AMY GOODMAN: President Bush has named Solicitor General Paul Clement to serve as acting attorney general. Meanwhile, there has been much speculation about who Bush will nominate to replace Gonzales. Names mentioned in the press include Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former Solicitor General Theodore Olsen, Homeland Security Adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, and former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson.

Jesselyn Radack joins us now from Washington, D.C. She’s a former attorney in the ethics department of the Justice Department. She worked at the Justice Department after the September 11 attacks and dealt with the John Walker Lindh case. At the time, Michael Chertoff headed the Criminal Division of the Justice Department. Two years ago, Jesselyn Radack was a vocal critic of Chertoff’s nomination as homeland security director.

Jesselyn Radack, take us through what happened with John Walker Lindh, right through Michael Chertoff’s involvement.

JESSELYN RADACK: Michael Chertoff was involved from the get-go. I had been the ethics adviser at the Justice Department in the case of the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh. And I had basically advised not to interrogate him without counsel.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain again who John Walker Lindh was.

JESSELYN RADACK: John Walker Lindh was an American citizen who was caught fighting alongside the Taliban, along with Yaser Hamdi, another U.S. citizen, who was recently released to Saudi Arabia. And we prosecuted him. He was one of the first people tagged with the dubious “enemy combatant” label by the Bush administration.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, tell us what happened, and your role, and then Michael Chertoff’s.

JESSELYN RADACK: Basically, the Justice Department disregarded the advice of the ethics unit not to interrogate him without a lawyer, went ahead, interrogated him and, by the pictures we’ve seen worldwide, tortured him, and then went ahead to prosecute him.

Basically, Judge Ellis, who was overseeing the prosecution, ordered that all Justice Department correspondence related to the Lindh interrogation be turned over to the court. That order was concealed from me. I found out about it inadvertently from the prosecutor. And when I went to comply with the order, my emails with the advice not to interrogate him without counsel and the fact that the FBI had committed an ethics violation in doing so were missing from the file. I resurrected those emails from my computer archives and tried to get them to the prosecutor, and when that failed, I turned them over to the media.

As punishment — again, this was all under Michael Chertoff, who at that time was the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division — under Chertoff, I was placed under criminal investigation. For what, I was never told. I was forced out of the Justice Department, fired from my next job at the government’s behest, referred to the state bars in which I’m licensed as an attorney, based on a secret report to which I did not have access, and put on the no-fly list. And all of that occurred on Michael Chertoff’s watch. So, to the extent that President Bush seeks to rehabilitate the beleaguered Justice Department, I think Chertoff is a very odd choice for that.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Chertoff was asked about the John Walker Lindh case when he was being confirmed as secretary of homeland security, and you also testified against him. Can you explain what happened there?

JESSELYN RADACK: Well, in his — Chertoff — I’ve been a stumbling block to two of his promotions, because unfortunately that seems to be the Bush credo, to mess up, cover up, lie and get promoted. But during those confirmation hearings, Chertoff said unambiguously that the ethics unit had never given an opinion about the interrogation of John Walker Lindh. And that was contradicted by the public record, by both articles in Newsweek and in The New Yorker. Yet Chertoff kept repeating that assertion two or three times, including in written statements. That was during his confirmation to become a federal judge.

And he was eventually confirmed to be a federal judge, but again this issue of lying came up during his confirmation hearing to be director of the Department of Homeland Security. And again, Chertoff is just as much of a perjurer as Alberto Gonzales. I just think that his time at the Justice Department has been largely forgotten or overlooked, because it’s been so eclipsed by his abysmal performance at the Department of Homeland Security.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Horton, I’m looking at an email that involves Michael Chertoff. Explain what this is, involving whether Michael Chertoff lied to Congress about Guantanamo.

SCOTT HORTON: Well, it’s yet another incident, I think, along with Jesselyn Radack’s, which to me is a very, very troubling one. He was asked about the development of torture policy and his role in it, whether he knew about abuses that had gone on at Guantanamo that had been reported by FBI agents to his office. He testified that he knew nothing about this and that he had not been involved in the formulation of a torture policy, nor that he had given much advice. He acknowledged that he knew about the torture memorandum, by the way, the so-called Bybee memorandum. But I think things —

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what it said.

SCOTT HORTON: The Bybee memorandum is the memorandum that was actually authored by John Yoo that authorized torture, basically, saying that if the president authorized it, whatever he authorized was fine, and it would not be considered to be torture under American criminal law, as long as it had presidential authorization. So they included things like waterboarding.

Well, after his testimony — in fact, around the time of it, some of the documents came out, but subsequently much more information came out really calling into question the veracity of Chertoff’s testimony here. And I think that email that you’re holding up is one of the key documents. So that email reflects a number of FBI agents briefing Chertoff’s chief of staff and his counsel about highly abusive conduct that was going on at Guantanamo, recounting that they protested about it, they raised questions about it with Major General Miller and others, all to no avail. The Department of Defense continued with the use of these highly abusive techniques.

We know subsequently that the CIA came to Chertoff and to his deputy, Alice Fisher, who now heads the Criminal Division, trying to get clarification based on the torture memorandum. They wanted him to say, as the head of the Criminal Division, that as long as these techniques, these torture techniques, were used by CIA agents, their contractors and their personnel were not going to face criminal prosecution. He has denied repeatedly that he gave any such assurances. I’m being told that he did and that that was a major part of his consultation in connection with the torture memorandum.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Horton, I also want to ask about Paul Clement, who President Bush has tapped as acting attorney general. In 2004, he represented the Bush administration before the Supreme Court in the case, Donald Rumsfeld v. Jose Padilla. In this exchange with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he insisted the U.S. does not torture.

JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG: If the law is what the executive says it is, whatever is necessary and appropriate in the executive’s judgment — that’s the resolution you gave us that Congress passed — and it leaves it up to the executive, unchecked by the judiciary. So what is it that would be a check against torture?

PAUL CLEMENT: Well, first of all, there are treaty obligations, but the primary check is that, just as in every other war, if a U.S. military person commits a war crime by creating some atrocity on a harmless, you know, detained enemy combatant or a prisoner of war, that violates our own conception of what’s a war crime, and we’ll put that U.S. military officer on trial in a court-martial. So I think there are plenty of internal reasons —

JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG: Suppose the executive says, “Mild torture, we think, will help get this information.” It’s not a soldier who does something against the Code of Military Justice, but it’s an executive command. Some systems do that to get information.

PAUL CLEMENT: Well, our executive doesn’t, and I think, I mean —

JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG: But what’s constraining, and that’s the point, is it just up to the goodwill of the executive? Is there any judicial check?

PAUL CLEMENT: Well, this is a situation where there is jurisdiction in the habeas courts. So, if necessary, they remain open, but I think it’s very important. I mean, the court in Ludecke v. Watkins made clear that the fact that executive discretion in a war situation can be abused is not a good and sufficient reason for judicial micromanagement and overseeing of that authority. You have to recognize that in situations where there is a war — where the government is on a war footing, that you have to trust the executive.

AMY GOODMAN: That was U.S. Deputy Solicitor General Paul Clement, now the acting attorney general once Alberto Gonzales leaves. Scott Horton, this argument he’s making before the Supreme Court?

SCOTT HORTON: Well, I think first we’ve got to note that the fact that the president has to go down the line to the number four figure in the Department of Justice to find an acting attorney general shows the depth of the problem in that institution right now, its effective decapitation and loss of leadership.

That being said, I think Paul Clement is amongst the leading figures in the Department of Justice, the one who’s the most highly respected, but I think this clip you’ve just played reflects some of the troubles that some people have with Paul. You know, I think he is very ideologically oriented. He was a member of the Federalist Society. And I think he has gone out on a ledge to support the administration several times. I think the passage you just played — two things — I mean, he’s denying that there were torture practices there. I think the facts really undercut what he said. And secondly, he’s also saying, “Don’t worry. Habeas corpus will be available to provide review.” And, of course, it wasn’t. In fact, he worked very hard to avoid it.

AMY GOODMAN: By the way, the date of that was April 28, 2004, the argument before the Supreme Court where he’s being questioned by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A few hours later, if that long, the Abu Ghraib photos were released.

SCOTT HORTON: But certainly people in the administration knew about that several weeks beforehand. So, you know, he was closing his eyes if he didn’t know about it.

AMY GOODMAN: Jesselyn Radack, as we wrap up with you, in one of your writings, now, as Michael Chertoff’s name comes up as the possible attorney general, you start off by saying, yes, there is the case that I can talk about — my own case, John Walker Lindh — but wouldn’t Katrina be enough?

JESSELYN RADACK: Well, one would think that Katrina would be enough, and his spectacular failure in heading the Department of Homeland Security should be enough to caution against him serving as attorney general. But, again, I ask people to reflect back on the fact that Michael Chertoff had been at the Justice Department before in a leadership role shortly after 9/11. He had been the head of the Criminal Division, he had been at the Justice Department before. And on his watch, a lot of atrocious things occurred, including, as Scott Horton mentioned, torture.

And, again, while most people may not remember my case, I’ve written about it in my book, Canary in the Coalmine. It’s out there. I’ve detailed Chertoff’s perjury during his previous confirmation hearings to other positions of power. And while, yes, his performance at the Department of Homeland Security should be enough to preclude any consideration of him for the nation’s top law enforcement position, I think one could also easily look to his record when he was, in fact, at the Department of Justice.

AMY GOODMAN: Jesselyn Radack, I want to thank you for being with us.

JESSELYN RADACK: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, former attorney in the ethics department at the Justice Department. Her book, The Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in the Case of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh.

Scott Horton, your final comment, as we look at Alberto Gonzales resigning, the possibility of Michael Chertoff replacing him, and Paul Clement as the acting attorney general right now.

SCOTT HORTON: Well, I’ll just follow up on the comment that was just made about Chertoff’s tenure at the Criminal Division. I think that’s right. If we look, he ran that division. He also appointed one of his closest protégés, Noel Hillman, as the head of the Public Integrity Unit. So it is while he was running that division and his protégé was running Public Integrity that we had prosecutions at the ratio of seven-to-one of elected Democrats against Republicans, including the Siegelman matter beginning. So this —

AMY GOODMAN: Siegelman, the Alabama governor who’s now in prison.

SCOTT HORTON: Precisely. And so, I think this entire process of politicization of the prosecutorial process is going on under Michael Chertoff’s watch. So if we want a new attorney general who’s going to come in and straighten things out and restore the integrity and reputation of the Department of Justice, Michael Chertoff is an awfully odd choice for that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Michael Chertoff has not been announced. If they were announcing him this week, it would be on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Do you think right now they’re floating that name, as has been done before, to see what the public’s response would be?

SCOTT HORTON: That’s precisely what’s going on. I think it’s clear that there’s a list of a half-dozen names. He’s the number one name on the list, because he’s been reconfirmed three times for offices in the last five years. So I think people in the White House think he is confirmable. They’ve floated the name now to see what sort of problems he’s going to face, and I think they may have underestimated the problems.

AMY GOODMAN: Scott Horton, thanks for joining us, Columbia Law professor, contributor to Harper’s magazine, writes the blog, ” No Comment.”