DOJ Probes Legality of Waterboarding

Feb. 22, 2008— -- The Justice Department is conducting an internal inquiry into the role its lawyers played in approving the legal opinions and memos on interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, Attorney General Michael Mukasey confirmed Friday.

Sens. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., released a letter Friday acknowledging an investigation being conducted by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), an internal watchdog that monitors decisions and actions of the department's lawyers.

The Feb. 18 letter from H. Marshall Jarrett, the chief of OPR, notes the investigation concerns the "circumstances surrounding the drafting of the August 1, 2002 memorandum from the Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to Alberto Gonzales, then the counsel to the President." Gonzales became Attorney General in 2005, and resigned last August.

The controversial memo, issued under Jay Bybee, then OLC head, but written in large part by John Yoo, one of his assistants, concluded that a definition of torture "covers only extreme acts," opening the door to legal justification for certain harsh interrogation tactics.

When asked by ABC News about the investigation and the formation of the memo at a press conference at the Justice Department Friday, Mukasey stated, "I have no reason to believe that politics was involved in that or any other analysis."

"There is, as you pointed out, a letter reflecting that there is an OPR inquiry at the request of two senators into the drafting of those letters and whether people adhered to professional standards in doing that," he continued. "But that's what there is, an inquiry, into that aspect."

Sources inside the Justice Department say that administration officials and top department officials, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft, were uncomfortable with some of Yoo's legal arguments.

Former aides to Ashcroft say the then-attorney general privately dubbed Yoo "Dr. Yes" for being so closely aligned with lawyers at the White House.

Yoo, who left the Justice Department in 2003 and is now a law professor at the University of California-Berkeley, defended his legal stance, telling the Associated Press last year that the department shouldn't go "about, willy-nilly, changing its opinions about what's legal or not."

He added that intelligence agents should be able to focus on "fighting the enemy," not "worrying about whether they will be prosecuted by their own government" if different administrations switch up the rules.