The Arrogance Of Being George

-by Noah

George, George, king of the bungle. The former Tree-Swinger-In-Chief just couldn’t stay away. Rather than hide out in a coconut tree on a remote island, Chimpy decided to have someone write a book in his name and then go rip off the scabs of his hurtful presidency on national TV. The book is called Decision Points. In it, the former usurper of the White House has chosen a series of points in his occupation of the Oval Office that he has decided need some re-framing and cleaning up in order to shed a more positive if untrue light on his presidency. He claims to not care about what people think but if that was true, this particular book would not exist.

Chimpy has gone on a book tour to promote the book. I’m happy to report that, unlike fellow tree-swinger, Sarah Palin, the book tour isn’t a phony bus tour. He hasn’t seen the need to create a false perception by having a bus meet him at the airport so he can pretend to be riding a bus from bookstore to bookstore like some kind of “ordinary folks” man of the people. No, in keeping with everything else that is George, he’s kept it simple. He’s just doing TV interviews (acting performances) with people like Oprah and Matt Lauer. He has bigger perceptions to hatch.
 
Try as he might as he makes the rounds, Chimpy just can’t hide his arrogance, insensitivity, and utter shallowness. When asked by Lauer about Katrina, he says “it gave critics an opportunity to kinda undermine the presidency” (Yeah. It’s all about you George, isn’t it? Not the victims. You were the victim of Katrina?) He even says his mistake was that he didn’t have Air Force One touch down in Baton Rouge so he could say hi to Governor Kathleen Blanco. He doesn’t mention her name, of course. After all, the governor was not only a woman; she was also a Democrat. Hell, she isn’t even rich! More importantly, though, in what passes for his tiny, warped beyond any semblance of normalcy or decency, “mind,” the mistake he made was not a missed opportunity of immediately offering aide, hope, and reassurance, but a missed opportunity of a photo op that would have altered appearances. With Bush, the man who doesn’t “care about perceptions,” it’s all about perception.

Had he touched down in Baton Rouge, aid efforts could have been jump-started. Instead, the confusion escalated and incompetence came from every direction of Federal, State and Local government. The ‘decisive’ guy failed to be decisive. Sure, he had a dilemma in that his legal options may have been limited, but a face-to-face meeting and asking the right questions could have gotten the ball rolling and circumvented all of that bureaucracy; if only he had cared enough. If only he was capable of feeling the pain and suffering of others. If only he wasn’t a sociopath, the perfect man to lead the Republican Party. Hey, heck of a job!
 
Lauer, playing his role in this charade, never brings up the fact that Bush did find time to go drop in on the remains of Trent Lott’s former KKK headquarters, er, a beachfront home first, and effuse about rebuilding Trent’s house. There was nothing there about rebuilding the houses of people who “don’t matter,” if you know what I mean. Even his later little walk around photo op was in what had been in a Mississippi beachfront community, not the 9th Ward of New Orleans or anything like it. All of that goes unmentioned. Then, Bush takes offense at the almost equally boorish Kanye West saying he doesn’t care about Black people. Gee, how would anyone have ever gotten that idea? Bush blew it and he actually admits it, but he gets the actual what of what he did wrong just plain wrong. Like-wise, in hindsight, he now considers his “Mission Accomplished” banner a mistake, too. It gave a wrong impression. Mistakes were made. Damn those ugly realities! 

“Did you ever ask yourself the question ‘What more could I have done to prevent this from happening.”

 
At 6:05 into this portion of the interview, as Lauer centers on the 9/11 attacks, Lauer asks the above question.

You can watch the body language of Bush’s mouth and eyes as he formulates the next big lie of his life of lies. There’s always the rapidly shifting, rapidly blinking eyes when Bush lies; always that hint of a smirk, especially at the end of his lie. The smirk is so prevalent during the interview that you begin to wonder why it isn’t as permanent as The Joker’s grotesque smile in the Batman stories.
 
Of course, he answers ‘no’ by saying “we just didn’t have any solid intelligence that gave us a warning on this.” There’s no mention from Lauer of the infamous August memo, delivered to Bush at his fake (for image creation and perception only) ranch in Crawford; the memo that he treated so dismissively by arrogantly telling his briefer that he’d covered his ass and now he should leave and go back to Washington. Does ol’ go along to get along corporate media shill Lauer challenge Bush on that? What do you think?
 
I have no doubt at this point that Chimpy’s book will rise high on the New York Times Non-Fiction Best Seller List. But then, a lot of conservatives are also pretty unhappy with Bush; at least those who are angry at him for exploding the deficit and bailing out Wall Street are, except when they are blaming President Obama for both of those. The question now is: does the book contain enough lies to eventually also make the Fiction List? If it was up to me, I’d suggest that Chimpy’s lies and his hiding behind the calculated cover of others (such as John Yoo in the case of the water-boarding but more on that in a little bit) are overrun by the magnitude of his crimes against humanity both here and abroad and they make the book ripe for syndication in True Crime Magazine. 
 
In our nation’s history, we’ve had a lot of people with issues in the White House. Nixon was a serious mental case, filled with layer upon layer of insecurities and paranoia. Reagan was senile and lord knows what was going on in Clinton’s head. Obama appears to be plagued by an over-sized desire for acceptance. But George Dubya will be fodder for shrink books and dissertations for decades to come. Already, I can suggest one. It’s called Bush On The Couch by Dr. Justin A. Frank.

Chimpy knew water-boarding was wrong. You can see it in his answers to Lauer about the subject. When mildly pressed by Lauer, he merely nervously says his lawyer, John Yoo, told him it was OK and that’s it. Never mind that that lawyer was more than likely told to come up with the desired answer. Someone had the job of providing the cover to have our country engage in water-boarding. Yoo said that Bush was not bound by the War Crimes Act so Bush ordered it. These conclusions were reached despite our own statutes and the Geneva Conventions and despite the fact that we tried and hung Japanese soldiers that water-boarded Americans during WWII and prosecuted our own soldiers who water-boarded the enemy. Since George Washington, our policy has been to not lower ourselves to torture. The first Commander-in-Chief made that very clear. In the interview, Bush makes it very, very emphatically clear that he just won’t discuss it. If he had a leg to stand on, he would discuss it, but all we get is the “My lawyer said it was legal” excuse. There he goes again, hiding behind someone else, a minion. Why get your hands dirty when you can have a staff to delegate that to? Bush didn’t invent that, but, he is a master of it. It’s like saying his father’s CIA had nothing to do with pulling out the finger nails of Chilean folk singers during the overthrow of Allende. In Dubya’s case, why sweat the details when you can’t comprehend them and you publicly pride yourself as a delegator even while you call yourself the decider? From his DUI days to his AWOL days to his fraudulent elections which put him in the Oval Office, to declaring an off the books war on Iraq, Bush has felt a grand, megalomaniacal sense of entitlement. He has always felt at home living outside the laws of the land.  It comes with being a Bush. The key thing in the discussion, though, is that Bush has admitted, on camera, to giving the order to water-board. Indictable? Yes. Will there be one? Yeah, right.
 
Lauer repeatedly lets Bush off the hook. Whether it’s not bringing up the August memo or not bringing up details that would contradict Bush’s book on the reasons for the war on Iraq, he never really challenges him. But, if Lauer was the kind to do such pushing and challenging, he wouldn’t have his job. That’s not his role in our society. This book and Lauer’s coverage of it is just another example of how the establishment propagates fairy tales and moves them along until they become accepted doctrine and fact in our society. Reality doesn’t enter into it. The Ed Schultzes of the world never get that gig. The Matt Lauers do, precisely because they can provide a dog and pony show that has the veneer of something more substantial. They provide a version of a story that people are comfortable with when the deeper reality is just too damn disturbing. It's "Hear no evil. Speak no evil. See no evil." History is written by those who have the power. The Bushes are using the compliant media to tell the story, in their terms, for posterity, but there are some cracks in this one. Already, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder is accusing Bush of lying in his book. And, the more Bush goes out in public, the more material he will unwittingly provide simply because he lacks the intellect and curiosity to understand exactly the damage he has done. His mind and personality are a treasure trove for anyone who can study him without throwing up.   

Tangled Up In Yoo

Last week David Swanson wrote this really great song, "Tangled Up In Yoo." This version was sung by Margaret Flowers. I thought watching the video would be an uplifting way to start the week.



Not everyone is enamored of the use of anthemic songs like this for social and political causes (although you rarely hear people crying anymore when their favorite classic turns up in an ad selling a crappy car or detergent). Kay Bailey Hutchison, a right-wing Texas senator running against a further right secessionist governor for his position, uses songs on YouTube clips, as does the secessionist. The secessionist has an air of corruption around him-- a well-deserved one-- and Hutchison has been using the O'Jay's For the Love of Money. "Political campaigns like ours have long considered the use of such songs in Web videos as acceptable under fair use rules," Hutchison campaign spokesman Joe Pounder said. The secessionist's spokesperson agrees. "It's an inexpensive way to put out a message. The goal in the campaign is to use every outlet possible to get your message out." Usage like the one above isn't for narrow political gain, but for the benefit of mankind.

In re. Yoo and Bybee v. Law, Ethics, and Decency: Does any right-winger ever consider for even a second telling the truth?

Of course Rachel gets it, and Michael Isikoff gets it, and their viewers get it. But the rest of the country, under the benevolent bipartisan gaze of our free-from-principle Village elders, doesn't give a hoot about the rule of law and thinks torture is a good thing. But still, do they always have to lie about it? (Answer: Yes, apparently they do.)

"The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched. The Charter of this Tribunal evidences a faith that the law is not only to govern the conduct of little men, but that even rulers are, as Lord Chief Justice Coke put it to King James, 'under ... the law.' And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment."

-- Opening Statement of the Chief Prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, at Nuremberg, from the website of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee, lawsnotmen.org

by Ken

I really don't want to go into DoJ stooge David Margolis's 69-page report declining to take any legal action against should-be-disgraced former DoJ stooges Jay Bybee and John Yoo, the "Torture Boys," who disgraced the obligation of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) to provide the executive branch with accurate information about the law. (Of course it's a cosmic irony that after the Bush regime turned the OLC into a crime-covering travesty, the law-hating crime enthusiasts of the Right have blocked the nomination of the superbly qualified Dawn Johnsen to head the OLC, the very job that, so thoroughly bungled, catapulted Torture Boy Bybee onto the federal bench.)

It sucks, of course. Some welcome heat is being generated by the lawyers and journalists of the Robert Jackson Steering Committee, which under the Freedom of Information Act secured the release of a host of DoJ documents -- unfortunately in heavily redacted form -- including the three versions of DoJ's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report, all now overturned by the Margolis judgment. There is, for example, this comment from journalist Kristina Borjesson, an RJSC member:

To read the contents of the first OPR report, the subsequent reports, and then the DOJ conclusions, is to read an account of a classic whitewashing process, one that has been exercised often since the Iran-Contra hearings and before. The first report presents the real evidence, a parade of enumerated horribles that, by the final report by Margolis, have been erased or minimized according to the interests that the reviewing parties want to protect. The end result is always the same: no accountability for laws broken. These were not little legal infractions committed by the OLC lawyers. These were infractions that destroy the very fabric of our democracy.

And there's this comment from RJSC lawyer Peter Weiss, who participated in the FOIA filing:

We deplore the fact that David Margolis, speaking for the department, has gone very far toward accepting Yoo and Bybee's argument that, in times of emergency, legal norms as fundamental as the absolute prohibition of torture may be violated with impunity by the President and other high officials. If that is to become official US policy, it will merely reinforce the international movement toward universal jurisdiction for particularly heinous crimes, instead of leaving it to American courts to deal with Americans accused of such crimes.

But even the RJSC gets it wrong when it comes to characterizing the Margolis report: "The committee expressed grave concern that David Margolis, a senior lawyer in the Department of Justice, wrote a final opinion in January which completely exonerates the two lawyers for legally justifying the illegal torture of detainees."

Deep breath. THE DECISION DOES NOT "COMPLETELY EXONERATE" THE TORTURE BOYS. If you want to say it "lets them off," fine. But it's pretty unkind about the quality of their legal work.

What it comes down to, if you read what Margolis actually wrote, is that he doesn't see that it's likely to be provable that Yoo and Bybee weren't sincere in issuing the legal opinions for which the Office of Professional Responsibility recommended they be referred to their respective bar associations for disciplining. That, in Margolis's mind, is the legal issue: As long as they sincerely believed the bullshit that torture, which is unambiguously illegal under international and U.S. law, can be massaged to cleanliness, and that the president of the United States can under certain circumstances do any damn thing he pleases and fuck the law, for which there isn't a single word in the Constitution that provides the remotest hint of the shadow of a possibility of justification, but as long as they sincerely believe it, it's difficult to prove that they recklessly rendered bad legal opinions or deliberately advocated contrary-to-law positions.

Justice Jackson at Nuremberg: I know the defense that defendants were "only following orders" came up a lot (and was always rejected), but I don't recall that we established a Nuremberg Loophole excusing war-crimes defendants who were "sincere."

Now if people as sensibly attuned to the issues as the RJSC folks slip into declaring the Boys "exonerated," you can probably imagine what's going on on the truth-be-damned Right. Or can you? Glenn Greenwald has already declared himself surprised, in a vintage GG piece, "The flailing falsehoods of America's war criminals":

I didn't think it was possible, but former Bush officials -- desperately fighting what they know will be their legacy as war criminals -- have become even more dishonest propagandists out of office than they were in office. At National Review, Bill Burck and Dana Perino so thoroughly mislead their readers about the DOJ report . . . that it's hard to know where to begin.

Glenn, it appears, has actually read the Margolis report. And on the issue of whether "Yoo intentionally or recklessly provided misleading advice to his client," he points out, Margolis writes, "It is a close question."

"Just think about that for a minute," says Glenn.

Margolis said that whether Yoo "intentionally or recklessly provided misleading advice to his client" when authorizing torture -- about the most serious accusation one can make against a lawyer, as it means he deliberately made false statements about the law -- "is a close question." That's the precise opposite of what Burck and Perino told National Review readers about Margolis' conclusion ("This shouldn’t have been close — and it wasn't, on the merits").

Moreover, Margolis repeatedly adopted the OPR's findings that the Yoo/Bybee torture memos -- on which the entire American torture regime was constructed and which media elites now embrace in order to argue against prosecutions -- were wrong, "extreme," misguided, and the by-product of "poor judgment."

He refers readers to Yale Prof. Jack Balkin's detailed analysis of the opinion on Friday, under the piquant head, "Justice Department Will Not Punish Yoo and Bybee Because Most Lawyers Are Scum Anyway." According to Balkin, says Glenn, "The only thing that saved Yoo in Margolis' eyes was that attorney ethical rules have been written by lawyers to protect themselves, and the bar is therefore so low that it basically includes only 'sociopaths and people driven to theft and egregious incompetence by serious drug and alcohol abuse problems.'"

And remember, Margolis described his judgment about actionability against the Torture Boys as "a close question." So there is no remotely conceivable sense in which Yoo and Bybee can be said to have been "cleared" or "exonerated," any more than anyone under investigation by a prosecutor's office that declines to prosecute can be said to have been. Less, actually, because rarely does such a person have a judgment delivered that says, "The decision was oh so close, you know this close, to going the other way."

In fact, one reason that should have been given more weight is the consequence of failing to take action: the possibility that the proponents of rampant government criminality can claim their heroes to have been "exonerated."

But did that stop the Washington Post from editorializing ("No punishment for torture memos' authors, but no exoneration, either"; at least they got the "no exoneration" part right) from claiming, "Mr. Margolis noted that the lawyers acted in 'good faith' under extremely difficult circumstances and with the benefit of several court decisions that could be read to support their approach"? Well, some stuff sort of along those lines is in there, but do you get the sense from this characterization that Margolis in fact described his decision -- hailed by the sleepy-at-the-wheel WaPo editorialist as "courageous" -- not to recommend action as "a close call"?

Actually, what the editorial says is that Margolis "correctly and courageously overturned a skewed recommendation by the department's Office of Professional Responsibility." Well, perhaps the final OPR report was skewed, but as those who have now read the redacted versions of the three OPR reports tell us, the skewing going on was all in the direction of watering it down, to make it more live-and-let-live Village-friendly.

Of course, by the time the "skewed" OPR report was scuttled by the Margolis one, it was a snap for the war criminals and their enthusiasts on the Right to claim "exoneration." I'm with Glenn on this one. You have to wonder, is there any lie those people won't tell to cover their butts?

#

UPDATE From The Celebrated Songwriting Team Of David Swanson And Robert Allen Zimmerman

Tangled Up in Yoo
By David Swanson

Early one mornin' the sun was shinin',
Prisoners layin' in bed
Wond'rin' when the guards would come
And kick them in the head.
The folks who wrote the torture memos
Sure did have it rough.
They never got enough exercise.
The new condo wasn't big enough.
One victim standin' at the side of his cell
Blood dripping on his shoes
Admitted Iraq had WMDs
Lord knows that made the news but was it true,
Tangled up in Yoo.

Yoo was married to his belief
That nobody could force
A president to obey the law
And wartime only made that worse.
Yoo drove that point as far as he could
And overruled the rest
Of the lawyers who gave into him
All agreeing it was best.
He turned around to look upon
The damage he had done
I heard him whisper over his shoulder,
"They'll lock me up some day on the avenue,"
Tangled up in Yoo.

Yoo had a job training fascist youth
Writing up a book for a spell.
But he never did like it all that much
And one day the ax just fell.
So he drifted round to campuses
Wherever they would let him speak
About presidents crushing testicles
And disinheriting the meek.
But all the while he was alone
The past was close behind,
Yoo broke a lot of statutes,
Prison never escaped his mind, and he just knew,
Tangled up in Yoo.

Yoo was talkin' in a corporate place
And I stopped in to hear.
I just kept lookin' at the side of his face
In the spotlight so clear.
And later on as the crowd thinned out
I started calling John Yoo's name,
I handcuffed him to the back of his chair
Said to him, "Does it feel the same?"
Yoo muttered somethin' underneath his breath,
I read him his Miranda rights.
I must admit I felt a little uneasy
When he admitted it was the right thing to do.
Tangled up in Yoo.

Yoo left a bundle of memos behind, legalizing crimes.
"I thought you'd never come for me," he said
"And it really blew my mind."
Then he opened up a book of laws
And handed it to me
Written by all kinds of people
Over two or three centuries.
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burnin' coal
Pourin' off of every page
Like it was written purely so we'd indict Yoo,
Nothing else to do.

Yoo authorized aggressive war
and lawless imprisonment,
warrantless spying and torture techniques,
That was the way Yoo went.
Then he started into peddling lies
And something inside of him died.
He had to sell his heart and bones
And Yoo froze up inside.
And when finally the bottom fell out
Yoo became withdrawn,
The only thing he knew how to do
Was to sing his lying song, like a bird that flew,
Tangled up in Yoo.

So now Yoo's goin' to be tried,
The law got to him somehow.
All the people he used to know
They're co-conspirators now.
Some are ex vice presidents.
Some lead glamorous lives.
Don't know how it all got started,
I don't know what they're gonna tell their wives.
But me, I'm still on the road
Trying to make a point.
Yoo always did feel the same,
He just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in Yoo

Dealing With War Crime Investigations Would Be Uncomfortable And... Icky

I guess disbarment is somewhere between a slap on the wrist and a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. But it certainly isn't the thorough investigation of the three Bush Regime shills from the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility. Remember when the far right was shrieking about the martyrdom of Scooter Libby? This would be at least as ugly and it makes the cowardly, self-serving Democrats cringe and cower. All the carefully orchestrated headlines yesterday were along the lines of the NY Times' Inquiry Suggests No Charges and the Wall Street Journal's Justice Likely To Urge No Prosections: nothing to see here; move along please.

It looks like the Justice Department will recommend turning the cases over to The Hague's International War Crimes Tribunal local bar associations for possible disciplinary actions-- meaning anything from going to bed without dinner to, if the general public screams loudly enough, disbarment for John Yoo, Steven Bradbury and Jay Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge. All three wrote and signed memos justifying torture and encouraging others to think that criminal activities were legal.

But there's more. Bradbury was kind of in charge of the Bush Regime DOJ "investigation" and was almost certainly tampering with it, as was Yoo. In yesterday's Washington Post Carrie Johnson didn't even mention that when she reported how ex-members the former criminal outfit ironically known as the Bush Department of Justice were rallying around their colleagues, at the incitement of Yoo's and Bybee's attorneys, and urging gold stars on their permanent records instead of wrist slaps.

Former Bush administration officials have launched a behind-the-scenes campaign to urge Justice Department leaders to soften an ethics report criticizing lawyers who blessed harsh detainee interrogation tactics, according to two sources familiar with the efforts.

And in today's Washington Post the same Ms. Johnson breaks the good news: that even ersatz justice is dead and none of these outrageous criminals would get even a slap on the wrist. Yes, despite how serious the findings are against Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury, the system has been neatly fixed so that none will face any kind of retribution whatsoever, unless being vilified by Jonathan Turley (see below), Rachel Maddow, Firedoglake and possibly even Stephen Colbert is the kind of retribution that fits their crimes.

Yoo! Who? Dick Of The Day!

I'm all for Democrats who are courageous enough-- like Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)-- to stand up and say, unambivalently "NO!" to torture, where Republican shitheads are dancing around and looking for shades of gray. But today's best blow against torture and torture apologists goes to Dickipedia for their newest entry: former Bush Regime torture attorney John Yoo:

John Choon Yoo (born June 10, 1967) is an American attorney, former U.S. Justice Department official, Berkeley law professor, writer of memos, foremost authority on routing the U.S. Constitution, alleged war criminal, and an all-around good person. It is important to note however that—though it contradicts all rational reason-- in this article, "an all-around good person" has been redefined narrowly to mean "a dick."

Yoo is an eminent scholar of the document known as the U.S. Constitution, though this refers specifically to an edition of it that is missing several amendments and has been integrated with entries from Vice President Dick Cheney's bedtime dream journal.

Having devoted his life to the common dick practice of redefining words to mean something different and more convenient, Yoo, during the course of one business day, redefined "acceptable behavior for a civilized nation" to "pretty much anything up to the reenactment of an Eli Roth movie."

Yoo's work is chiefly responsible for the supposed legal justification the Bush administration asserted for the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which is like a crazy corporate marketing-speak term for when the vendor fake drowns the consumer.

In his professional world, Yoo's work has caused him to stand out as a shining dick, which, considering this is the legal community we're talking about, is a major achievement in and of itself.

...While at the White House, Yoo authored a series of notorious memos that other people put their names on. In them, Yoo developed newer and narrower definitions for the concepts of "torture" and "habeas corpus" as well as, not to mention, the terms "ethics," "morals," and (from the look of him) "a modest lunch."

Lately, anonymous friends-- i.e., sneaky Mormons-- have been claiming that 9th Circuit Appellate Court Judge Jay "The Torture Lawyer" Bybee didn't really write the rah-rah-torture memo he signed and that he only signed it because Cheney might have tortured him if he didn't. Yoo, on the other hand, is proud to have taken a stand that puts him in the ranks of all the heroes of authoritarianism from Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, Marcos, Atilla and Caligula all the way down the shoot to Hitler and Cheney.

A lot of lawyers played a key role in the Bush regime's law-breaking. Shouldn't they pay a price?

John "Mr. Torture" Yoo

We've been talking about what can be done to hold the law-breakers of the Bush regime to account for what they've done. Last night I passed on the suggestion by Georgetown law professor David Cole in a current NYRB article:

The next administration or the next Congress should at a minimum appoint an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States' adoption of coercive interrogation policies. If it is to be effective, it must have subpoena power, sufficient funding, security clearances, access to all the relevant evidence, and, most importantly, a charge to assess responsibility, not just to look forward. We may know many of the facts already, but absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment -- our own federal government -- the healing cannot begin.

As Professor Cole points out, with regard to possible prosecution, John "Mr. Torture" Yoo's infamous "torture memo," drafted in the bowels of the Justice Dept., "would be a legal defense for any but the lawyers who wrote it." Well, what about the lawyers?

I've taken the liberty of yanking this comment by reader drinkof out of our comments section to make sure everyone sees it. -- Ken

"Surely Yoo, Gonzales or Addington's offenses are worth a couple of Clinton units of suspension time?"

by drinkof

For various unfortunate reasons, criminal prosecutions are unlikely.

On the other hand, there is a mechanism which can make a substantial statement as to our dedication to the rule of law, and for which there is ample (and, for critics, inconvenient) precedent. Lawyers involved at various points of approving, and covering up, torture and related practices in their official capacity should face disbarment.

Yoo, Gonzales, Addington, for that matter, Jack Goldsmith (sorry, but the half-ass mea culpa doesn't cut it) and dozens more should answer for their actions.

Complaints as to criminalizing policy differences simply don't apply. Law practice is a privilege, not a right, and it's time the legal profession begin to purge its ranks of these practices.

And recall, Bill Clinton got his license to practice suspended for 5 years for whatever it was that he did. Surely Yoo, Gonzales or Addington's offenses are worth a couple of Clinton units (e.g., 10 years) of suspension time?

#

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.

Quote of the day: It's time to begin sorting out and undoing the destructive legacy of one of the Bush regime's evil geniuses, John Yoo

"Unless it is properly addressed by the government, Yoo's troubling legacy could affect the history of American civil liberties for decades to come."
--David Luban [right], in "The Defense of Torture," in the March 15 New York Review of Books

As I write, the new issue of The New York Review of Books doesn't appear to be up on the website yet. For now, the website seems content to taunt me with all the things I somehow haven't gotten around to reading in the March 1 issue. (Huh? I never read Russell Baker on Ronald Reagan? How is this possible? I always read Russell Baker pieces the day the damned magazine turns up in the mailbox.)

If you click on the one visible link to March 15, you're taken to a page that proclaims, "There is no issue of The New York Review of Books for March 15, 2007." This seems to me a shockingly defeatist attitude, which is happily not borne out by the facts. Come on, nybooks.com, I'm holding the bloody thing in my hand! There really is a March 15 issue--you'll see!

In the new issue, I haven't yet read Peter Galbraith on "The Surge," or Michael Tomasky on "The Democrats" (jumping off from a whole bunch of books that have already been published in the new political season), but I have read David Luban (a law professor at Georgetown) on John Yoo and his new screed, War by Other Means: An Insider's Account of the War on Terror, maybe because Howie and I were just chatting about Yoo the other day while he (Howie, that is) was in New York. He's reading Joe Conason's apparently terrific new book, It Can Happen Here, where Yoo receives some close-up scrutiny.

In case you've been lucky enough to forget, John Yoo is the punk Berkeley academic who slithered into the Bush Justice Department, indeed into the extremely powerful policy-wise Office of Legal Counsel, on a self-appointed mission to shred the Constitution to line the bird cages of the far, far, no farther right.

Among other things, Yoo is generally presumed (authorship of OLC documents is never attributed, except to the head of the unit) to be the author of the original Bush regime We Love Torture memo.

Now Luban is remarkably generous to Yoo, as for example when he writes that "Yoo argues forcefully and intelligently, but not always honestly. Half-truths, straw men, double standards, selective quotations, significant omissions, and caricatures of his opponents' positions--all are characteristic of War by Other Means. While you may not find this all that generous, I'm wondering how, in the face of everything that follows, one can claim that Yoo argues "intelligently."

The stuff that Yoo writes, whether it's about torture or any of the other other things he fantasizes a president has the power to do in time of war (when you get right down to it, there doesn't seem to be any limit to what he thinks a president can do--as long as he's a far, far, far right-wing, deeply authoritarian president), may be technically true but highly misleading, often so close to untruths that they're within a hair's breadth of being lies, or sociopathic misinterpretations of actual facts, or just plain whoppers.

One of Luban's nice touches is pointing out that:

Only once has Yoo complained that a president "exercised the powers of the imperial presidency to the utmost . . . in our dealings with foreign nations." He added, "Unfortunately, the record of the administration has not been a happy one, in light of its costs to the Constitution and the American legal system," and "the administration has played fast and loose with the law." He added that "when it comes to using the American military, no president in recent times has had a quicker trigger finger." Yoo wrote those words about President Clinton in 2000.

Luban's generosity to Yoo extends to accepting his assertion "that the struggle against al-Qaeda actually is a war."

The problem lies not in the label, but in the consequences that supposedly follow from it. For Yoo, labeling the struggle "war" activates every war power formerly associated with battle commanders. The central contradiction, which Yoo never overcomes, is that while he insists that the US is fighting a new kind of war, he also insists that it should be fought with the full panoply of traditional presidential war powers. But these war powers were designed for conflicts in which the enemy is in uniform and belongs to an identifiable foreign government, and whose duration and conclusion are defined by victories, surrenders, and peace treaties.

It appears that in Yoo's psychotic fantasy world, these unchecked and uncheckable presidential war powers all derive from his constitutional role as commander in chief. But as with the entire case for the supposedly "unitary executive," the supposed constitutional doctrine on which the modern-day right-wing loonies base their argument for what amounts to a right-wing dictatorship, it's all made up ini their diseased heads. The Constitution doesn't say any such things--they've taken a few wispy threads and applied the full potency and majesty of their screeching mental illness.

"There is absolutely no reason to believe," Luban writes, "that either the framers of the Constitution or its early interpreters would have given broad war powers to a commander in chief if they thought that those powers could displace civilian law anywhere, perhaps for decades, just on the president's say-so."

Now comes a crucial paragraph:

Yoo might reply that whatever we think the framers would have intended, hey made the president commander in chief. But this brings us to a disabling weakness in Yoo's constitutional theory: the relevant clause of the Constitution says nothing about the breadth of the president's war powers. The clause designates the president as commander in chief of the army, navy, and militias "when called into the actual Service of the United States"--period. It never explains what powers the commander in chief possesses, and the Philadelphia debates were equally silent on this issue. Is the authority of the commander in chief a narrow power of military command or a vast set of "war powers"? Yoo assumes the latter, but his assumption has no textual support in the Constitution, and he falls back again and again on [Alexander] Hamilton's call for executive "energy" and "dispatch." He does not mention that many of the founders had deep suspicions of Hamilton's pro-executive views.

When it comes to "energy" and "dispatch," Yoo has few equals. Luban cites Yoo's strong identification with Hamilton ("the most pro-executive and militarist of the constitutional founders, and also the most prolific and polemical") and notes, "He has written a staggering number of speeches, Op-Ed pieces, and articles defending hard-line policies since leaving the OLC," and now two books.

Luban concludes:

It remains now for a Democratic Congress to hold hearings to clarify Yoo's role in changing government policy and go on to propose changes in repressive laws--a the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, has urged. For unless it is properly addressed by the government, Yoo's troubling legacy could affect the history of American civil liberties for decades to come.

With luck, by the time you read this, nybooks.com will have discovered that its pessimism was unwarranted, that there is indeed a March 15 issue of The New York Review of Books, and Professor Luban's piece will be one of those offered for free viewing, so you can see how he fleshes out these arguments.