By David Swanson

No one disputes that Jay Bybee's name is at the bottom of memos that were, and to some extent still are, treated as laws which legalized aggressive war at the pleasure of a president and a variety of acts of torture. For many months the House Judiciary Committee has had two excuses for not impeaching Judge Bybee, even while proceeding with the impeachments of a judge for groping and another judge for petty corruption. The private excuse has been that impeaching Bybee would be opposed by Fox News. The public excuse has been that the Justice Department has not yet released its Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on the crimes of Bybee and his former colleagues.

But the Justice Department does not intend to ever release the more honest version of that report, the one which found that Bybee and John Yoo had engaged in misconduct. Instead, after taking the unprecedented step of allowing Bybee and Yoo to recommend edits to the report, lo and behold the new version finds that felonious acts of complicity in torture (not to mention aggressive war, which as far as we know really isn't mentioned in the report at all) don't amount to misconduct but rather "poor judgment", sort of like getting into a skiing accident. Here's Newsweek:

"NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final review of the report softened an earlier OPR finding. Previously, the report concluded that two key authors—Jay Bybee, now a federal appellate court judge, and John Yoo, now a law professor—violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted a crucial 2002 memo approving the use of harsh tactics, say two Justice sources who asked for anonymity discussing an internal matter. But the reviewer, career veteran David Margolis, downgraded that assessment to say they showed 'poor judgment,' say the sources. (Under department rules, poor judgment does not constitute professional misconduct.) The shift is significant: the original finding would have triggered a referral to state bar associations for potential disciplinary action—which, in Bybee’s case, could have led to an impeachment inquiry."

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By David Swanson

There is strong evidence that John Conyers, Patrick Leahy, and most of the rest of us are in love with torture-lawyer Jay Bybee. I'm not talking about sexual love and wouldn't, because people's lives are lost to such bread-and-circuses journalism every day. I'm talking deep personal devotion.

Let's examine the evidence.

1. As head of the Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee committed felonies in exchange for being nominated to a life-time seat on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Bybee violated the Anti-Torture Statute and the War Crimes Statute by facilitating torture through secret memos purporting to legalize specific criminal acts. Bybee also played a leading role in a conspiracy to violate the UN Charter, the US Constitution, and the War Powers Act by signing a secret memo purporting to give presidents the unrestricted power to launch aggressive wars.

2. The excuses that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Conyers used for not impeaching Bush or Cheney, outlandish and revolting as they may have been, do not apply to a judge who is not president and who is not known to most Americans. Yet Conyers, his committee, and the House of Representatives impeached a judge this year for groping people and have not attempted to impeach Bybee.

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The following is my commentary concerning, "UN Official Demands Torture Accountability," (by Edger. Antemedius.com. July 2, 2009) and specifically Edger's comment at the end of that post as follows, "Where is the line between avoiding the issue, and becoming complicit and an accessory?"

Hi Edger,

Yours is an excellently posed question: "Where is the line between avoiding the issue, and becoming complicit and an accessory?" There is definitely an element of "damned if you do, and damned if you don't" in Obama's tightrope walking. His handlers and he are trying to get away with not calling a spade a spade -- not calling waterboarding and other "harsh interrogation techniques" what they are: torture. Due to Obama's approach to life (his severely deficient worldview), he cannot roundly expose and denounce all the lies going back to the beginning of time while at the same time calling for peace and reconciliation without being directly confronted with having to include his stated arch enemies, the Pashtuns, he has conflated with the Taliban, conflated with al Qaeda, ignored as a CIA creation.

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