Two Bush administration lawyers who authorized harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects used poor judgment but will not face punishment, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday in summarizing a lengthy ethics report.
The department's Office of Professional Responsibility had originally found that the lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, had engaged in professional misconduct, according to a letter sent to the House Judiciary Committee leaders.
The harsh techniques they authorized 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 that finding, according to the letter by Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich.
Instead, Margolis found that they "exercised poor judgment in connection with the drafting of the pertinent memoranda," the letter said.
Because the two lawyers are no longer employed by the agency, no government disciplinary action would be pursued, Weich said. The Justice Department declined to comment on the report, which was sent to Congress on Friday.
Poor judgment "differs from professional misconduct in that an attorney may act inappropriately and thus exhibit poor judgment even though he or she may not have violated or acted in reckless disregard of a clear obligation or standard," the letter said.
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 report likely will anger 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.
But the decision not to prosecute Yoo and Bybee won praise from Representative Lamar Smith, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
"It is important that future government lawyers know that their efforts to protect Americans will not be criminalized by future administrations," Smith said. "They did their best to follow the law and provide intelligence officials with legal guidelines for the use of strong tactics to obtain actionable intelligence from terrorist suspects."
Waterboarding, which induces the sensation of drowning, was used on three terrorism suspects including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has said he was the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and al Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah.
President Barack Obama has said he preferred to look forward beyond the Bush administration but that has been complicated by the ethics report and a decision by his attorney general, Eric Holder, who asked a prosecutor to look into allegations of abuse on prisoners by CIA interrogators.
