After Newsweek Reports That Goldsmith Opposed Bush Torture Policy, HLS Profs’ Critics Stay Mum

Shattuck Professor of Law Jack L. Goldsmith, who was accused at the time of his appointment of supporting torture while serving in the Bush administration, in fact fought against the administration’s drive to increase executive power and justify torture, Newsweek magazine reported earlier this month.

“Goldsmith was actually the opposite of what his detractors imagined,” the Feb. 6 article said. “For nine months, from October 2003 to June 2004, he had been the central figure in a secret but intense rebellion of a small coterie of Bush administration lawyers.”

But when Goldsmith first arrived in Cambridge in November 2004, he received a less than cordial welcome, with several Harvard Law professors opposing his appointment.

Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law Elizabeth Bartholet ’62 told the Boston Globe at the time that the school had erred in not inquiring into “any role Jack Goldsmith may have played in providing legal advice facilitating and justifying torture.”

Newsweek however said that Goldsmith is not an “executive-power absolutist” and that he had argued in favor of the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention to U.S. actions in Iraq.

Goldsmith, after becoming head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003, argued that the Convention’s ban on torture applied to Iraqis who were members of al Qaeda, the magazine reported.

It was Goldsmith who pushed to disavow the famous 2002 memo justifying torture after it was leaked to The Washington Post in June 2004, according to the article. By the end of the summer, he had left the administration, and in November, he joined the faculty at Harvard Law School.

Despite media reports in January 2005 that Goldsmith had opposed the torture memos, his critics were not mollified. Bartholet told The Crimson then that “nothing makes it clear that [Goldsmith] was not involved in providing problematic legal advice.”

Over the past week, Bartholet declined multiple requests from The Crimson for comment on the Newsweek article.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.