After an "investigation" by the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility, the legal architects of US Government sponsored torture during the Bush Administration will not be held accountable for their actions by their former employer.
According to a NY Times Article this morning, the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility inquiry into the activities of "Torture Memo" architects John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Stephen Bradbury, will result in no referrals for prosecutions.
From the Times article:
An internal Justice Department inquiry has concluded that Bush administration lawyers committed serious lapses of judgment in writing secret memorandums authorizing brutal interrogations but that they should not be prosecuted, according to government officials briefed on its findings.
Brutal. As in "near drowning" to the point that in 2005 Stephen Bradbury realized that waterboarding was so potetinally deadly as to require a doctor with emergency surgical tools in the room while waterboarding.
But the investigation will find that they made "mistakes" in their legal analysis, right?
The findings, growing out of an inquiry that started in 2004, would represent a stinging rebuke of the lawyers and their legal arguments.
Stinging rebuke? Stinging like the pain that accompanies being shackled hanging from the ceiling all night in a CIA black prison?
No. More like sending a letter to Yoo and Bybee's State Bar Associations to ask them to think about punishing the torture lawyers:
The report by the Office of Professional Responsibility, an internal ethics unit within the Justice Department, is also likely to ask state bar associations to consider possible disciplinary action, which could include reprimands or even disbarment, for some of the lawyers involved in writing the legal opinions, the officials said.
I say Bullshit.
What these men did was immoral, and in my opinion, criminal. The Office of Professional Responsibility is part of the DOJ, the source of the torture memos, and the investigation started in 2004, during the Bush Administration. We have not yet seen the report, and according to the article neither has Attorney General Holder or President Obama, but this is sounding like whitewash.
We need real investigations by INDEPENDENT investigators.