New Justice probe of waterboarding

WASHINGTON — An internal watchdog office at the Justice Department is investigating whether Bush administration lawyers violated professional standards by issuing legal opinions that authorized the CIA to use waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques, officials confirmed Friday.

H. Marshall Jarrett, counsel for the Office of Professional Responsibility, wrote in a letter to Democratic lawmakers that his office is investigating the "circumstances surrounding" Justice Department opinions that established a legal basis for the CIA's interrogation program, including a memo from August 2002 that narrowly defined torture and was later rescinded by the department.

"Among other issues, we are examining whether the legal advice contained in those memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys," Jarrett wrote.

This is the second publicly disclosed Justice Department investigation related to the CIA's use of waterboarding, a type of simulated drowning that is considered torture by most human-rights groups and legal scholars. Jarrett's inquiry began in 2004, but was not confirmed publicly until now, officials said.

In January, Attorney General Michael Mukasey assigned a special U.S. attorney to investigate whether CIA officials committed crimes by destroying interrogation videotapes of two high-level al-Qaida detainees, including one who was waterboarded. But Mukasey has rebuffed demands from Congress to investigate the interrogations themselves, saying officials were acting under legal advice from the Justice Department.

Justice spokesman Peter Carr said the existence of the Jarrett investigation "in no way suggests that those who rely on the department's advice should be subjected to a criminal investigation."

Jarrett's office also is investigating whether Justice lawyers followed professional standards in helping to authorize a warrantless surveillance program by the National Security Agency (NSA). In addition, the office is part of an investigation of the scandals surrounding the firings of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006, which led to the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last fall.

The results of such investigations are usually kept confidential because they focus on allegations of professional misconduct or other personnel issues. But in his letter Monday to Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., Jarrett wrote that investigators will consider releasing a "nonclassified summary" at the end of the investigation "because of the significant public interest in this matter."

The August 2002 memo was addressed to Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and was signed by Jay Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and now a federal appeals court judge in San Francisco. The memo's main writer was one of Bybee's deputies, John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

The memo was formally withdrawn in 2004 by Jack Goldsmith, who succeeded Bybee.

Two other Justice memos that are known to have dealt with waterboarding and harsh tactics are still-secret opinions penned in 2005 by Steven Bradbury, who is the acting Office of Legal Counsel chief. Administration officials have said those opinions authorized a number of techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and head-slapping.