Recently, Yoo and Bybee escaped accountability for their failings and attempts to do irreparable damage to our Constitution and Checks and Balances. The U.S. Justice Department is still broken beyond all recognition in my book. Now some are questioning more missing emails, this time John Yoo’s. Read the following excerpt and then use the link to go to Truthout.org and read the rest of the story. GFS
National Archives, Watchdog Demand DOJ Probe Destruction of John Yoo’s Emails
Friday 26 February 2010
by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report
Excerpt:
“The National Archives and a watchdog group sent letters to the Justice Department (DOJ) Thursday demanding an investigation into the destruction of John Yoo’s emails in the summer of 2002, when he and other government attorneys prepared and finalized legal memoranda for the CIA that redefined torture and authorized interrogators to brutalize war on terror detainees.
The Federal Records Act (FRA) requires the preservation of government documents. Records cannot be destroyed unless approved by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). According to the DOJ’s web site, emails fall under FRA if they pertain to government business.
Last week, the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) released a long-awaited report into the legal work former Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorneys Yoo and Jay Bybee did for the Bush administration on torture. Yoo currently works as a law professor at UC Berkeley and Bybee received a lifetime appointment as a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Legal opinions written by Yoo in August 2002 and signed by Bybee cleared the way for the Bush administration to subject detainees to the near drowning of waterboarding and other brutal treatment at the hands of CIA interrogators.
Waterboarding and some of the other interrogation techniques sanctioned by the Bush administration, such as slamming detainees against walls and depriving them of sleep, have long been considered acts of torture and have been treated and prosecuted as war crimes. However, Yoo – working closely with Bush administration officials – claimed that the techniques did not violate US criminal laws and international treaties forbidding torture.
Further, Yoo asserted that Bush’s presidential powers were virtually unlimited in wartime, even a conflict as vaguely defined as the war on terror.”
Link to rest of article on Truthout.org: http://www.truthout.org/national-archives-watchdog-demand-doj-probe-destruction-john-yoos-emails57202