Friday, February 13, 2009

Coming to Yoo, baby?

Brad DeLong posts what purports to be an inside tip about the OPR investigation of John Yoo:

[T]he [Justice Department's] O[ffice of] P[rofessional] R[esponsibility]... came to "very harsh conclusions" about the professional competence of a number of the [Yoo and Bradbury] memos, making "recommendations for further action" with respect to both John Yoo and Stephen Bradbury. Attorney General Mukasey and Deputy AG Filip were reported to be apoplectic about the report and to have attempted to squelch it. Their concern is... for the defense of reliance on advice of counsel that Mukasey put forward in a series of speeches, and that the OPR reports will make, I understand, something of an absurdity...

After we commenters nagged him about the provenance of this text, he amended the post to cite "Echelon Intercept #3489DE38A9." IOW, that's classified.

Interesting if true, as Mark Twain used to say of the Gospels. Meanwhile, 62% of respondents in a Gallup poll favor an investigation into "possible use of torture in terror interrogations," though only 38% of the total want that to be a criminal investigation. Of course, getting some facts out there could nudge that number up.

UPDATE: Ha - the DeLong post disappears. Emptywheel's post proves I'm not crazy, and speculates that the reason we heard about this from DeLong was that the leak came via someone connected to Berkeley. Maybe someone who didn't want his e-mail quoted either, I would now infer.

UPDATE: Orin Kerr links to Newsweek's report of an alleged OPR report unfavorable to Yoo and others. Y.t. degrades the quality of the comments thread at several points, but there are numerous valuable comments by others.

No comments:

Post a Comment