Our view
It's been weeks since President Barack Obama slammed the door on prosecuting CIA operatives who tortured terrorist suspects in secret locations overseas and left it up to his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to decide whether to press criminal charges against the government lawyers who wrote the absurd legal memos saying war crimes are OK. Now reports have surfaced that an internal Justice Department inquiry has determined the lawyers shouldn't be prosecuted either, despite the evident incompetence of their handiwork, and Mr. Holder is likely to accede in that judgment.
But the Justice Department finding reportedly didn't rule out asking state bar associations to consider disciplinary action against the authors of the memos. One of them, Jay S. Bybee, was rewarded for his diligence as an enabler of the Bush administration's torture policy with a federal judgeship. His subordinate, John Yoo, is now a law professor at the University of California Berkeley. Having so gleefully trashed the Constitution and international law, neither deserves to occupy positions of such power and prestige.
Judge Bybee deliberately concealed his involvement in drafting the torture memos during his Senate confirmation hearings. At the very least, he should be called to account for that omission, even if lawmakers have to impeach him to get the whole story. And having demonstrated such egregious contempt for the law, Mr. Yoo really has no business instructing future jurists how to uphold it. He should be disbarred and never allowed to practice again.
Glenn McNatt
Reader responses
Clearly Bybee lied during his confirmation about his role in creation of a state run torture system; disbarment and removal from the bench after impeachment seems the bare minimum required. Yoo also should be disbarred and prevented from infecting other would-be lawyers with this un-American rationalization of long illegal tortures.
But these two lawyers got prior instructions from Alberto Gonzales (then Bush's counsel) and David Addington (Cheney's lawyer) on these memos, so there clearly appears to been a legal opinion pre-ordered at the highest levels. To avoid these four men's culpability does not seem to me to be a just resolution of these high crimes and misdemeanors.
Joe Compton
Mr. Yoo will be disciplined and not be disbarred. Mr. Bybee should be divested of his judgeship. He can be clobbered for lying to Congress, but why disbarment? No need to be so vindictive.
The left, the right and the middle are stumped by terrorists and their tactics. Maybe Bybee, Cheney and Yoo were potential dictators who in the name of the terrorists sought to subvert international and U.S. laws. But maybe they were no more than terrified fools who sought to protect their own heads from being hung on pikes if they failed to prevent another attack on U.S. soil.
Usha Nellore
