TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Justice Department's Waterboarding OK Investigated

ADVERTISEMENT

By DAN EGGEN, The Washington Post

Published: February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON - An internal watchdog office at the Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration lawyers violated professional standards by issuing legal opinions authorizing the CIA to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, officials said Friday.

H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the Office of Professional Responsibility, wrote in a letter to Democratic lawmakers that his office is investigating the "circumstances surrounding" Justice opinions that established a legal basis for the CIA's interrogation program, including a now-infamous memo from August 2002 that narrowly defined torture and later was rescinded by the department.

"Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys," Jarrett wrote.

This is the second publicly disclosed Justice Department investigation related to the CIA's use of waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning that is considered torture by most human rights groups and legal scholars. Jarrett's inquiry got under way in 2004, but was not confirmed publicly until now, officials said.

In January, Attorney General Michael Mukasey assigned a special U.S. attorney to investigate whether CIA officials committed crimes by destroying interrogation videotapes of two high-level al-Qaida detainees, including one who was waterboarded.

But Mukasey has rebuffed demands from Congress to investigate the interrogations themselves, saying officials were acting under legal advice from the Justice Department.

The August 2002 memo was addressed to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and was signed by Jay Bybee, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel and now a federal appeals court judge in San Francisco. The memo's main writer was one of Bybee's deputies, John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT