[Tex]

Originally Posted by Cali Coug

You saying it is silly doesn't make it silly.

Of course not. Which is why I explained my reasoning.

Originally Posted by Cali Coug

Let's take an extreme hypothetical: let's say Bybee wrote a memo that said it is ok for the president to commit murder. It clearly is not ok, but Bybee wrote a document purporting to give him legal justification to commit murder. That would certainly be conspiracy to commit murder (he wrote the document knowing it would be relied upon and knowing what he wrote wasn't an accurate statement of the law).

Totally absurd. Again, setting aside the fact that murder is far more clearly defined than torture, I still don't see the "conspiracy" here. Were Bybee to have written a memo that stupid, he should be fired, not prosecuted. Give me a break.

Originally Posted by Cali Coug

Now back to this scenario: Bybee knew torture is illegal (he mentions that fact in his memo). His employer (the DOJ) had prosecuted many people in the past (successfully) for violating that law by waterboarding American citizens. Waterboarding has been declared torture by the US government multiple times in the past and has prosecuted people who waterboarded others. Now Bybee wants to claim he didn't know it really was torture or that the position his employer took routinely in the past was that it was torture? He knew it would be relied upon (that is the point of a legal memo), and knew (or should have known) that it was illegal. Conspiracy to commit torture. It isn't a stretch at all.

Waters is exactly right when he says that is why Bybee is publicly claiming he really believed what he wrote. That is his only possible defense (if ignorance can be a defense to this form of conspiracy). What he is saying publicly doesn't square with what he is saying privately, by the way.

Again, I'm no lawyer, but the commentary I've read suggests that a prosecutor would have to prove he knowingly advocated illegal behavior. It is impossible to come to that conclusion (based on the info we have) without a tinfoil hat. In fact, the whole point of the memo was to legally justify it.

No prosecutor is going to touch this. Moreover, the American people are not interested in seeing it happen either. This is a lose-lose for Obama, politically and legally.