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• Monday, January 5, 2009 12:17 PM

  "The conscience of the Justice Department"

  Interesting write up on job duties and recent history:

  http://tinyurl.com/a42c5f

  The Office of Legal Counsel is, in effect, the general counsel for the Attorney General and the Justice Department. It also serves, in effect, as outside counsel to the President, the White House and other executive branch agencies, providing authoritative advice on the Constitution and other weighty legal matters.

  Douglas W. Kmiec, legal scholar, once told The New York Times,

  "We used to call it the conscience of the Justice Department."

  Whether that conscience worked as it should during the Bush administration's war on terror is a question that historians will debate. The office's reputation suffered badly as critics on Capitol Hill and elsewhere questioned whether its advice contravened the Geneva Conventions and condoned the torture of terror suspects captured in the war on terror, and as the Supreme Court dealt setbacks to the Bush administration's reading of the law.

  Regarding changing prior OLC rulings:

  "Jack Goldsmith held the job of assistant attorney general only briefly in 2003-2004 before departing to become a professor at Harvard Law School...For nine months, from October 2003 to June 2004, (Goldsmith) had been the central figure in a secret but intense rebellion of a small coterie of Bush administration lawyers," Newsweek wrote. It said that Goldsmith took the position that the Fourth Geneva Convention barring physical or moral coercion on prisoners of war applied to even to those suspected of belonging to al Qaeda...

  Goldsmith told Newsweek that he realized soon after taking the job that the torture memo could not stand, but that it would be difficult to change. According to Goldsmith, "The Office of Legal Counsel rarely overturns its prior opinions, and even more rarely does so within an administration, and even more rarely than that, in the same administration about something this important. I didn't find any precedent for it."

  List of recent position profiles only goes back to 2000.

  —karr(sic) Read karr(sic)'s other letters
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