http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/black-box-origins.ars
This is an excerpt of the above article.
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Yoo was the OLC guy in charge of national security, and the president tapped him directly to write the US government's official legal opinions as to the legality of the PSP. Yoo was "read into" the classified program, but his immediate superior, OLC Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, was not.
Bybee later told the OIG that he had no idea that his assistant, a man whose position didn't even require Congressional confirmation, was advising the president directly on a major, Constitution-busting classified signals intelligence initiative. (Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was also read into the program, actually complained about this highly irregular situation, but nobody fixed it.
The problem wasn't just that Yoo had been scooped up out of the bowels of the DOJ directly by the president without the knowledge of his (Congressionally confirmed) superiors, and was then writing memoranda on the legality of the PSP. No, the real problem was that his advice was apparently so bad that it appears to be something like legal malpractice, yet it was allowed to stand for three years as the official US position on a critical constitutional issue without ever having undergone a shred of peer review or oversight.
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This begs the question of who was John Yoo's effective supervisor for the preparation of the document which established the legal rationale for terrorist interventions?
It is highly unusual that there semms not to be an identifiable chain of command and that there was no peer review of the legal rationale within DOJ for the legal product John Yoo produced.
Normal processes having been bypassed is a very curious circumstance. That John Yoo prepared this entirely on his own just isn't a possible scenario. He was under the supervision of someone and it wasn't his DOJ supervisor Jay Bybee. So who was guiding the process?
The peculiar nature of this makes me wonder if John Yoo might have been taking guidance directly from the WH.
