Free Republic

For weeks, the right has heckled Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. for his plans to try the alleged 9/11 conspirators in New York City and his handling of the Christmas bombing plot suspect. Now the left is going to be upset: an upcoming Justice Department report from its ethics-watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), clears the Bush administration lawyers who authored the “torture” memos of professional-misconduct allegations. While the probe is sharply critical of the legal reasoning used to justify waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques, NEWSWEEK has learned that a senior Justice official who did the final...

"(A)s a matter of constitutional law, the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) memoranda’s most sweeping, categorical, and controversial conclusion – that at all events no statute or treaty may limit thePresident’s sole constitutional powers as military” Commander in Chief” to direct and conduct the use of U.S. force – is in my opinion unquestionably correct. The Office of Legal Counsel has long and consistently defended the view, both in Republican and in Democratic administrations,that the President’s constitutional powers under Article II of the constitution, as chief executive and as Commander in Chief of the nation’s military, afford the President substantial...

Since the Obama administration released memos describing the enhanced interrogation techniques used by the C.I.A. to extract information from top-level al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other terrorists, there has been a running debate on such questions as: † Whether the memos should have been released (video link);† Whether all or just a few enhanced techniques meet some arbitrary threshold for torture, even when used on Islamic terrorists who have been trained to resist them ... As luck would have it, an unintentional snafu provided a much-needed reality-check for us all. Earlier in the week, people on both sides of...

Hey, if it's no problem to release classified documents, the birth certificate should be an easy call, as to my knowledge it's not classified. Neither are his undergraduate records. If he's as brilliant as everyone keeps saying he is, why not prove it by showing off his stellar grades? What articles did he write while editor of the vaunted Harvard Law Review? Inquiring minds want to know. Speaking of Harvard, how did he pay for his high priced law degree? Let's not forget that trip during college to Pakistan in 1981, the one that supposedly provided Obama with his foreign...

OK, listen closely so I can show you what I see, trust me, it will be worth it to read all of this. Here goes… When I was growing up I was taught it was more important to ask the right questions than to give the right answers. I always wondered why but I think I finally have it figured out. If you don’t ask the right questions you will only pay attention to what is being shown you rather than what those in power are trying to hide. Modern day politicians are nothing more than sleight-of-hand artists. They get...

Jay S. Bybee has been the forgotten man among the legal architects of the torture policies of the George W. Bush administration.But the release Thursday of several additional memos by the Justice Department puts Bybee, then an assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, front and center. He is the author of an August 2002 memo, to CIA General Counsel John Rizzo, concluding that waterboarding, among other enhanced interrogation techniques, did not meet the legal definition of torture.The 18-page memo authorizes such methods in language that is stunning for its detail and detachment. As the New York Times...

ABC News' David Chalian Reports: Hillary Clinton stepped directly into the middle of this week's political fray when she questioned former Vice President Dick Cheney's credibility on the torture memos recently released by the Obama administration. Congressman Dana Rohrbacher, R-Calif., took up Dick Cheney's cause today and pressed Secretary of State Clinton to urge the Obama administration to declassify and release documents he believes demonstrate the success of the enhanced interrogation techniques employed during the Bush administration. Rep. Rohrbacher referred to Mr. Cheney's recent comments where he claimed the memos released by the Obama administration last week tend to only...

Mark Levin provided a lecture on history last night to President Barack Obama about the law and the decisions made by Lincoln, FDR, and others when American lives hung in the balance. "If we get hit again, that blood is on Obama's hands." It makes no logical difference that Bybee could have foreseen that the result of his incorrect legal advice would be the commission of a crime. Gorelick could have foreseen that the consequences of her incorrect legal advice would permit the commission of a crime (just read her memo ... and you will see that the warning signs...

.....Having been the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, I'm aware of what some of these captives did....[T]he evidence against most -- if not all -- of the high-value detainees remains damning. But the issue is not about who or what they are. It is about who or what we are. With the release of these OLC memos, I can add three .....comments..... 1. The focus on water-boarding misses the main point of the program. Which is that it was a program. Unlike the image of using intense physical coercion as a quick, desperate expedient, the program developed "interrogation plans"...

"Trust the president." That was the Bush administration's main defense of the president's bizarre choice of corporate lawyer Harriet Miers for a seat on the Supreme Court. But the administration also had a backup rationale: as D.C.'s Hill newspaper reported, in an October 3, 2005, conference call with conservative leaders, Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman stressed "the need to confirm a justice who will not interfere with the administration's management of the war on terrorism." It was a bit unsettling to hear that proposition stated so baldly, but no one who has followed the administration's drive to expand executive...