Yoo was a “godsend” to a White House nervous about war-crimes prosecutions,

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/magazine/09rosen.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

By JEFFREY ROSEN
Published: September 9, 2007

This article will appear in the Sept. 9 issue of the magazine.


> ...........When Goldsmith was asked, four years ago, to head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, he jumped at the opportunity. Working for the office is one of the most prestigious jobs in government: former heads and deputies include the Supreme Court Justices William H. Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. The Office of Legal Counsel interprets all laws that bear on the powers of the executive branch. The opinions of the head of the office are binding, except on the rare occasions when they are reversed by the attorney general or the president.
>
> In the post-9/11 era, the office has played a crucial role in providing legal cover to jittery bureaucrats fearful that officials in the White House, Defense and State Departments or the C.I.A. might be prosecuted for their actions in the war on terror. The Justice Department, after all, is the branch of government responsible for prosecutions, and its own prosecutors — as well as independent counsels — would be hard pressed to prosecute someone who had relied on the department’s own opinions in good faith. For this reason, the office has two important powers: the power to put a brake on aggressive presidential action by saying no and, conversely, the power to dispense what Goldsmith calls “free get-out-of jail cards” by saying yes. Its opinions, he writes in his book, are the equivalent of “an advance pardon” for actions taken at the fuzzy edges of criminal laws.
>
> In the Bush administration, however, the most important legal-policy decisions in the war on terror before Goldsmith’s arrival were made not by the Office of Legal Counsel but by a self-styled “war council.” This group met periodically in Gonzales’s office at the White House or Haynes’s office at the Pentagon. The members included Gonzales, Addington, Haynes and Yoo. These men shared a belief that the biggest obstacle to a vigorous response to the 9/11 attacks was the set of domestic and international laws that arose in the 1970s to constrain the president’s powers in response to the excesses of Watergate and the Vietnam War. (The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, for example, requires that executive officials get a warrant before wiretapping suspected enemies in the United States.) The head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the first years of the Bush administration, Jay Bybee, had little experience with national-security issues, and he delegated responsibility for that subject matter to Yoo, giving him the authority to draft opinions that were binding on the entire executive branch.
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> Yoo was a “godsend” to a White House nervous about war-crimes prosecutions, Goldsmith writes in his book, because his opinions reassured the White House that no official who relied on them could be prosecuted after the fact. But Yoo’s direct access to Gonzales angered his boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to Goldsmith. (Neither Ashcroft nor Gonzales responded to requests for interviews for this article.) Ashcroft, Goldsmith says, felt that Gonzales and the war council were usurping legal-policy decisions that were properly entrusted to the attorney general, such as the creation of military commissions, which Gonzales supported and Ashcroft never liked.........

[Demeter]

1. He Sounds Much Too Nice and Honest to Be a Republican

Come to the side of the Light, Mr. Goldsmith.

[RainDog]

2. thanks for posting

esp. in this forum where it will not disappear so quickly.