TPMMuckraker
Steven Bradbury

Holder May Investigate Torture -- But Several Probes Are Already Underway

Zachary Roth | July 13, 2009, 2:34PM

The pendulum appears to have swung back in the other direction on the issue of criminal investigations into Bush-era torture. It had looked for a while like President Obama's stated desire to look forward not back had carried the day. But now it appears that Attorney General Eric Holder -- independent of his boss's political concerns, which is how things should work -- is leaning back towards initiating a probe. The news was first reported over the weekend by Newsweek, then picked up today by the New York Times and Washington Post.

But whatever Holder ultimately decides, there are already several ongoing government efforts to investigate torture, which figure to substantially fill out our still patchwork understanding of the issue. So as we wait for official word from the Justice Department on a criminal inquiry, it's worth being clear about what those efforts are, and how they relate to each other.

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Topics: Barack Obama, CIA, CIA Tapes, DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility, Dick Cheney, Eric Holder, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Justice Department, Steven Bradbury, Torture

Alberto Gonzales

DOJ Torture Emails: How The Times Could Have Reported The Story

Zachary Roth | June 8, 2009, 1:01PM

Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that Justice Department lawyers agreed in 2005 that harsh interrogation techniques were legal. The impact of the story -- which was based largely on email messages written at the time by James Comey, then a high-ranking Justice Department official -- has been, it seems, to bolster the Dick Cheney position in the ongoing torture debate in Washington.

But the Times also, to its credit, released Comey's emails in full, allowing us all to make our own judgments about what they show. And after a close look at the emails, it seems clear that the paper could have used them to write a very different story -- with a very different effect on the public debate.

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Topics: Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Harriet Miers, Justice Department, Steven Bradbury, Torture

Media

Maddow Cites TPMmuckraker On Sleep Expert

Zachary Roth | April 23, 2009, 1:05PM

Last night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow cited our interview with James Horne, the sleep expert who says his work was distorted by Steven Bradbury in one of the OLC torture memos, to justify keeping people awake for 11 days.

Thanks for the shout out, Rachel!

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Topics: Media, Steven Bradbury, Torture

Torture

Turley: We Need A Special Torture Prosecutor, Not Some Lame Commission

Zachary Roth | April 22, 2009, 10:02AM

Jonathan Turley, the media-friendly George Washington Law School professor, who's an outspoken advocate of curbing executive power, gave a bravura performance on MSNBC's Countdown last night, on the subject of possible torture prosecutions.

Arguing that investigations aren't just necessary but long overdue, Turley made two important points that have been getting a bit lost in the rapid-fire debate lately.

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Topics: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, George Tenet, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Justice Department, Steven Bradbury, Torture

George Bush

Nadler And NYT: Impeach Bybee For Torture Memo

Zachary Roth | April 20, 2009, 2:36PM

More fallout from last week's release of the Bush DOJ's torture memos...

Both Congressman Jerry Nadler and the New York Times are calling for Jay Bybee, the author of one of the memos, who's now a federal judge, to be impeached.

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Topics: George Bush, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Justice Department, Steven Bradbury, Torture

George Bush

Who Are the Torture Memo Authors?

Zachary Roth | April 17, 2009, 4:59PM

For all the (justified) clamor over the Bush administration's torture memos that were released yesterday, there's been surprisingly little attention paid to the two authors of those documents.

As officials in the department's Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury authored the four memos. The first was written in 2002 by Bybee, and the latter three in 2005 by Bradbury. So: who are Bybee and Bradbury?

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Topics: George Bush, Harriet Miers, Jay Bybee, Justice Department, Steven Bradbury, Torture, U.S. Attorneys

George Bush

Sleep Expert "Surprised And Saddened" To Find Research Twisted In Torture Memo

Zachary Roth | April 17, 2009, 2:03PM

A British professor whose research on sleep was cited in one of the just-released Bush administration torture memos has expressed outrage that his work was used to justify extreme sleep deprivation, including keeping subjects awake for up to 11 days.

In an interview with TPMmuckraker, James Horne, a leading authority in the field of sleep research, said he was "surprised and saddened" to see Bush officials "misrepresent" his research to argue that such sleep deprivation does not cause serious harm to its subjects.

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Topics: George Bush, Justice Department, Steven Bradbury, Torture

Steven Bradbury

Is Footnote In OLC Memo Designed To Protect Its Author?

Zachary Roth | March 3, 2009, 12:41PM

There's an interesting detail buried in those OLC memos released yesterday, that perhaps hasn't gotten the attention it deserves.

In the January 15, 2009 memo written by then-acting OLC head Steven Bradbury -- in which he repudiated many of the previous OLC memos that articulated an expansive view of presidential power in the war on terror -- there's a footnote stressing that the memo is not "intended to suggest in any way that the attorneys involved in the preparation of the opinions in question did not satisfy all applicable standards of professional responsibility."

Why would Bradbury have gone out of his way to make this point -- especially in the context of repudiating those opinions?

Perhaps because the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility has been working on a report on whether OLC lawyers violated standards of professional responsibility when they approved harsh interrogation tactics like water-boarding. And, as Newsweek revealed last month, a draft of the report is sharply critical of three senior OLC lawyers in particular -- John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury.

The report's release was delayed after then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy Mark Filip objected that responses from Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury should be included. As of February 6, Attorney General Eric Holder had not yet reviewed the report, and it had not yet been turned over to Congress.

So the fact that the earlier memos have been repudiated could potentially still affect the OPR report's conclusions about the lawyers' actions. As a result, Bradbury would have had good reason to explicitly state in his recent OLC memo that the repudiation of the original opinions did not bear on issues of professional responsibility.

It'll be interesting to see, when the OPR report is released, whether its authors agree with that take.