...lack thereof—is what this is really about. In the days and months after 9/11, while OLC was generating the Geneva Convention memos and the torture memos, L was being run by an ex-General Counsel of the Department of
Defense (who had also been an Acting Secretary of
Defense) and included a staff of lawyers who had worked more at negotiating, interpreting, and applying the laws of armed conflict than anyone else in the U.S. except for some of the uniformed JAGs. This is not to say that OLC was “evil,”...