Last Sunday, Nancy Pelosi vowed to wrangle up the votes needed to pass a health care bill even if it meant some Democratic lawmakers would be voted out of office in November's midterm elections.

"Why are we here? We're not here just to self-perpetuate our service in Congress. We're here to do the job for the American people," Pelosi said in an interview on ABC News' "This Week."

"The point is we have a responsibility here ... " Pelosi said later on CNN's "State of the Union," explaining the urgency in passing legislation.

If only Pelosi and other Democrats applied the same aggressive attitude toward holding Bush administration officials accountable for implementing a policy of torture against "war on terror detainees" after 9/11.

While it may seem like a stretch to talk about health care benefits and torture in the same breath, there is a direct link between the two issues. Indeed, it was a Medicare benefits statute and other health care provisions that were used to form the basis for one of two August 2002 torture memos.

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Happy Monday and welcome to the Dog’s letter writing campaign for torture accountability. Last week was not a good week for the cause. The release of the Office of Professional Responsibility report with the conclusion that Mr. Yoo and Judge Bybee showed only poor judgment in their ginning up of legal cover for torture is a travesty. The Associate Attorney General David Margolis overrode the two previous versions of the report which called for them to be referred to their local Bar Associations for professional misconduct. Instead they are very mildly admonished and let go their merry way.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

There is still an avenue to pursue and that is House and Senate Judiciary Committee hearings. The Dog would love to tell you this was going to be a place where things will be different, but the reality is that it is likely to be a lot of smoke and very little fire. However giving up is not an option, at least for this dog. So lets take all the shots we can and keep this issue alive.

Today we will be writing to Judiciary Chair Conyers, below is this weeks letter:

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What else can you call it when the Obama Justice Department rules that the Bush team lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to quote the New York Times February 19 story, “had used flawed legal reasoning but were not guilty of professional misconduct”?

This decision shreds the carefully constructed reasoning that the United States prosecution team presented, and that was adopted, at the Nuremberg Trials. Under the Obama Justice Department’s rationale regarding Yoo and Bybee, all Nazi defendants tried under those proceedings, which set a precedent thereafter, would have been set free.

In the cases of the Nazi defendants the argument repeatedly asserted was “We were following orders.” Under the Obama Justice Department ruling the defense was more like “Oops, it is easy for anyone to make a mistake, particularly in moments of great pressure.”

Oddly enough, this is one time when Dick Cheney has demonstrated a higher standard of probity than those analyzing the conduct of Yoo and Bybee. It was Cheney who recently conceded that the executive branch controlled Justice Department “opinions” on torture.

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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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Illustration: Matt Mahurin
Washington Independent

CIA interrogators provided top agency officials in Langley with daily "torture" updates of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged "high-level" terrorist detainee, who was held at a secret "black site" prison and waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, according to newly released court documents obtained by this reporter.

The extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials in Langley likely included updates provided to senior Bush administration officials.

The government documents filed May 1 with US District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein included two sets of indexes totaling 52 pages and contained general descriptions of cables sent back to CIA headquarters describing the August 2002 videotaped interrogation sessions of Zubaydah. Those cable transmissions included a description of the techniques interrogators had used and the intelligence, if any, culled from those sessions.

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An ethics report prepared by H. Marshall Jarrett, head of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), reached "damning" conclusions about numerous cases of "misconduct" in the advice attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee provided the Bush administration, according to legal and Congressional sources familiar with the findings and news reports.

The report, which also may be critical of legal opinions authorizing domestic surveillance activities, recommends state bar associations conduct a review of Yoo and Bybee's legal work to determine whether they should face disciplinary action, including disbarment.

Bybee, now an appeals court judge in San Francisco, signed the so-called August 1, 2002 torture memo and other controversial legal opinions that Yoo helped to draft. Bybee was head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and Yoo was a deputy assistant attorney general.

Steven Bradbury, the former acting head of OLC, was also a subject of Jarrett's probe and authored three legal opinions in May 2005, reinstating torture against alleged "high-level" terrorist detainees, but it's unknown exactly what the report has recommended Bradbury's punishment, if anything, should be. Bradbury, as it turns out, participated in a final review of the report while he was still acting head of OLC.

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A new draft Department of Justice report, not yet approved by Attorny General Eric Holder, is recommending that Bush administration torture memo authors Jay Bybee, John Yoo, and Steven Bradbury not be prosecuted, but will apparently ask for disciplinary reprimands and/or disbarment by state bar associatons.

“The report by the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit within the Justice Department, is also likely to ask that state bar associations consider possible disciplinary action, including reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions, the officials said,” reports the New York Times.

“The conclusions of the 220-page draft report are not final and have not yet been approved by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The officials said it is possible the final report might be subject to revision, but they did not expect major alterations in its main findings or recommendations.”

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Not a single Democrat questioned Bybee at the session, and the proceedings came to a quick conclusion. The following month he was confirmed by the full Senate. Just six months prior to the hearing, Jay Bybee had signed legal memos providing cover for CIA agents torturing detainees -- yet Congress voted him to a lifetime on the federal bench. How did this happen? And what will become of Judge Bybee now?

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George W. Bush's Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn't even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan's Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.

Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case - which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later - was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week.

The failure to cite the earlier waterboarding case and a half-dozen other precedents that dealt with torture is reportedly one of the critical findings of a Justice Department watchdog report that legal sources say faults former Bush administration lawyers - Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury - for violating "professional standards."

Bybee, Yoo and Bradbury also shocked many who have read their memos in the last week by their use of clinical and legalistic jargon that sometimes took on an otherworldly or Orwellian quality. Bybee's August 1, 2002, legal memo - drafted by Yoo - argued that waterboarding could not be torture because it does not "inflict physical pain."

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