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Opinion: Bush officials work to soften ethics report on waterboarding authors

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They are calling Atty. Gen. Eric Holder‘s Justice Department -- former officials from the Bush administration who are lobbying Team Obama to soften a soon-to-be-released report on torture.

The issue: whether John C. Yoo (now a professor at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law) and Jay S. Bybee (now a judge on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals), should be disciplined or prosecuted for writing key legal memos that cleared the way for harsh interrogation tactics against terrorist suspects.

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We’ve known that an ethics probe is in the process. And subjects of an investigation are always allowed the right to respond to allegations before they are aired.

But the Washington Post is reporting that the Bush team has launched a lobbying campaign in which former Bush officials contact their counterparts at the Obama Justice Department. The theme: It’s bad precedent to impose sanctions on legal advisors.

No telling how this will all turn out.

But one thing is sure. Even as President Obama reiterates that he wants to move forward instead of looking back, the Holder Justice Department’s edict on the torture memos will likely turn up the heat on the administration and Congress to investigate and prosecute those responsible.

This is Yoo testifying in Congress last summer about the torture memos.



In an interview Tuesday, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin told the Post it was too early to call for a special prosecutor or another congressional probe.

But he added, ‘It’s a question of responsibility. In this chain of command, how far up did it go?’

-- Johanna Neuman

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