New Waterboarding Probe: Did Gov't Lawyers Act Ethically?
A second Department of Justice investigation, in addition to the one launched last month by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, has been under way for “several years” concerning the propriety of the waterboarding interrogation technique that the CIA has admittedly used on several al-Qaida suspects.
This newly revealed probe, which is being conducted by the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, is focusing, at least in part, on whether the Bush administration lawyers who OK’d waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques in written memos complied with legal ethics standards when doing so, according to the Washington Post and the Associated Press.
“Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys,” writes OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett in a Feb. 18 letter to Democratic senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
The DOJ investigation announced last month by Mukasey focuses on whether the CIA improperly destroyed videotapes of interrogations of al-Qaida suspects, at least one of which reportedly involved waterboarding.
Although such DOJ investigations are usually considered confidential personnel matters, Jarrett said in his letter to the senators that the results of this investigation may be released “because of the significant public interest in this matter.”
Bush administration officials have repeatedly insisted that the U.S. does not torture prisoners and that the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques was lawful. However, many observers say that waterboarding, in particular, is clearly a form of torture, as discussed in an earlier ABAJournal.com post.
Additional coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “DOJ Official Who Signed 2005 Waterboarding Memo Revisits the Issue”
ABAJournal.com: “CIA Officials Say Three Al-Qaida Suspects Subjected to Waterboarding”
ABAJournal.com: “Red Cross: US Tortured Prisoners”
