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Report Delayed

A newly revealed e-mail indicates the Justice Department was close to completing an internal investigation on senior lawyers who wrote controversial positions on the legality of waterboarding.

 

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A Justice Department investigation into the conduct of senior lawyers who approved waterboarding was on the verge of completion last fall when then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey raised objections to the findings, according to an e-mail from a Justice official and two legal sources who have been briefed on the inquiry.

The e-mail was disclosed Monday by Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse following a NEWSWEEK story reporting that a draft of the report by the department's internal ethics watchdog unit, the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), sharply criticizes three former top lawyers at Justice who authored controversial legal memos about interrogation practices.

The OPR report has been eagerly anticipated on Capitol Hill for some time because it deals directly with one of the central issues in the contentious debate over Bush-era interrogation policy: whether a small group of senior lawyers violated professional legal standards when they concluded that waterboarding (or simulated drowning) and other "enhanced" interrogation tactics could be used by the CIA against Al Qaeda suspects without violating a federal law banning torture.

Last Oct. 1, a lawyer on Durbin's staff at the Senate Judiciary Committee e-mailed the Justice Department about the "status of OPR's investigation of DOJ attorneys who provided advice on interrogation matters," according to a letter to Marshall Jarrett, the chief of OPR, sent today by Durbin and Whitehouse.

A Justice legislative affairs official, Keith B. Nelson, e-mailed back on Oct. 16, 2008: "Heard back from OPR. Should be done in 4-5 weeks. I believe [Marshall Jarrett] will provide it to the Members."

But the report has yet to be turned over to Capitol Hill and a senior Justice Department official said last week that new Attorney General Eric Holder has not yet had a chance to review it. The NEWSWEEK story, published Feb. 14 and based on information provided by two knowledgeable sources who had been briefed on the inquiry, stated that Mukasey and his deputy, Mark Filip, strongly objected to the critical findings when they were presented with a copy of the OPR draft in the closing weeks of the Bush administration.

It could not be learned precisely what the grounds of Mukasey's objections were. (Neither he, Filip nor Mukasey's former chief of staff, responded to requests for comment.) But in several speeches before he left office, Mukasey criticized efforts to second guess the work of Justice lawyers who, he argued, were acting under "almost unimaginable" pressures in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

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  • Posted By: ManhattanPROJECT @ 02/27/2009 6:20:28 PM

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  • Posted By: Twisted @ 02/21/2009 8:17:31 PM

    Waterboarding is not so bad .i was waterboarded by the us government in 1982 Its a most human way to get enemy combatants to spill there guts out. and confess there sins .I am a Navy veteren and was waterboarded in a controlled pow training enviorment The liberals of our nation need to really see what the islamic radicals are capable of doing to us all. i say dont close gitmo and if oboma does i propose giving each detaine a gallon of water a rowboat an oar a copy of the qur'an and place them in the middle of the atlantic and let allah guide them

  • Posted By: Twisted @ 02/21/2009 8:16:03 PM

    Waterboarding is not so bad .i was waterboarded by the us government in 1982 Its a most human way to get enemy combatants to spill there guts out. and confess there sins .I am a Navy veteren and was waterboarded in a controlled pow training enviorment The liberals of our nation need to really see what the islamic radicals are capable of doing to us all. i say dont close gitmo and if oboma does i propose giving each detaine a gallon of water a rowboat an oar a copy of the coran and place them in the middle of the atlantic and let allah guide them

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