The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) confirmed Friday afternoon that it has launched a formal investigation to determine whether agency attorneys provided the White House with poor legal advice when it drafted legal opinions authorizing CIA interrogators to use waterboarding against so-called high-level terrorist detainees to extract information about alleged plots against the United States. The investigation was formally launched after an article published by this reporter last week revealed that the author of the August 2002 legal opinion, John Yoo, a former attorney in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), relied on a health benefits statute to form the legal basis for waterboarding and other "enhanced" interrogation techniques, an OPR official at OPR said in an interview this afternoon. The official requested anonymity because he said he was not permitted to discuss the probe. Last week, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, wrote a letter to the Justice Department's inspector general and OPR requesting an investigation into the department's authorization of waterboarding, specifically, how Yoo and others in the OLC formed the legal basis for waterboarding and whether DOJ standards and policies were met when OLC reached it's conclusions on the technique. "Did Justice Department officials who advised the CIA that waterboarding is lawful perform legal work that meets applicable standards of professional responsibility and internal Justice Department policies and standards? For example, did these officials consider all relevant legal precedents, including those that appear to contradict directly their conclusion that waterboarding is lawful?" stated Durbin's Feb. 12 letter to DOJ Inspector General Glen Fine. The probe will center on Yoo's use of the health benefits statute in defining torture and how the statue became the basis for authorizing enhanced interrogation methods and whether that "violated the standards of professional conduct," the OPR official said. The rest of the article
I surprised that your not upset about how congress is disrespecting the constitution and interfering in how the president wages war.