TORTURE AS OFFICIAL POLICY OF THE STATE

A few days ago Andrew Sullivan predicted that Bush and Cheney would one day be handed over to a war crimes tribunal. I'm sure I'd like to see it far more than he would-- but if he even believes it with 20% of his being, that's 20% more than I believe it. In this case the politics of the possible will trump what's right and wrong. The pathetic excuse for a Speaker of the House can't even allow an investigation to determine if there should be impeachment hearings; who's going to hand these two criminals over to the Hague? But if we humor Sullivan for a moment, the torture memo to end all torture memos (by criminal-minded Neocon attorney John Yoo) will surely be send over with them. The 81 page document was sent over to Capitol Hill after a lengthy battle to keep it secret.

Federal laws prohibiting assault and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned [suspected] al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander-in-chief overrode such statutes, according to a newly declassified 2003 Justice Department memo released today.

The memo--which was rescinded just nine months after it was issued--provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered presidential power in a time of war, contending that numerous laws and treaties that forbid torture or cruel treatment should not apply to the interrogations of enemy combatants overseas.

...The memo asserts that domestic and international laws and treaties, as well as the U.S. Constitution, would not apply to U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's inherent wartime powers.

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote in the memo. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."

Aside from doing his best to undermine the Geneva Conventions and push forward a legalistic veil for an imperial presidency (the so-called "unitary executive theory"), Yoo also was one of the drafters of the fascist-oriented so-called Patriot Act (which is to patriotism what the Clean Skies act is to breathing). Yoo, the kind of immigrant we should be deporting, hasn't been shipped back to Korea or even imprisoned. In fact he teaches at UC, Berkeley, warping the minds of young students with this bizarre ideological agenda.

In his 2007 book, The Terror Presidency, Jack Goldsmith, who was head of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004, writes that the Yoo memorandum was one of two internal Justice Department opinions that "stood out" for "the unusual lack of care and sobriety in their legal analysis."

Among many other problems, Goldsmith wrote, both memos "were wildly broader than was necessary to support what was actually being done."

Rear Adm. Michael F. Lohr, the Navy's top lawyer, asked in a memo at the time whether the American people would find "we have missed the forest for the trees by condoning practices that, while technically legal, are inconsistent with our most fundamental values?"

Korea was still a fascist dictatorship when Yoo was born. Looking at his work since coming to America, there is every reason to believe that fascist values have been embedded in his being. Leave it to Bush and Cheney to drag this piece of garbage into their regime and set him lose.