| William J. Haynes II | |
|---|---|
| General Counsel of the Department of Defense | |
| In office May 24, 2001 – March 10, 2008 |
|
| Nominated by | George W. Bush |
| Preceded by | Douglas A. Dworkin |
| Succeeded by | Jeh Charles Johnson |
| General Counsel of the Army | |
| In office 1990–1993 |
|
| Nominated by | George H. W. Bush |
| Preceded by | Susan J. Crawford |
| Succeeded by | William Thaddeus Coleman III |
| Personal details | |
| Born | March 30, 1958 Waco, Texas, U.S. |
| Political party | Republican |
| Alma mater | Davidson College Harvard Law School |
| Profession | Attorney |
William James "Jim" Haynes II (born March 30, 1958 in Waco, Texas) is an American lawyer and former General Counsel of the Department of Defense during President George W. Bush's administration. Haynes resigned as General Counsel effective March 2008. He has been General Counsel of the Department of the Army, a partner with the law firm of Jenner & Block, and an associate general counsel of General Dynamics Corporation. Haynes is currently Chief Corporate Counsel of Chevron Corporation.
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Haynes was born in Waco, Texas, and moved frequently during his childhood. He participated in the Boy Scouts while growing up, eventually achieving the rank of Eagle Scout. In 1976 Haynes graduated from Parkway High School in Bossier City, Louisiana, where he played tennis and won a state championship in wrestling.[1] Haynes earned an ROTC scholarship to attend Davidson College. During college Haynes played varsity tennis and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and Omicron Delta Kappa, and he graduated cum laude in 1980.[2] In 2005, Haynes received Davidson's Distinguished Alumnus Award. He also holds an honorary LLD from Stetson University College of Law.[3]
Haynes received his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1983. During his second year at Harvard, Haynes volunteered at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. At the time, the President of the Bureau was Deval Patrick, the current Governor of Massachusetts, who was a year ahead of Haynes in law school.
Following law school, Haynes spent a year as a law clerk to U.S. District Judge James B. McMillan,[2] an appointee of President Lyndon B. Johnson who famously ordered that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County school system should integrate by means of crosstown busing.[4]
Following his clerkship, Haynes was commissioned an Army second lieutenant through the ROTC program and entered active duty in 1984, serving four years advising and representing the Department of the Army in matters ranging from international research and development agreements, to hazardous waste cleanups, to government contracts. Haynes was twice awarded the Army Meritorious Service Medal, in 1986 and again in 1988.[5]
After leaving active duty, Haynes briefly worked as an associate at the D.C. law firm Sutherland Asbill & Brennan before being tapped by President George H. W. Bush to be General Counsel of the Department of the Army. He was confirmed in early 1990 and remained through noon of inauguration day in 1993, serving as chief legal officer of the Army during a period that witnessed the conclusion of the Cold War, the liberation of Kuwait during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, and the beginning of the contraction of the defense industry.[6]
In 1993, Haynes joined the D.C office of Jenner & Block as a partner. Upon moving to General Dynamics Corporation in 1996, Haynes was initially Staff Vice President and Associate General Counsel, and later General Counsel for the company's Marine Group. In early 1999, Haynes spent four months as a volunteer in central Asia working on microcredit programs for Mercy Corps International, before returning to his partnership at Jenner & Block.
Shortly after his inauguration, President George W. Bush appointed Haynes to be General Counsel of the Department of Defense, a post from which he oversaw some 10,000 lawyers, and advised on the Department’s internal affairs and its relations with other government and non-government agencies at home and abroad. Because of the position’s wide ranging responsibility for overseeing thousands of ongoing cases, legislative matters, and policy decisions, the DoD's General Counsel has been described as “one of the most powerful and influential lawyers in the entire federal government.”[7]
Haynes was in one of the Pentagon's command centers on September 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the western face of the building. At the time, Haynes was on the far side of the Pentagon and later, during the 2008 Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Lecture before the American College of Trial Lawyers, recalled that he felt "a shudder pulse the monstrous concrete structure," and that he sent a deputy of his to a survival site, in case any further attacks were to affect the Pentagon.[8]
In his capacity as General Counsel, Haynes was often sent to meet with foreign officials. In 2003, for instance, he met with British Attorney General Peter Goldsmith to discuss the cases of two British men held in Guantanamo Bay.[9] In 2007, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates dispatched Haynes to Turkey to speak with officials there about militants in the country thought to be using U.S.-supplied weaponry.[10]
As General Counsel to the Department of Defense, Haynes advised the Bush administration in its effort to create military commissions that would try detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. The commissions were authorized by Military Commission Order No. 1, which Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld issued on March 21, 2002. No detainees were tried under the provisions of that order, and in 2006, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Congressional authorization was required before any commissions could commence. Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who briefly worked at the Pentagon as Special Counsel under Haynes, notes in his book The Terror Presidency that Haynes urged getting Congressional approval for the commissions, but that others in the administration felt doing so was unnecessary.[11]
In November 2002, Haynes wrote a memo for Rumsfeld concerning interrogation techniques to be used at Guantanamo Bay. Haynes's memo, which the Secretary of Defense approved, recommended authorizing several techniques, but advised against the authorization of three more-aggressive techniques, including one that resembled waterboarding. Such treatment of detainees, Haynes noted, would be inconsistent with American Armed Forces' "tradition of restraint."[12]
That memo led journalist Stuart Taylor to write, in a 2008 article for the National Journal, that Haynes “is the only former [Bush administration] official whose paper trail also shows that he blocked a request to use waterboarding and two other harsh methods that administration lawyers had advised were legal....”[13] Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes went even further in the pages of the left-leaning New Republic, calling Haynes’s memo “the reason that the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody.”[14]
While the memo drew criticism for recommending techniques used abusively in Iraq and elsewhere, it in fact did not apply to interrogators working anywhere outside Guantanamo Bay. In August 2004, the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations, which was convened in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, issued a report noting that the methods Haynes recommended were “strictly limited for use at Guantanamo” and that officers there “used those...techniques with only two detainees, gaining important and time sensitive information in the process.”[15]
In the wake of the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, it was suggested that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved for use at Guantanamo Bay may have elicited information from Mohammed al Qahtani that helped U.S. intelligence agents find bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, and ultimately bin Laden himself.[16]
The panel’s report did fault Haynes for formulating his November 2002 interrogation memo to the Secretary of Defense without giving greater consideration to the input of Judge Advocates General and the General Counsels of the armed services. The authors of the report suggest that had Haynes done so, the military might not have needed to revise its Guantanamo interrogation standards again in April 2003, following objections from some within the military that the standards adopted in late-2002 might lead to abuse of detainees. As later became clear, however, the Department of Justice had earlier provided highly-classified, definitive advice to the White House that more aggressive techniques were within the legal bounds of discretion for the President in defense of the country.
Haynes was a part of the so-called ‘Bush Six,’ a group of administration officials who were considered for prosecution by Baltasar Garzón, a former examining magistrate on Spain’s Central Court of Criminal Proceedings. The six were to be charged with offering legal justifications for torture. After the Obama administration and the Spanish Attorney General both requested the investigation be dropped, the matter was dismissed in May 2011.[17] Additionally, Garzón has been suspended from his post for exceeding his judicial powers during an investigation of the Franco regime.[18]
In March 2008, Haynes resigned from his position at the Pentagon. His nearly seven years in office made him the longest-serving General Counsel in the history of the Department of Defense.[19] Upon his departure, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates awarded Haynes the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest award for a civilian appointee.
Later that month, Haynes joined Chevron Corporation as its Chief Corporate Counsel.[20]
In 2003, Haynes was nominated by George W. Bush to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. During the more than three years Haynes’s nomination was pending, the American Bar Association evaluated him twice and both times rated him Well-Qualified, the highest rating given to judicial nominees.[21] Haynes also received the support of a number of prominent lawyers, including Cass Sunstein and former NAACP Legal Defense Fund chairman William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr.
The Judiciary Committee approved Haynes’s nomination in November 2003, but he did not received a vote in the full Senate, and although re-nominated in subsequent Congresses, Haynes never again moved past the committee level. Surprisingly, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina surfaced as the principal impediment to the appointment.[22] In December 2006, after the Senate adjourned following the Democratic gains of the 2006 elections, Haynes asked President Bush to forego re-nominating him to the Court of Appeals.[23]
An essay about Islam and terrorism entitled "Why the Peaceful Majority is Irrelevant" by blogger Paul E. Marek was at one point incorrectly attributed to Haynes.[24]
Media related to [//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:William_J._Haynes,_II William J. Haynes, II] at Wikimedia Commons
| Government offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Douglas A. Dworkin |
General Counsel of the Department of Defense 2001 – 2008 |
Succeeded by Jeh Charles Johnson |
| Preceded by Susan J. Crawford |
General Counsel of the Army 1990 – 1993 |
Succeeded by William Thaddeus Coleman III |