Panel Subpoenas Top Cheney Aide For Hearing On Torture

Tue. May 6, 2008


A House Judiciary subcommittee today subpoenaed David Addington, the longtime top legal adviser to Vice President Cheney and his current chief of staff, before hearing testimony from witnesses who said Bush administration lawyers deliberately misrepresented the law to justify torture. David Luban, a Georgetown University law professor, testified that John Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, and other Justice Department lawyers went "beyond the ethical limits" for legal advisers in crafting a series of memorandums that allow interrogation techniques that amount to torture. Besides Addington, the full House Judiciary Committee wants to question Yoo, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, former CIA Director George Tenet and former Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin at a forthcoming hearing on the legality of interrogation techniques used against suspected terrorists.

The House Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee voted to subpoena Addington, who served as Cheney's legal counsel before the resignation of Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. Constitution Subcommittee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said Addington requested a subpoena to appear. The subcommittee had planned today to subpoena Yoo, now at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, but Yoo agreed Monday night to testify. Ashcroft has also agreed to appear, while Feith, Tenet and Levin are in discussions with staff about testifying at an expected full committee hearing. The committee has also demanded from the Justice Department all its legal opinions on the administration views toward interrogation techniques in terrorism cases.

The hearing today addressed the role of administration lawyers who offered legal opinions that appear intended to shield interrogators and top White House officials from prosecution for allowing or conducting torture of prisoners. At issue was whether former Justice Department officials such as Yoo and Levin, in particular, offered legitimate legal advice or deliberately misrepresented the law to tell higher-ups what they wanted to hear. David Rivkin, who worked in the Justice Department under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, argued against "lynching" the lawyers. "To me the effort to go after these lawyers borders . . . on madness," said Rivkin, who argued doing so would stop future presidents from receiving "candid advice."

But Luban, who stopped sort of urging penalizing Yoo or others, said candor is exactly what some administration lawyers avoided in misinterpreting the Constitution and case law. In pushing a version of executive power that "a crime is not a crime if the commander in chief orders it," Yoo "simply ignored Supreme Court precedents," Luban said. And in writing a narrow definition of torture as acts causing physical pain "equivalent in intensity to . . . organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death," Yoo misconstrued a Medicare statute defining medical emergences, Luban said. Luban said the lack of a legal basis for memos written by Yoo and Levin is demonstrated by their later rejection by Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004. Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and president of the National Lawyers Guild, went farther, arguing that in meeting to sign off on illegal interrogation techniques, Cheney, Secretary of State Rice, Tenet, Ashcroft and others committed war crimes.

by Dan Friedman

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