Hullabaloo

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

 
How Proud She Must Be

by digby

It turns out that there were more DOJ lawyers actively figuring out how best to torture prisoners than we knew. TPM reports:

The Torture Memos will forever be known as the work of John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel lawyer who took the lead in preparing them. But the internal Justice Department report on the memos, released Friday, reveals that a less experienced OLC attorney, working under Yoo, played a key role in the process -- in some cases writing initial drafts of the opinions before getting feedback from Yoo and others.

The name of that lawyer is redacted throughout the report. But in what appears to be an oversight in the redaction process, a footnote identifies her as Jennifer Koester. (The Justice Department didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the reason for the redaction, and about the oversight.)

Koester, who was two years out of law school and around 28 years old at the time, was clearly a junior level attorney in the process. She appears to have had no authority to approve the final versions of the memos that went out from the department, and was tasked with working with Yoo on them in part because having just joined OLC, she "had some time available," according to the report. But she did take the lead in developing the first drafts of the memos, and briefed the White House on their contents. And it's perhaps surprising -- given the intense level of scrutiny that Yoo has rightly received for his role in producing the memos -- that Koester has until now remained almost entirely under the radar.

Call her the Torture Memo author you've never heard of.

Read the whole thing and then go pick up your copy of The Banality of Evil.

The Federalist society member went on to work for the Defense department, Homeland Security and clerked for Justice Thomas. And what appropriate assignments they were considering her experience as an architect of the torture regime. She knew the "rules" inside and out. Lovely person.

I'm sure she would say that she was just doing her job. That's what they all say. So perhaps there needs to be a class in ethics and morals taught in the law school curriculum because apparently being asked to write legal justifications for torture doesn't instinctively strike certain people as wrong.

And anyone who works at the Kirkland and Ellis law firm should probably keep their distance. This is a person with a deep chasm where a soul should be and any time someone wants to
question her credibility they will likely bring up the fact that she actively participated in the justification of a torture policy for the US Government. I wouldn't want her anywhere near a case of mine.

If anyone is looking for an excellent short essay on just how evil these banal actors were, read this piece by Adam Serwer. He's more optimistic about justice ultimately prevailing on this one than I am. But I'm happy to help paper the electronic record just in case.


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digby 2/23/2010 10:00:00 AM |