Report: No Action Against Bush Era Attorneys For War On Terror Legal Advice

Andrew Sullivan and other lefty idiots hit hardest.

We’ve been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for news to come down from the Justice Department on what might become of John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the two Bush administration lawyers largely responsible for authoring the famous torture memos.

Well, we finally have word. And it appears that the DOJ will largely let the pair go with little more than a slap on the wrist. Click here for the story from Newsweek, which broke the news; here for a followup from over the weekend from the Washington Post.

According to a forthcoming ethics report issued by the DOJ’s ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility, Yoo and Bybee will be wrist-slapped for exercising poor judgment but will not be referred to authorities for possible sanctions.

Unless I've missed it, no CIA officers have been brought up on charges in connection with any enhanced interrogation activities. One might start to think that the actions the Bush administration took after 9/11 were in fact legal. Or that Obama just doesn't have the guts to pull the trigger on this stuff since it would be incredibly unpopular. Mind you they aren't mutually exclusive concepts.

After spending 7+ years whining about the "abandonment of our values" and "lawlessness" of the Bush approach to national security, what exactly do the Democrats have to show for it in a legal sense? Nothing.

It's almost as if they spent all that time running down every effort to keep the country safe out of a desire to do nothing more than score political points with their base.

Yes, they may have reaped some short term benefits from it but one year after the supposed death of the Republican Party, it's not looking like such a great deal.

Perhaps now Obama can get around to actually putting into place a process for interrogating high value detainees.

posted by DrewM. at 05:45 PM

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