As demands mounted Tuesday for sanctions against Bush administration lawyers who wrote so-called torture memos, one fiercely defended his legal justification for harsh interrogation tactics while another stuck to a carefully honed policy of silence.
Law professor John C. Yoo confronted the allegations that he bent the law to condone violations of international treaties against torture. By contrast, his former boss at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Jay S. Bybee, remained in his chambers at the Las Vegas courthouse where he holds a lifetime appointment as a federal appeals court judge.
Bybee was an assistant attorney general in the frantic months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. Since President Bush appointed him to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals six years ago, he has maintained a low profile, declining to talk about his role in shaping the administration's treatment of terror suspects.
Bybee's approach contrasts sharply with that of Yoo, his former deputy, who is now a tenured law professor at UC Berkeley and a strong defender of the Bush administration's tactics.
Of the four lengthy legal memos released by the White House last week, the one written by Bybee, 55, was the most controversial.
Some critics of the Bush administration say Yoo has taken a disproportionate share of the public condemnation over the memos. "It's important not to focus too much on scapegoating professor Yoo. He was a subordinate of Judge Bybee," said Katherine Darmer, a professor at Chapman University School of Law, where Yoo is a visiting professor this semester. "Jay Bybee has not been held accountable for his central role in these memoranda."
'Was it worth it?'
At a spirited forum Tuesday at the Orange County school, Yoo, who was the author of much of the legal rationale for using waterboarding and other severe interrogation techniques, defended his legal guidance as correct and necessary to protect the nation.
"Three thousand of our fellow citizens had been killed in a deliberate attack by a foreign enemy," Yoo, unruffled by shouts that he is a war criminal and should be in jail, told a packed auditorium on the Orange County campus. "That forced us in the government to have to consider measures to gain information using presidential constitutional provisions to protect the country from further attack."
