Do you think many Americans would recognize the names, John Yoo and Jay Bybee? They are the two Justice Department lawyers during the Bush Administration who provided the legal basis for “enhanced” interrogation of terrorist suspects after the 9/11 attacks – including water boarding.

Yoo and Bybee are in the news now because the ethics division of the Justice Department concluded a five-year investigation and review of the legal advice they provided and how they reached their conclusions. After an exhaustive inquiry, the Office of Professional Responsibility (O.P.R.) issued their final report on February 19, 2010. Then – in a complete reversal – a senior official in the Justice Department over-turned their recommendations on the same day. Here’s the story of how it all unfolded.

John Yoo wrote most of the legal opinions that expanded the president’s authority as commander-in-chief after the 9/11 attacks. In August, 2002, Abu Zubaydah, a suspected operative of Al Qaeda, was captured. At that time, the O.P.R. report quotes Patrick Philbin, a senior Justice Department lawyer, urging Bybee, Yoo’s boss, to sign a memorandum to give President Bush broad powers to set aside domestic and international law. Philbin described the atmosphere as urgent, “given the situation and the time pressures, and they are telling us this has to be signed tonight – this was like 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock at night...my conclusion was that it was permissible for Mr. Bybee to sign the memorandum.” In a separate section of the O.P.R. report, Yoo denied that the White House or the CIA, which had requested the legal opinion, had pressured him. “I don’t think of them as particularly aggressive,” he said. “I never felt that anybody was pushing us in one direction or another.” As a final twist, the O.P.R. report said that John Rizzo, the CIA lawyer, had “candidly admitted the agency was seeking maximum legal protection for its officers” against possible criminal prosecution.

The bottom line of the O.P.R. report was that John Yoo and Jay Bybee had committed “professional misconduct” in a series of memos starting in August 2002. The report said the lawyers had ignored legal precedents, and criticized their methods of analysis in defining torture along very narrow lines. Yoo and Bybee had concluded that President Bush was free to ignore any law in the conduct of the war on terrorism. The O.P.R. recommended that both Yoo who is now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and Bybee who was appointed to a lifetime federal judgeship, be disciplined by appropriate bar associations.

In a footnote, it was revealed that many of the e-mail messages to and from Yoo were missing. “We were told that most of Yoo’s e-mail records had been deleted and were not recoverable.” Mr. Yoo’s lawyer, Miguel Estrada, said that Yoo had left the Justice Department by the time the O.P.R. had begun their review and he “has no basis for knowing whether e-mails are gone or why.” When the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the missing e-mail records from the Justice Department, Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman and Democrat of Vermont, stated that destruction of government records, including e-mails was a criminal offense. He argued that the original interrogation memos “were intended as a golden shield to commit torture and get away with it.”

On the same day the O.P.R. issued their report, David Margolis, the associate deputy attorney general issued his own report that Yoo and Bybee had only shown “poor judgment” and should not be disciplined. As a senior career officer in the Justice Department with three decades of service, Margolis had the authority to overrule the O.P.R. findings and recommendations. It was ironic that in his 69-page report, he was often more critical of Yoo and Bybee than the O.P.R. had been. He wrote that “this decision should not be viewed as an endorsement of the legal work that underlies these memoranda.” However, he continued, the legal advice of Mr. Yoo and the other lawyers, while “flawed” and insufficient in some areas, did not rise to the level of “professional misconduct” resulting in bar reviews and other disciplinary action. Margolis took particular aim at Yoo in his report, “While I have declined to adopt O.P.R.’s findings of misconduct, I fear that John Yoo’s loyalty to his own ideology and conventions have clouded his view of his obligation to his client and led him to author opinions that reflected his own extreme, albeit sincerely held, view of executive power while speaking for an institutional client.”

Both John Yoo and Jay Bybee vehemently denied the statements and conclusions in the O.P.R. report, stressing that they had given their “honest and reasoned judgments” on pressing matters of national security. O.P. R. officials disagreed and pointed out that the report said, “situations of great stress, danger and fear do not relieve department attorneys of their duty to provide thorough, objective and candid legal advice, even if that advice is not what the clients want to hear.” Representative John Conyers, Democrat of Michigan who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said the original ethics report by the O.P.R. revealed that the authors of the interrogation memoranda “dishonored their office and the entire Department of Justice.” The ethics report also criticized a third lawyer, Steven Bradbury, who wrote four memoranda in 2005 and 2007 supporting enhanced interrogation methods. “ We had serious concerns about some of his analysis,” but they concluded his work did not reach the level of “professional misconduct.”

The last word on the national dispute about “enhanced methods” and “torture,” will come when Attorney General Eric Holder completes the criminal investigation he began in August, 2009 into whether the C.I.A. broke the law with their interrogation of terrorist suspects. However, the Justice Department’s inquiry into the work of their own lawyers was over when the two conflicting reports were issued on February 19. John Yoo and Jay Bybee were given a pass by the Margolis report. In the years ahead, history may decide that the O.P.R. ethics report came closer to the truth.

Joyce S. Anderson is the author of “Courage in High Heels,” “Flaw in the Tapestry,” “If Winter Comes” and “The Mermaids Singing.” She can be reached at JSAWrite@aol.com.