As today's diary from jimstaro notes, there are many disturbing aspects to the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility's (OPR) whitewash of Prof. Yoo and Judge Bybee for their rationalization of torture. That diary more than adequately adresses this disturbing development, which continues the slow strangulation of the rule of law in this country. There is an equally disturbing sidelight to this decision, however--the blatant double standard that was applied to WJC 10 years ago and to Yoo and Bybee now.
As many here may've forgotten, our 42nd POTUS agreed to the suspension of his Ark law license as he left office. He further agreed to pay a $25,000 fine as part of a deal in which he avoided potential prosecution for misleading testimony in the Paula Jones suit. Later in 2001, Clinton also agreed to resign from the Supreme Court bar in the face of a threatened suspension from that tribunal.
The whole Clinton/Jones/Lewinsky saga has been rehashed so many times in so many forums that it is not worth rehashing here. It is worth rehashing, however, that, at worst, WJC lied under oath in a deposition in a civil suit utterly unrelated to his official duties. That conduct was deemed to be sufficiently violative of the canons of professional responsibility to merit Clinton losing 2 licenses to practice law.
Relatively speaking, WJC's conduct is a parking ticket compared to Bybee's and Yoo's conduct. He didn't endorse the government's ability to engage in waterboarding. He didn't sign any memos
which defined "enhanced interrogation techniques" in ways that are regarded as torture by the current Justice Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, medical experts in the treatment of torture victims, intelligence officials, military judges, and American allies.
Jay Bybee is a federal appellate judge w/ life tenure. John Yoo is a tenured professor at the Univ. of California. Like Bill Clinton in the 1990s, they hold positions of trust and responsibility. Unlike Clinton, they breached the public trust while engaging in their official duties.
It was, arguably, an uphill battle all along to have Bybee and Yoo subject to discipline from their state bar associations. Obeisance to basic standards of accountability, however, mandated that the attempt be made. It required that the OPR not merely find that they engaged in poor judgment.
Bill Clinton engaged in poor judgment when he testified in the Jones case. Bybee and Yoo did not merely engage in poor judgment when they endorsed waterboarding. They endorsed activities that any decent civilization finds morally abhorrent. In the immortal words of Carnac the Magnificent, a child of four could plainly see the blatant inconsistency between the respective treatments afforded to these holders of a public trust.
What's saddest of all is that it is a DOJ serving under a Dem POTUS that allowed this inconsitency. This whitewash is morally wrong, legally dubious, and politically counterproductive. I honestly expected better from an administration that is headed by a constitutional scholar.