William James "Jim" Haynes II (born March 30, 1958) is an American lawyer and was General Counsel of the Department of Defense during much of 43rd President George W. Bush's administration and his war on terror.

In 1976 Haynes graduated from Parkway High School in Bossier City, Louisiana, where he played tennis and won a state championship in wrestling.

He served 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.

[4] 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.

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.

In his capacity as general counsel, Haynes 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.

Later, during the 2008 Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Lecture before the American College of Trial Lawyers, he recalled feeling "a shudder pulse the monstrous concrete structure," and that he sent a deputy of his to a survival site, in case any additional attacks were to affect the Pentagon.

213–237) of her book The Dark Side, Jane Mayer describes how Alberto Mora, then the general counsel of the US Navy, as early as 2003 mounted a challenge to the interrogation policy used by the United States which he saw as potentially leading to war crimes charges.

[11] Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who briefly worked at the Pentagon as Special Counsel under Haynes before becoming head of the Office of Legal Counsel, United States Department of Justice (2003-2004), notes in his book, The Terror Presidency (2007), that at the time Haynes did urge the powers that be in the Bush administration to seek and obtain congressional authorization for the policy and military commissions, but that others in the administration felt doing so was unnecessary.

This followed what were known as the Torture Memos of August 2002, largely written by Yoo and issued by the Office of Legal Counsel to the CIA and DOD, with two signed as well by Jay S. Bybee.

"[13] 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...."[14] Brookings Institution fellow Benjamin Wittes went further in the pages of The New Republic, claiming Haynes's memo was "the reason that the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody.

[16] In August 2004, the Independent Panel to Review Department of Defense Detention Operations, which was convened in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal that broke in April 2004, issued a report claiming 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.

[19] Haynes received the support of a number of prominent lawyers, including Cass Sunstein and former NAACP Legal Defense Fund chairman William Thaddeus Coleman Jr.

"[23] But in 2007 Durbin read a Washington Post report[24] regarding the resistance of Navy General Counsel Alberto J. Mora, to the so-called "Torture Memos"[25] which seemed to imply that Kavanaugh had not given honest answers.

Additionally, he holds an appointment as a Distinguished Fellow at the George Mason University School of Law Center for Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security.