I think I have officially taken up residence on the other side of the looking glass

That is the only explanation when the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee asks a witness if the president of the United States has the authority to order a suspect be buried alive...and the answer isn't a swift and reverberating "NO!"

~~BG

Ruth Marcus Hearts Her Some John Yoo

Really, did they ever date? Were they an item? I'm trying to go through the gossip blogs and find out.

Should this man be teaching constitutional law at one of the nation's top law schools? If he were being hired on the basis of that memo, certainly not. But he is already teaching at Berkeley's Boalt Hall, and he has tenure, which makes the matter far more complicated and argues, in the end, for keeping Yoo on the faculty.

Yoo's memo for the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has long been repudiated by the administration for which he worked, which gives some hint of how extreme it is.

Now, the declassification of the document has ignited a new round of demands for his dismissal, with online petitions deluging the e-mail inbox of Boalt Hall dean Christopher Edley. Yoo "twisted the law in order to sanction what is highly likely to be considered a war crime," lectured a group called the American Freedom Campaign.

Edley, a veteran of the Clinton and Carter White Houses, responded last week with a memo of his own, concluding that Yoo "offered bad ideas and even worse advice during his government service." Still, he found, this failing does not "warrant dismissal or even a potentially chilling inquiry."

Absent "very substantial evidence" of "clear professional misconduct" or criminal violations, Edley said, "no university worthy of distinction should even contemplate dismissing a faculty member."

Disputes over academic freedom tend by their very nature to involve unpleasant choices. No one wants a comparative literature professor who marches with Nazis on the faculty, but pushing her out for that reason invites McCarthyite purges.

The scientist who argues that blacks are genetically inferior to whites (William Shockley), or the "ethnic studies" professor who describes those killed in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns" (Ward Churchill) may be even more repugnant because their offensive statements are intertwined with their academic work.

Really? John Yoo is not as bad as Ward Churchill?

Should John Yoo even be allowed to practice law in this country? That's a question above my pay grade. But for a whole lot of people who are at that pay grade, the ball is now rolling to get Yoo fired from his job and to have his ability to practice law in this country taken away. Either they will or they won't--but if they do, who can argue that having John Yoo find another line of work would be a bad thing? I hear the military is looking for a few good men. Perhaps Yoo could pour his ass into some BDUs and go over to Iraq and check out how things are going now that our enemies know we torture people.

I never understood the furor over Churchill. He was typical of a lot of professors I saw at the school that I went to--a wannabe, a poseur and a borderline phony. Well, in Churchill's case, the borderline part is pretty much confirmed--he was a fraud and a phony. But he had tenure, he had a chairmanship, and he was published. And widely read, if you believe the hype. Professors at that level are always striving, but get caught up in the fact that they really aren't that smart, can't think for themselves, and they make the fatal mistake of believing their own bullshit.

When Yoo started believing his own bullshit, the legal justification for torturing people became the policy of the United States of America. When Churchill started believing his bullshit, he got to see his reputation trashed by a bunch of wingnuts. He got fired. Yoo got hired. And that's more than Alberto Gonzales can say, right?

That whole thing about not wanting to be like Joe McCarthy? Yeah, you might want to read the Constitution first. Try to tape it back up first, because after being eviscerated with a razorblade, there isn't a whole lot left of it that makes any sense anymore--again, thanks to the likes of Yoo.

But let's be clear--Ruth Marcus thinks that an ethnic studies professor who got fired from the University of Colorado at Boulder because he said something that pissed off Fox News is worse than a man who actually committed a war crime by providing the legal basis for torture.

How fucking insane is that?

Welcome Back, Mr. Joe Klein

Here's a very, very well-constructed thought from a man I thought had gone over the abyss himself into wankery a long time ago:

On the day that John Yoo's remarkable torture memo is released, this foolishness is a reminder that none of these people--none of the vicious, mendacious, naive, simplistic, unapologetic, neo-colonialist ideologues who promulgated this disaster--should have even the vaguest claim on the time or tolerance of fair-minded people. Fred Kagan's certainty is an obscenity, his claim to expertise a farce.

Well done, Mr. Klein. Well done.

Hubris is the word I'm looking for...

Hubris is the best way to describe this kind of arrogance. An arrogance that says
"we can do whatever we want to whoever we want and no one can touch us."

(CBS/AP) The Pentagon on Tuesday made public a now-defunct legal memo that approved the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terror suspects, saying that President Bush's wartime authority trumps any international ban on torture.

The Justice Department memo, dated March 14, 2003, outlines legal justification for military interrogators to use harsh tactics against al Qaeda and Taliban detainees overseas - so long as they did not specifically intend to torture their captors.

Even so, the memo noted, the president's wartime power as commander in chief would not be limited by the U.N. treaties against torture.

"Our previous opinions make clear that customary international law is not federal law and that the president is free to override it at his discretion," said the memo written by John Yoo, who was then deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.

The memo also offered a defense in case any interrogator was charged with violating U.S. or international laws.

"Finally, even if the criminal prohibitions outlined above applied, and an interrogation method might violate those prohibitions, necessity or self-defense could provide justifications for any criminal liability," the memo concluded.

Is there a reason why John Yoo is not sitting in a Federal prison right now? Just on the basis of his inability to tell the difference between the law and "what the boss wants" he should be incarcerated. This legal opinion tries to tear down the rule of law in this country. Tries to, because it had to be withdrawn.

And I don't think anything these people have done will ever stand up over time. We will move on from them soon. We will rebuild this country and we will reject the logic in this memo and condemn it for the rest of our days. This is the framed document that should welcome people to the George W. Bush Presidential Library--framed under glass and tastefully lit next to the PDB that says "Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S. and the text of his "Mission Accomplished" speech.

"The whole point of the memo is obviously to nullify every possible legal restraint on the president's wartime authority," Jaffer said. "The memo was meant to allow torture, and that's exactly what it did."

The 81-page legal analysis largely centers on whether interrogators can be held responsible for torture if torture is not the intent of the questioning. And it defines torture as the intended sum of a variety of acts, which could include acid scalding, severe mental pain and suffering, threat of imminent death and physical pain resulting in impaired body functions, organ failure or death.

The "definition of torture must be read as a sum of these component parts," the memo said.

The memo also includes past legal defenses of interrogations that Yoo wrote are not considered torture, such as sleep deprivation, hooding detainees and "frog crouching," which forces prisoners to crouch while standing on the tips of their toes.

"This standard permits some physical contact," the memo said. "Employing a shove or slap as part of an interrogation would not run afoul of this standard."

The memo concludes that foreign enemy combatants held overseas do not have defendants' rights or protections from cruel and unusual punishment that U.S. citizens have under the Constitution. It also says that Congress "cannot interfere with the president's exercise of his authority as commander in chief to control the conduct of operations during a war."

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said the memo "reflects the expansive view of executive power that has been the hallmark of this administration." He called for its release four months ago.

"It is no wonder that this memo ... could not withstand scrutiny and had to be withdrawn," said Leahy, D-Vt. "This memo seeks to find ways to avoid legal restrictions and accountability on torture and threatens our country's status as a beacon of human rights around the world."

That's what we have to rebuiild. That's what we have to restore to get our soul back. And there has to be accountability. Has to be.

The rule of law doesn't mean much when third-rate legal minds are allowed to write whatever they want and pass it off as legal advice. To think that these people concocted such a policy and have never repudiated it and keep defending what they did is enough hubris to last us a lifetime.

Padilla is suing Yoo

...for the whopping sum of one whole dollar.

It isn't about money, it's about principle.

Jose Padilla is the American citizen who was held without charge for three years in solitary confinement in the Navy brig at Charleston, South Carolina. He was denied his Constitutional rights to legal counsel, to a speedy trial and to Habeas Corpus.

John Yoo is the former Justice Department official who wrote the legal memorandums and briefs pertaining to interrogations and the treatment of detainees. Yoo's specious legal work gave cover to the undermining of the Constitution and rationalized and justified torture; as well as indefinite detention of anyone for any reason, so long as the president declared the person in question an "enemy combatant."

In January 2006, Mr. Padilla was transfered from military custody to the criminal justice system by a terrified United States government mere steps ahead of the courts weighing in on the legality of his detention. (Timeline here)

In February 2007, Mr. Padilla filed a separate lawsuit in federal court in South Carolina against multiple administration officials and former officials, including Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft. That suit stems from his treatment while he was imprisoned without charge in the Navy brig, classified as an enemy combatant.

The suit against Yoo takes a different tack than that original suit, asserting that “[A] lawyer who gives the green light to clearly illegal conduct is an accomplice to that conduct.”

The suit against Mr. Yoo is partly based on the recent book The Terror Presidency by Jack Goldsmith, a professor at the Harvard School of Law who served in the Justice Department in 2003 and 2004. While serving at main Justice, Mr. Goldsmith disavowed some of Mr. Yoo's legal work. Specifically, in the book, he charges that two of Mr. Yoo's memorandums were “legally flawed” and “tendentious in substance and tone.”

Mr. Yoo's attorney, Eric M. George, of course issued the obligatory sneering, condescending dismissal of Mr. Padilla’s suit, calling it “a political diatribe” that “belongs, at best, in a journal, not before a federal court.”

Whatever, Mr. George. Bill your client - overbill the sonofabitch hundreds of thousands of dollars for all I care - and let's let the courts decide. I'm sure Padilla will accept the ruling. Will Yoo?