Two top Bush-era lawyers who authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics exercised “poor judgment” but should not be disbarred, an internal Justice Department review showed.

An initial investigation by the department’s ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility, found that Jay Bybee and John Yoo engaged in “professional misconduct,” a finding that could have stripped them of their law licenses.

But the agency’s top career lawyer overruled the recommendations and concluded instead that while the controversial memos were “flawed,” the pair did not act recklessly or knowingly provide incorrect advice, and thus should not be referred to state bar associations for disbarment or face criminal punishment.

“These memos contained significant flaws,” Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis wrote in a 69-page memo dated January 5 and released Friday.

“But as all that glitters is not gold, all flaws do not constitute professional misconduct…. I conclude that Yoo and Bybee exercised poor judgment by overstating the certainty of their conclusions and underexposing countervailing arguments.”

The long-awaited and repeatedly delayed release of the final report by the ethics unit, which capped a two-year review, was hundreds of pages long and included emails exchanged between the Justice Department, the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency. It was dated July 29.

It also cleared Steven Bradbury, who headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel where Yoo and Bybee worked.

Together, they followed a broad interpretation of executive power in outlining the legal standards for interrogations of top terror suspects and providing the legal justification for the methods used.

The report criticized former attorney general John Ashcroft, then-chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division Michael Chertoff and others for not critically examining the memos or recognizing the documents’ shortcomings. But it did not cite the officials for misconduct.

In April, President Barack Obama’s administration released four partially blacked out memos authored by government lawyers at the height of his predecessor George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

The documents blew the lid on harsh CIA terror interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration, including waterboarding — a simulated drowning method — sleep deprivation and the use of insects.

The lawyers argued that a long list of coercive techniques did not equal torture as they did not amount to inflicting severe mental or physical pain.

Obama has faced criticism across the political spectrum over the issue, with rights groups and some fellow Democrats demanding prompt prosecution of former Bush administration officials and conservatives charging the release of the memos endangered national security.

Decrying the abuses of terror suspects in US custody as “a blight on our national honor,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers said the report “makes plain that those memos were legally flawed and fundamentally unsound.”

The Michigan Democrat said in a statement that the lawyers “dishonored their office and the entire Department of Justice.” His panel plans to hold a hearing on the matter “shortly.”

The top Republican on his committee, Lamar Smith, countered that Yoo and Bybee “did their best to follow the law.”

“In the wake of 9/11, attorneys at the Justice Department were faced with unprecedented challenges, not knowing whether other attacks were imminent,” he added.

Rights groups did not let up on their pressure for the Obama administration to prosecute those responsible for interrogation techniques widely considered torture.

“Justice Department lawyers have an obligation to uphold the law, so when they write legal opinions that were designed to provide legal cover for torture, they need to be held accountable with more than a slap on the wrist,” said Andrea Prasow, senior counterterrorism counsel at Human Rights Watch.

Jameel Jaffer, who heads the National Security Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, called on the Justice Department to expand its investigation into the interrogation practices.

read ViaBreitbart

Main Justice is going through the early draft transcripts of today’s hearing in federal court in New York on the Google books deal, and we’ve pulled out some choice snippets:

“To end the suspense, I am not going to rule today,” Judge Denny Chin, of the Southern District of New York, said in his early remarks. “There is just too much to digest. And however I come out, I want to write an opinion that explains my reasoning.”

The court first heard from several supporters of the agreement, then from the settlement’s opponents. The Justice Department followed, and then the parties got in the last word.

• A professor from Howard University School of Law argued that Google’s book project would open up access to books and help level the playing field. The critics’ reliance on copyright law ignored the spirit of the law, Lateef Mtima argued. ”Copyright is intended to be an engine of cultural development, not a brake on it,” she said.

• A lawyer for Sony, which makes digital book readers, argued in favor of the settlement. Janet Cullum, from the law firm Cooley Godward Kronish, said: “The settlement will make available to the consumers a vast quantity of books, including many that would otherwise likely never become available in digital format,” she said. Cullum also said that, if the settlement was approved, the mechanism designed to track down missing rights holders would be effective enough that the problem of works whose copyright holders are unknown would be limited.

• A professor from the University of Michigan who oversees the school’s libraries said the settlement would provide access to titles that might otherwise be forgotten. “The bulk of what I’ve written is now out of print, hard to find and never sold all that well in the first place,” said the University of Michigan’s Paul Courant.

The university spends millions each year maintaining old books that are falling apart, he said, and can’t provide digital access to books without the kind of comprehensive settlement Google is trying to get. “The alternative to the settlement is not a utopia of universal digital access. Rather, it is the status quo under which most of the works of the 20th century simply cannot be legally read in digital form and physical and institutional proximity to great collections is the only effective means of access,” Courant said.

• John Morris from the Center for Democracy and Technology urged the court to approve the settlement, but said that it raised privacy concerns because it would let Google track and monitor what books people read in ways that libraries do not.

Later, responding to similar concerns raised by another speaker, the judge seemed unsure what to make of the argument. “When I order something on Amazon, suddenly I’m getting an e-mail saying if you like that book, you’ll like this one. Is this different? Should I be concerned about these e-mails I’m getting from Amazon about what I’m buying?” he said.

• “It’s not going to be a great library, it’s going to be a great store,” said a children’s book author, who expressed frustration that illustrators had been dropped from the settlement.

• Author and class action lawyer Scott Gant worried about the authors who were a part of the settlement but knew nothing about it. Google estimated there are 174 million works out there. Gant estimated that there are tens of millions of absent class members, and said that Google has reached out to only about 2 million.

• Tom Rubin, Microsoft’s chief intellectual property lawyer, argued that, if the settlement was approved, other companies would be penalized for following the law. Microsoft and other competitors that had tried similar projects scanned only those books they explicitly had permission to scan. “Google by comparison took a short cut by copying anything and everything regardless of copyright status. They’re like a trucking company that instructs its drivers to go 90 miles an hour. It’s not surprising that competing companies that obey the speed limit can’t keep up,” Rubin said.

• Many critics reiterated arguments that Congress and not private parties should deal with the problem of orphan works, and said that the settlement would set a bad precedent for future copyright questions. “If this settlement agreement is approved I think it will encourage Google and possible others to go out and scan lots of other materials and then say, hey, we could litigate about this but it would be expensive and ugly, so why don’t we just reach a deal right now. And I think that would be unfortunate,” said academic Pam Samuelson.

• Gary Reback, the antitrust lawyer leading the charge for Google Books critics with the Open Book Alliance argued that, with the settlement, Google would be the sole supplier for 174 million books. “We didn’t end up with a single seller for those 174 million books, just by chance. We didn’t end up there through some pro-competitive initiative by Google. We got there through concealment and misdirection,” he said.