NYT on exactly how lawyers are like teenaged girls

[Mort Zuckerman]

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Subject: NYT on exactly how lawyers are like teenaged girls

Date: Mar 5, 2009 4:34 AM

"In a footnote to Mr. Bradbury’s January memorandum that sharply
criticized Mr. Yoo’s work, Mr. Bradbury signaled that he did not want
a repudiation of Mr. Yoo’s legal reasoning to be used against him as
part of the ethics inquiry.

"Mr. Bradbury wrote that his retractions were not 'intended to suggest
in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the
opinions in question' violated any 'applicable standards of
professional responsibility.'


TRANSLATION:

"I, we, lawyers who are employed by US citizens to
protect these citizens against corporate crime and
to protect national security by not pissing off
our Western partners via revealing that the US is
actually controlled by the plutocrats (banksters),
don't want anyone to hurt *us,* the lawyers, because
we are ever so much more valuable and delicate than
the soldiers who fight the wars and face the consequences
of our cowardice.
"DISCLAIMER: We also suffer from, but are expected
to demonstrate Guv-employment-related Intellectual and
Moral Paralysis (or DSM-V GIMP)."

===============
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/washington/04legal.html?_r=2&ref=us

March 4, 2009
Release of Memos Fuels Push for Inquiry Into Bush’s Terror-Fighting
Policies
By CHARLIE SAVAGE and NEIL A. LEWIS

WASHINGTON — A day after releasing a set of Bush administration
opinions that claimed sweeping presidential powers in fighting
terrorism, the Obama administration faced new pressure on Tuesday to
support a broad inquiry into interrogation, detention, surveillance
and other practices under President George W. Bush.

Justice Department officials said they might soon release additional
opinions on those subjects. But the disclosure of the nine formerly
secret documents fueled calls by lawmakers for an independent
commission to investigate and make public what the Bush administration
did in the global campaign against terrorism.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative John
Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, said the revelations, together with
the release of new information about the Central Intelligence Agency’s
destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, had underscored the need
for a commission that would have the power to subpoena documents and
testimony.

Officials who discussed the process spoke on the condition of
anonymity because memorandums still under review might involve
classified information. Among those that have not been disclosed but
are believed to exist are a memorandum from the fall of 2001
justifying the National Security Agency’s program of domestic
surveillance without warrants and one from the summer of 2002 that
listed specific harsh interrogation techniques, including
waterboarding, that the C.I.A. was authorized to use.

The Justice Department officials said the decision to release the nine
memorandums on Monday came after some of the opinions were sought in a
civil lawsuit in California. They said department lawyers had
determined that the opinions did not contain classified information.

The lawsuit was filed by Jose Padilla, a United States citizen who was
arrested in Chicago in 2002 and detained for years as an enemy
combatant before eventually being tried and convicted in a civilian
criminal procedure. Mr. Padilla is suing John C. Yoo, a former Bush
administration lawyer who was the author of many of the opinions
justifying detention and interrogation policies.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on Wednesday on
whether to create a commission to look into the Bush administration’s
counterterrorism policy. The committee chairman, Senator Patrick J.
Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, has already called for a commission, and
another Democrat on the panel said Tuesday that he would support such
an approach.

But David B. Rivkin Jr., an associate White House counsel under the
first President Bush who is scheduled to testify at the hearing on
Wednesday, said he planned to urge Congress not to move forward with
that proposal, which he said would violate the rights of Bush
administration officials and set them up for prosecutions by foreign
courts.

“They want to pillory people,” Mr. Rivkin said. “They want to destroy
their reputation. They want to drag them through the mud and single
them out for foreign prosecutions. And if you get someone in a perjury
trap, so much the better.”

President Obama has signaled a reluctance to open a wide-ranging
investigation into his predecessor’s policies, saying he preferred to
fix the policies and move on. In his first days in office, he issued
executive orders requiring strict adherence to rules against torture.
As a senator, he voted for legislation that brought surveillance
efforts into alignment with federal statutes.

The increased calls for a greater public accounting come as the
Justice Department’s internal ethics office is preparing to release a
report that is expected to criticize sharply members of the Bush legal
team who wrote memorandums purporting to provide legal justification
for the use of harsh interrogation methods on detainees despite anti-
torture laws and treaties, according to department and Congressional
officials.

The Office of Professional Responsibility at the Justice Department is
examining whether certain political appointees in the department
knowingly signed off on an unreasonable interpretation of the law to
provide legal cover for a program sought by Bush White House
officials.

The report is expected to focus on three former officials of the
Office of Legal Counsel: Mr. Yoo, a Berkeley law professor, now on
leave at Chapman University, who was the principal author of opinions
on national security matters from 2001 to 2003; Jay S. Bybee, who
oversaw the counsel’s office during that period and is now a federal
appeals court judge; and Steven G. Bradbury, who oversaw the counsel’s
office in Mr. Bush’s second term.

Mr. Bradbury wrote two of the opinions released on Monday. Written
last October and this January, they broadly repudiated the aggressive
theory of virtually unlimited commander-in-chief power at the heart of
Mr. Yoo’s memorandums.

Although he was a critic of Mr. Yoo’s work, Mr. Bradbury himself wrote
three memorandums on the use of harsh interrogation techniques in
2005. Those documents are believed to be part of the Office of
Professional Responsibility’s investigation.

In a footnote to Mr. Bradbury’s January memorandum that sharply
criticized Mr. Yoo’s work, Mr. Bradbury signaled that he did not want
a repudiation of Mr. Yoo’s legal reasoning to be used against him as
part of the ethics inquiry.

Mr. Bradbury wrote that his retractions were not “intended to suggest
in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the
opinions in question” violated any “applicable standards of
professional responsibility.”

Scott Shane contributed reporting.

"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci