MoveOn released a video today calling for the impeachment of Jay Bybee. Watch it:
Since ThinkProgress launched our Bybee impeachment campaign 10 days ago, a few lawmakers have indicated support for such action. More support is needed, however. Last Sunday, CAPAF President and CEO John Podesta called for Bybee’s impeachment on CNN, arguing, “If he would do the right thing, he should just simply resign. If he doesn’t…I think a simple matter would be to remove him from office.”
In tonight’s press conference, ABC’s Jake Tapper asked President Obama if he believes “that the previous administration sanctioned torture,” in light of Obama’s recent release of Bush-era torture memos. Obama refrained from saying the Bush administration committed criminal acts, but he said, “I do believe that it [waterboarding] is torture.” The President added that the legal guidance that Bush lawyers provided were a “mistake”:
QUESTION: Do you believe the previous administration sanctioned torture?
OBAMA: I believe that waterboarding was torture. And I think that the — whatever legal rationales were used, it was a mistake.
Watch it:
Although Obama has repeatedly said that waterboarding is torture, his response saying that the “legal rationales” were “a mistake” is important because it discredits 9th Circuit Court Judge Jay Bybee’s recent claim that his flawed OLC memos were legally sound.
Yesterday, Bybee “broke his silence” and talked to the New York Times about his torture memos. While anonymous friends of Bybee said that the former OLC head regretted signing off on the torture memos, Bybee defended his memos as legally “correct“:
[H]e 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.” [...]
“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.”
Obama’s belief that the notorious memoranda written by Judge Bybee were legally flawed add further justification to the need for Bybee to resign his seat on the federal court.
Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.
The Washington Post reported over the weekend that anonymous friends of Judge Jay Bybee said that he had been apologetic for authoring Bush-era memos that legally justified torture. However, The New York Times reports today that Bybee contradicted the Post’s report. “I believed at the time, and continue to believe today, that the conclusions were legally correct,” Bybee said. NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed international lawyer Philippe Sands and asked him to respond to Bybee’s most recent defense. Sands said that the American federal courts, where Bybee currently sits, “are immensely respected institutions” internationally and that Bybee should resign to preserve their credibility:
SANDS: I think the braver and more honorable thing to do would have been to recognize that he fell into error and I have to say, reading that [New York Times] interview, for the first time I felt really very strongly that this is not a gentleman who really ought to be sitting on the bench of a U.S. federal court.
I mean, sitting here in London, I have to tell you; U.S. federal courts are immensely respected institutions. It’s not a political thing it’s not a left, right thing. These are hugely important courts that our English courts look to, that foreign courts look to and the idea that a lawyer who signed off on waterbording and still thinks today that it is not torture should sit on such a court is frankly distressing and I would say even shocking.
Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.
Today, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) sent a letter to Judge Jay Bybee inviting him to testify about his “views” about torture and his “role” in drafting the torture memos. “There is significant concern about the legal advice provided by OLC while you were in charge, how that advice came to be generated, the considerations that went into it, and the role played by the White House,” Leahy wrote. “I look forward to your cooperation and your testimony.” Read Leahy’s letter (pdf) here.
Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.
Judge Jay Bybee finally “broke his silence” and talked to the New York Times about his legal memos which authorized torture. This past weekend, the Washington Post quoted anonymous friends of Bybee claiming that Bybee was apologetic for authoring the memos. Speaking for himself, Bybee said that’s not the case:
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.”
Bybee, “the man behind waterboarding,” once said that he would like his “headstone to read, ‘He always tried to do the right thing.’” The right thing would be for him to resign. If he does not do so, Congress should impeach him.
The Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is currently conducting a review of Bybee’s work. The New York Times’s Charlie Savage recently reported that the review could find that Bybee’s office changed its legal views to cater to policy makers:
One thing could change that dynamic, however. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility has been investigating the work of lawyers who signed off on the interrogation policy, and is believed to have obtained archived e-mail messages from the time when the memorandums were being drafted.
If it turned out that the lawyers initially concluded that aspects of the proposed program would be illegal, then reversed that conclusion at the request of policy makers, then prosecutors could make a case that the officials knowingly broke the law.
Jon Eisenberg, one of the lawyers who is representing the plaintiffs in a case challenging Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, writes in the Philadephia Inquirer today that Jay Bybee’s “remoteness from the actual torturers increases his degree of responsibility”:
Far from absolving him of guilt, his remoteness from the actual torturers – his thoughtlessness – increases the degree of his responsibility. His is a special kind of evil – the evil of nonchalance where there should be outrage. […]
I wonder whether Bybee feels guilty before God. He certainly has no business being a federal judge. His presence on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals brings disgrace to that court. He should resign.
Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.
Last week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) repeated his view that the United States had conducted torture by authorizing waterboarding. Saying the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times was “unacceptable,” McCain declared, “One is too much. Waterboarding is torture, period.”
However, discussing torture on CBS’s Face the Nation today, McCain insisted, “We’ve got to move on” and ignore the Bush administration’s torture program. Indeed, McCain refused to support the impeachment of Judge Jay Bybee — even as he acknowledged that Bybee had broken both U.S. and international law in authorizing torture:
MCCAIN: He falls into the same category as everybody else as far as giving very bad advice and misinterpreting, fundamentally, what the United States is all about, much less things like the Geneva Conventions. Look, under President Reagan we signed an agreement against torture. We were in violation of that.
McCain claimed that “no one has alleged, quote, wrongdoing” on the part of Bush administration lawyers, only that they had given “bad advice.” And yet minutes later McCain himself acknowledged that Bybee’s advice led the U.S. to be “in violation” of both U.S. and international law. Watch it:
Later on Face the Nation, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), who supports holding broad investigations about torture, pointed out that McCain supports a commission to investigate the causes of the financial crisis. “But just as important as losing our money, what happens when we lose our national honor? That’s what we should look at,” Leahy said.
Yesterday, the blogger dday asked Sen Barbara Boxer (D-CA) whether she would support a Congressional inquiry into Bybee, including the possibility of impeachment. “I’m very open to that,” Boxer said. “There is an ongoing investigation at the Justice Department into his work, and we’ll see how that goes. But I’m very open to that. And I’ll remind everyone that I didn’t vote for him when his nomination came up. I was one of 19 to do so.”
Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.
Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union this morning, Center for American Progress Action Fund President and CEO John Podesta called on Congress to commence impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee, should he decide not to voluntarily resign his seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Podesta said:
The one thing I disagree with you and David [Gergen] about is I do think there’s a distinction between going back and prosecuting in criminal courts the actors who were involved in these memos and letting Judge Bybee continue to sit on a court one step removed from the Supreme Court. He’s acting and listening to cases, making judgments of others, and we know he authorized things that were illegal under U.S. law and violated the U.S. obligations under international treaties.
If he would do the right thing, he should just simply resign. If he doesn’t, I think this is one matter where he continues to sit — he doesn’t have the moral or legal authority to continue to do that. And I think a simple matter would be to remove him from office.
Podesta added that he suspects the White House doesn’t agree with the call for impeaching Bybee. The other panelists — David Gergen and former Reagan chief of staff Ken Duberstein — disagreed with the call for impeachment. Watch it:
Also, Podesta delivered a letter this morning to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI), laying out the case for impeaching Bybee.
The letter (pdf) informed Conyers that ThinkProgress has collected nearly 20,000 signatures from concerned citizens “who have expressed their deep-felt and sincere desire to see that Judge Bybee is held to account for authorizing torture.” Podesta’s letter affixed the names of everyone who signed our petition calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Bybee. (It required 71 three-column double-sided pages.)
Thanks for all your help! This could not have been possible without the support of all of you who signed the petition. If you have not already done so, please consider joining the effort by clicking here.
Read Podesta’s full letter below: Read more
The Washington Post interviews a number of friends and colleagues of Jay Bybee, who anonymously tell the paper that the judge regrets writing the torture memos:
“I’ve heard him express regret at the contents of the memo,” said a fellow legal scholar and longtime friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity while offering remarks that might appear as “piling on.” “I’ve heard him express regret that the memo was misused. I’ve heard him express regret at the lack of context — of the enormous pressure and the enormous time pressure that he was under. And anyone would have regrets simply because of the notoriety.”
“On the primary memo, that legitimated and defined torture, he just felt it got away from him,” said the scholar. “I got the impression that he was not pleased with that bit of scholarship,” said an associate who asked not be identified sharing private conversations. “I don’t know that he ‘owned it.’ … The way he put it was: He was head of the OLC, and it was written, and he was not pleased with it.”
In a new video titled “The Problem of Jay Bybee,” American News Project’s David Murdoch asks how Bybee could have been confirmed by the U.S. Senate in Feb. 2003 for a lifetime appointment as a federal judge despite authoring memos justifying the legality of torture.
The answer is partly due to the fact that the Senate had no knowledge of Bybee’s role in the Bush administration’s authorization of torture because no secret memos on the subject had yet to be released. “Had the Senate known about these memos, there’s simply no way Bybee ever would have been confirmed as a federal judge to begin with,” Harpers editor Scott Horton noted.
Another reason the Senate let Bybee’s nomination fly through unchallenged was perhaps due to the fact that on the same day as his hearing, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was delivering a speech to the United Nations making the case for invading Iraq. “Bybee was greatly advantaged by an accident,” Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman noted:
ACKERMAN: So almost all the Senators were watching the TV outside the hearing room. All the Democrats were. This was of central importance for the Democratic senators in particular to define their position, one could appreciate why they were watching the tube than questioning Judge Bybee. So there was no critical questioning at all at the hearing room and that does not normally happen.
Indeed, near the conclusion of the February 5, 2003 hearing, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) heaped praise on Bybee: “I don’t know of anybody who has any more qualification or any greater ability in the law than you have and that’s counting some pretty exceptional people.” Watch ANP’s video:
Please join our campaign calling on Congress to begin impeachment hearings against Jay Bybee.
On Special Report tonight, Fox News highlighted ThinkProgress’ campaign calling for the impeachment of Jay Bybee. “Democrats are getting a lot of pressure from left-leaning groups who are after Bybee’s hide,” Fox’s Brian Wilson reported, while flashing an on-screen image of ThinkProgress.
Fox also reported that Jon Summers, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), said that Bybee “has a good reputation in Nevada, where he serves.” Reid’s spokesman added that the Senator “does not believe there should be a rush to judgment.” Watch it:
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