Two Bush administration lawyers who authorised harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects used poor judgement but will not face punishment, according to a US Justice Department report released on Friday.
The department's Office of Professional Responsibility had originally found that the high-ranking lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, had engaged in professional misconduct and also urged that criminal prosecution be considered for interrogators who relied on their advice, according to the report.
The harsh techniques Yoo and Bybee authorised included waterboarding of terrorism suspects as the Bush administration tried to elicit intelligence after the September 11, 2001, attacks for capturing or killing anti-American al Qaeda militants. However, Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis reviewed the ethics report as well as responses by Yoo and Bybee and decided not to adopt its findings and instead decided that they gave flawed legal advice.
The two lawyers "exercised poor judgement by overstating the certainty of their conclusions and underexposing countervailing arguments," Margolis said. Separately, a federal prosecutor is examining whether interrogators who relied on their advice should face criminal charges.
During the Bush administration, Yoo and Bybee were high-ranking officials in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo is now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Bybee is a federal appeals court judge. The outcome angered human rights groups who have pushed the Obama administration to pursue criminal charges, arguing that the harsh interrogations, which included a technique known as waterboarding, were forms of torture.
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