I recommend you watch “Taxi to the Dark Side” and see exactly what Bybee authorized. Just know, the documentary holds nothing back and can be very disturbing. Dark Side indeed.

I was very disappointed to learn this, which is probably why it stuck in my mind, I think. I like Bachman, and read a biography several years ago. He has a great story, and I’ve always felt that the LDS community has never given him the attention he deserved, given his notariety.

Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss Bybee in context.

Just as an aside to you, an ad hominem attack evades the substance of an argument while attacking the source. In your case there is no substantive argument at all, just your own ipse dixit attestations about Bybee’s character. Since you are your only source for those attestations, pointing out your own lack of credibility is quite fair.

Meanwhile, let’s return to your wholly unsupported claim that Bybee was “courageous.” I have already explained above how the circumstances of his employment show the very opposite pattern. Now let’s look at an example what real moral courage by Justice Department lawyers in his position looked like:

When Bybee’s successor at OLC — Jack Goldsmith, a solidly conservative Republican lawyer — saw all those secret legal opinions, he was aghast at many of them. He rescinded Bybee’s torture memo to the White House, and several other secret memos we haven’t even seen yet. One of those opinions supported the early version of an NSA surveillance program, which Goldsmith found to be illegal.

OLC chief Goldsmith, and his solidly conservative superiors (Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, who was critically hopitalized at the time, and Deputy Atty. Gen. James Comey) dramatically confronted the White House over it in 2004. They, FBI Director William Mueller and more than 20 other senior Justice Department lawyers all threatened to resign if the program remained in effect. Bush backed down and modified the program. (To this day, we don’t know the details of what that egregiously illegal surveillance program actually was, but it had been operating from late 2001 through March 2004.)

That was moral courage. Bybee apparently had none of it. He just went along in secret and got his lifetime appointment to the bench.

Bybee is a saint.

I know he is a troll. But he is an incompetent troll who happens to be representative of a lot of wrongheaded opinion out there. (People need not even read the “friends of Bybee” web site. The troll’s comments encapsulate its propaganda perfectly.)

Those comments actually have provided me an opportunity to lay out many of the issues about Bybee, which otherwise would have required a single long blog post to explain.

So if aloysiusmiller did not exist, I would wish that someone invent him. I have no delusion that he will ever be persuaded. But as the archetype of mindless propaganda on this matter, he is a useful tool.

Aloysius is a troll on this issue. He has nothing of substance to add. He will keep on repeating “Bybee is a saint” because that’s the only thing he can say. Don’t feed this troll.