Reports: HLS Professor Goldsmith Urged White House To Reinstate Torture Ban

Professor of Law Jack L. Goldsmith, who held high-level posts at the Pentagon and the Justice Department during President Bush’s first term, played a key role in pushing the White House to ban the torture of suspected terrorists, according to two recent news reports.

Goldsmith faced criticism last month from a handful of Harvard Law School (HLS) faculty members who alleged that he had helped the Bush administration devise a policy justifying harsh treatment of detainees. Goldsmith’s predecessor as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel signed a now-infamous Aug. 1, 2002 memo, which said that torturing suspected terrorists “may be justified” under U.S. law.

But according to a Wall Street Journal report published Friday, Goldsmith used his power as an assistant attorney general last June to withdraw the so-called “torture memo.” Goldsmith began drafting a new policy, released by the Office of Legal Counsel last week, reversing the earlier memo.

Goldsmith declined to comment for this story.

Newsweek also reported late last month that Goldsmith voiced his concerns over the 2002 memo in a “tense meeting” with White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales last June. Gonzales, a 1982 HLS graduate, is Bush’s nominee for attorney general.

According to Newsweek, Goldsmith resigned from his post last summer “at least partly due to his discomfort about the [2002] memo.”

The recent media reports have done little to assuage one of Goldsmith’s staunchest critics, Elizabeth S. Bartholet ’62, who holds the Wasserstein chair in public interest law at HLS.

After reading the Newsweek report, Bartholet wrote in an e-mail that “nothing [in the article] makes it clear that [Goldsmith] was not involved in providing the problematic legal advice.”

Bartholet said last month that “the faculty was seriously at fault for not inquiring more deeply, prior to making this appointment, into any role Jack Goldsmith may have played in providing legal advice facilitating and justifying torture.” She wrote in an e-mail yesterday that she still stands by her December statement.

More than 80 percent of the HLS faculty voted to grant Goldsmith a tenured position last spring. And when Goldsmith’s critics aired their objections to his appointment publicly, many longtime Harvard professors rallied to his defense, praising his scholarship and his commitment to teaching.