Lawyers Ascribed Broad Power to Bush on Torture
Retired Rear Adm. John Hutson, the former judge advocate general for the Navy, said the memo read as though the lawyers were trying to bend the law to benefit their client, rather than stating the law fairly and accurately.
"That is not the job of people advising the president or the attorney general or the secretary of Defense. They have to be right legally, and I think they have an obligation to be right morally. I think they failed on both counts," said Hutson, now dean of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, N.H.