Annals Of Repudiation (CBS)

[struggle4progress]

Architect Of Bush Era's Most Dubious Terror Policies Denounced By Own Administration
March 4, 2009 | by Andrew Cohen

... As a practical matter, the disastrous John Yoo Era in American Constitutional law ended several years ago, when the Bush administration ideologue, and the zealous attorney-architect of its most dubious terror law policies, left the Office of Legal Counsel, and the ruin he had helped create there, and slunk back to California to teach law at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall.

As an official and historical matter, however, Yoo’s day of reckoning came Monday, when the Justice Department released to the world a startlingly detailed and candid repudiation of many of his worst justifications for waging war on terrorism. What made the denunciation all the more powerful is that it came from the Bush administration itself, in the form of an October 8, 2008 “memo to the file” from then-Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Stephen G. Bradbury.

Bradbury’s memo doesn’t quite rise to the level of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous denunciation of Joseph Stalin in 1956. But by American standards it was an absolutely extraordinary display of public humiliation. No small wonder that the Obama administration eagerly disclosed it to the world. If nothing else, the now-disgraced professor won’t so easily get as many public forums to repeat his now-discredited theories of executive power ...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/04/opinion/courtwatch/main4842738.shtml