim-- a standard civil remedy that has nothing at all to do with professional misconduct proceedings. Not so, in this case.

In this case we have arguably one of the most egregious reported acts of legal malpractice yet no ability to address it. Both men continue on in their professions (as a law professor and federal appeals court judge, respectively) while as a country we scramble to piece together what remains of our Constitution and of our reputation. But unfortunately since Yoo and Bybee's client was President Bush and Vice President Cheney and not the American people, professional misconduct proceedings were the only realistic avenue for securing justice for the torture memos. With that possibility now off the table it looks more and more like the only real hope for justice will come from European trials.

Congress has not given up just yet. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy both condemned the findings and announced plans to hold hearings on the report. According to Conyers, the hearings are important because the report "reveals that the [torture] memos were not the independent product of the Department of Justice, but were shaped by top officials of the Bush White House." In a statement Senator Leahy said the report "is a condemnation of the legal memoranda drafted by key architects of the Bush administration's legal policy, including Jay Bybee and John Yoo on the treatment of detainees. The deeply flawed legal opinions proffered by these former OLC officials created a 'golden shield' that sought to protect from scrutiny and prosecution the Bush administration's torture of detainees in U.S. custody."

What these hearings will uncover that is not already in the report is unclear, but Rep Conyers and Sen. Leahy should be applauded for not letting this issue just go away quietly. Unfortunately the pomp of Congressional hearings means little with the reality of a prosecution shield for those members of the Bush administration with blood on their hands.


You can sign this petition at this site:

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/cheney_torture/

Love, Connie ( moonflower )

I think this thread is a good place to post the following article concerning the newly released movie, "Shutter Island." What Gareth Higgins states in his article regarding non - lamenting is very true of those involved in this finding and the attorneys who were sheilding Bush and Cheney's lawlessness - as well as our society as whole. In their case taking one for the team as it were.

Quote:

" Who is responsible for our nation’s sins? You? Me? Them? How can we live with ourselves when the inaction or action of those we have elected leads to the pointless deaths of hundreds of thousands on another continent?"

Biden vs. Cheney on Afghanistan, the Unpopularity of Lamentation, and Shutter Island

by Gareth Higgins 02-22-2010

Joe Biden appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows last week to defend the Obama administration from Dick Cheney’s disgraceful attacks, which appear to suggest his earlier bloodlust has not yet been satisfied, despite everything his time in the White House accomplished. The current vice president had the opportunity to set out a genuine alternative to the “war-first, don’t-even-ask-the-questions-later” policies that Cheney had pursued; but regrettably, Biden did not. Instead, he actually seemed to play a game of “who has killed the most terrorists?” citing the current “success rates” against the Taliban. When Joe Biden is pressured to define success on the basis of how many human lives have been taken in a conflict in which open diplomacy has hardly been attempted, never mind exhausted, it’s time to lament.

Lamentation isn’t popular these days — we have large-scale memorials before the smoke from violent atrocities has blown away; funerals are called “celebrations”; and even the losers get a nice certificate when someone else wins an Oscar. We don’t do lament. So we have Martin Scorsese, former seminarian, cataloguer of the broken male psyche, and kinetic film-maker to thank for releasing his new film Shutter Island at the beginning of Lent...

Shutter Island, in which federal marshals investigate the disappearance of a patient from a secure institution on a windswept Massachusetts island in 1954, turns out to be a metaphor for what happens when an individual (or a country, or an era) becomes detached from the consequences of his or her actions and pretends to face trauma by burying it. In that sense, it’s the ideal unofficial sequel to Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (Single-Disc Edition), a film that suggested enjoying really violent entertainment is a reason we are willing to entertain real violence. Shutter Island risks telling an unpalatable truth: that war is not clean; that the line between the “good guys” and the “enemy” is ambiguous; and that the post-Second World War era shattered community bonds and allowed hidden personal brokenness to reach epidemic proportions. So far, so depressing — but theologically this feels like a psalm lamenting human selfishness and misdirection; cinematically Scorsese has constructed a vastly compelling ‘B’ movie fan letter, filled with entertaining performances (Leonardo DiCaprio as the marshal Ted, Ben Kingsley as the institution’s director, and especially Michelle Williams as a kind of ghostly voice of conscience), extraordinary use of music, beautifully framed images, and ultimately a serious commitment to telling a story that, while set in a specific, disturbing location, is so universal that it could have profound meaning for anyone who approaches.

Why make this film? The answer comes over the end credits, as Dinah Washington sings a song that could have been taken from the deleted scenes in an ancient Hebrew text:

This bitter earth
Well, what fruit it bears.
What good is love
That no one shares.

The song makes sense in the case of the main character in Shutter Island, but its use here is about more than Ted’s personal loss: it’s being played over the end credits to bring a lament about our culture to its minor-key crescendo. Who is responsible for our nation’s sins? You? Me? Them? How can we live with ourselves when the inaction or action of those we have elected leads to the pointless deaths of hundreds of thousands on another continent? Shutter Island asks us to face ourselves, and not hide; and to recognize that in accepting responsibility that we are capable of being the “bad guys,” we do not have to shred our own dignity. If the line between good and evil runs through each person, and not between groups of people, then even after we have faced our shared culpability in structural evil, we may see that there is good in us too. The film doesn’t present a solution, or at least not a palatable one, although it does suggest that merely making a decision to take one step out of the darkness is better than nothing. But the purpose of Shutter Island is not to give us answers: it is to lament, which means that embedded within it is both a warning of what we can be when we lose sight of our interdependence as human beings, and — let us hope — a reminder that the purpose of lament is to prepare us for a new start.

Gareth Higgins is a writer and broadcaster from Belfast, Northern Ireland, who has worked as an academic and activist. He is the author of the insightful How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films. He blogs at www.godisnotelsewhere.wordpress.com and co-presents “The Film Talk” podcast with Jett Loe at www.thefilmtalk.com.


Love, Connie

Tortured Law, a new 10-minute documentary by Alliance for Justice, examines the role lawyers played in authorizing torture, and calls upon Attorney General Holder to conduct a full investigation of those who ordered, designed, and justified torture.


View Tortured Law here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJnQbPtgMAU&feature=player_embedded

Take action here to let Att. Gen. Eric Holder know that you want ALL those responsible for the torture policy of the Bush/Cheney administration held accountable - all the way to the top:

https://secure3.convio.net/afj/site/Advo...94bdtq6.app332b



Bush and Cheney: "We do not torture" We just use "enhanced techniques of interrogation. "

Love, Connie

IMO, this report is very damning and if all those involved in this behavior, all the way to the top, are not held responsible this nation cannot long endure being this corrupt and immoral. History has taught us that fact about totally corrupt and immoral nations. It's a disgrace for a nation which considers itself a democracy, champion of injustice etc. as the U.S.A has always done. We cannot keep electing slime like this either and expect better than this from them. In my mind that makes us equally responsible.

Co-authored with Brina Milikowsky
Ruth Goldman Judicial Selection Project Fellow
Alliance for Justice

On Friday, the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) released its long-awaited report about John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury, the senior government lawyers who authored the infamous "torture memos," and revealed damning new evidence about the involvement of senior White House officials in the production of those memos. The report raises further questions about improper political interference with DOJ's legal work and adds to the mounting evidence that warrants a full-scale investigation of those who ordered, designed, and justified torture.

Let's start with a quick recap: As we all now know, the Bush administration wanted to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" on alleged terrorists held in detention, but it administration didn't want a few federal and international laws to interfere with its agenda to abuse and humiliate detainees - so it turned to top lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to write a series of "torture memos" providing legal cover for letting the CIA do whatever it wanted with the detainees.

The OPR report confirms what legal ethics scholars have long suspected: as a general practice, senior White House officials improperly pressured Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury to "come up with an answer" in the "torture memos" that would justify the ongoing interrogation regime, conclude it was legal, and allow it to continue. We now have irrefutable proof that White House attorneys played a central role in shaping the content of the memos. White House counsel Alberto Gonzales told OPR that he would typically review drafts from lawyer John Yoo and "pass them along to other lawyers, such as [Cheney's lawyer David] Addington or [Gonzales' deputy Tim] Flanigan, who would forward them to Yoo along with their own comments." In a bombshell statement about Yoo's most notorious August 2002 memo, Gonzales is quoted as saying, "I'd be very surprised in [sic] David did not participate in the drafting of this document.'"

The final OPR report also establishes that Yoo added the most flawed and egregious portions of his August 2002 memo after the criminal division of DOJ refused to give the CIA the legal authority it was seeking - and after an auspiciously timed meeting at the White House. It seems the CIA requested a DOJ criminal declination letter providing advance blanket immunity from criminal prosecution before beginning interrogations in order to ensure that no CIA interrogator would be prosecuted for torture. Michael Chertoff, then Assistant AG in charge of DOJ's criminal division, found the request unreasonable, and refused to provide a blanket protection against criminal prosecution. The next day, Yoo went to a meeting at the White House with Gonzales (and possibly Addington and Flanigan) - and the day after that, Yoo added the two most tendentious and flawed sections to his most notorious memo.

The OPR report is replete with other shocking revelations. For example, Yoo proved just how far-reaching and excessive his unitary executive theory is by telling OPR investigators that, as commander-in-chief, a president legally has the power to bomb a village to massacre civilians. These outrageous facts are all the more striking given the limited mandate, resources, and authority of OPR to conduct an investigation of this magnitude. OPR's jurisdiction is limited to those attorneys employed by DOJ, and it lacks subpoena power to compel production of documents from other agencies or interviews with other government officials. The OPR report is therefore just the latest damning piece of a puzzle that irrefutably calls for an independent inquiry into those who provided legal cover for torture.

OPR's investigation alone cannot resolve what sinister sequence of events that led the top officials in our country to believe they could legally torture other humans. The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing scheduled for Friday will provide Senators an important opportunity to ask former OLC lawyers Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury more details about the interactions between DOJ, CIA, Department of Defense, and the White House. Additional crucial pieces of this puzzle will be uncovered if a special prosecutor or commission is empowered to investigate the conduct of officials in the CIA, Department of Defense, and White House who worked with DOJ officials on the development of torture policy.

Jane Mayer recently reported in the New Yorker that Eric Holder has decorated the walls of a conference room at the Department of Justice with portraits of his favorite Attorneys General. One of the portraits is of Elliott Richardson, who resigned rather than acquiesce to President Richard Nixon's command that he halt the Watergate investigation. Mr. Richardson's legacy reminds us that political pressure does not excuse an attorney general from his obligation to uphold the law. Only an independent inquiry and full-scale investigation into those who designed and authorized torture policy can restore America's international standing as a beacon of justice and human rights.



OPR Revelations Confirm Need for Full-Scale Torture Investigation

The OPR report confirms what legal ethics scholars have long suspected: as a general practice, senior White House officials improperly pressured Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury to "come up with an answer" in the "torture memos" that would justify the ongoing interrogation regime, conclude it was legal, and allow it to continue. We now have irrefutable proof that White House attorneys played a central role in shaping the content of the memos. White House counsel Alberto Gonzales told OPR that he would typically review drafts from lawyer John Yoo and "pass them along to other lawyers, such as [Cheney's lawyer David] Addington or [Gonzales' deputy Tim] Flanigan, who would forward them to Yoo along with their own comments." In a bombshell statement about Yoo's most notorious August 2002 memo, Gonzales is quoted as saying, "I'd be very surprised if [sic] David did not participate in the drafting of this document.'"

You can read the released documents here:

http://afjjusticewatch.blogspot.com/2010/02/opr-report-on-torture-memos-released-by.html

Love, Connie

I received this today from Alliance for Justice regarding deleted torture emails from the computers of Attorney's John Yoo and Patrick Philbin. Please read and sign the petition at the site below asking Att. Gen. Eric Holder to investigate the deletion of the memos and retrieve them from the computers of John Yoo and Patrick Philbin. It's my opinion that it is an admission of guilt to delete what these men must have known or felt was incriminating evidence against them. Unfortunately for them those emails are still in the system of their computers and can still be obtained. What they did in deleting those emails amounts to obstruction of justice as this investigation is still open in the senate Judiciary Committee. Patrick Leahy heads the Senate Juciciary Committee.


https://secure3.convio.net/afj/site/Advo...1k5kln3.app334b

Emails don’t just disappear.

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) made this point abundantly clear during last months’ Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on the “torture memos.”



When the OPR report was released many claimed that it vindicated John Yoo and others, but regardless of OPR’s conclusion about the lawyers’ ethical conduct, the report adds to the mounting evidence that warrants a full-scale investigation of those who ordered, designed, and justified torture.

The report also contained a shocking revelation: most of “torture memo” author John Yoo’s emails had been deleted and could not be reviewed by OPR investigators. Also “missing” are the July and August 2002 emails of OLC attorney Patrick Philbin, who was reviewing Yoo’s work that summer while he drafted the two most notorious “torture memos.”

The Federal Records Act (FRA) requires that agencies preserve agency records and maintain safeguards against their removal or loss, and it is highly suspicious that Yoo's and Philbin's emails have disappeared.

Deleted emails are almost always recoverable--and any intentional deletion or other destruction of emails that are material to an ongoing investigation would raise serious questions of obstruction of justice.

Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary G. Grindler promised Senator Leahy at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the OPR report that if the emails are "retrievable, I will direct [a department administrator] to retrieve them." We must hold the Justice Department to Grindler’s promise, to immediately devote attention and resources to retrieving the emails and conduct an investigation into how they went "missing" in the first place.

Urge Attorney General Holder to investigate these missing emails so that the American public can learn the truth behind the creation of the "torture memos."

Love, Connie