Dems New Whipping Boy Refuses to Play the Role

Judge Jay Bybee is the left's favorite new whipping boy. He's the guy that authored the memos in the Bush Administration that gave legal authority to the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques. Bybee is now a federal judge and some Dems are trying to figure out a way to impeach him from his lifetime appointment.

Bybee is not going gently into that good night:

Judge Jay S. Bybee broke his silence on Tuesday and defended the conclusions of legal memorandums he had signed as a Bush administration lawyer that allowed use of several coercive interrogation practices on suspected terrorists.

Judge Bybee, who issued the memorandums as the head of the Office of Legal Counsel and was later nominated to the federal appeals court by President George W. Bush, said in a statement in response to questions from The New York Times that he continued to believe that the memorandums represented “a good-faith analysis of the law” that properly defined the thin line between harsh treatment and torture. …

Judge Bybee said he was issuing a statement following reports that he had regrets over his role in the memorandums, including an article in The Washington Post on Saturday to that effect. Given the widespread criticism of the memorandums, he said he would have done some things differently, like clarifying and sharpening the analysis of some of his answers to help the public better understand the basis for his conclusions.

But he said: “The central question for lawyers was a narrow one; locate, under the statutory definition, the thin line between harsh treatment of a high-ranking Al Qaeda terrorist that is not torture and harsh treatment that is. I believed at the time, and continue to believe today, that the conclusions were legally correct.”

Other administration lawyers agreed with those conclusions, Judge Bybee said.

“The legal question was and is difficult,” he said. “And the stakes for the country were significant no matter what our opinion. In that context, we gave our best, honest advice, based on our good-faith analysis of the law.”

The left is trying to paint Bybee as the devil himself, but my guess is he was just a lawyer trying to answer a legal question according to the best information he could get his hands on. The effort to criminalize policy differences does not serve our country well, nor will it serve Obama well when that day comes that he's no longer Supreme Leader.