by John L. Work
NewsRealBlog.com
2010 February 23
A few weeks ago I wrote a post here at NRB on a news item that got very little attention from American readers. It’s well-worth revisiting now. The Obama Administration announced through an anonymous source on or about January 31 that no one in the Bush Administration who was involved with green-lighting the water-boarding of terrorists following the 9/11 attacks would face sanctions or prosecution.
I predicted that the American Left and The World of Islam would not let go of this issue, even if Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice did. True to my prediction the leftist Washington Post Editorial Board is still at it, scolding Bush Administration lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo today for okaying the “reprehensible and abusive techniques” (read that: pouring water onto terrorists’ faces to find out where and when the next attack was coming).
Read the entire editorial here:
“JAY S. BYBEE was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and John C. Yoo was his deputy in 2002 when the CIA asked for a review of the legality of certain interrogation techniques for detainees…Barely seven months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, chatter about a forthcoming assault on American soil or on U.S. interests abroad was high.
Mr. Bybee and Mr. Yoo approved a roster of techniques that included waterboarding and prolonged sleep deprivation. They asserted that interrogators would be on solid legal ground unless they acted with “specific intent” to inflict “severe pain,” which they defined as pain equivalent to “death, organ failure or serious impairment of bodily functions.”…
… Some seven years later, Mr. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge, and Mr. Yoo, a law professor, have been cleared of charges of professional misconduct. It is the right decision… In the event, lawyers provided cover for reprehensible and abusive techniques that stained the country’s reputation and diminished its moral standing in the world.”
The article continues at NewsRealBlog
