Post-9/11 Memos Show More Bush Era Legal Errors

[MountainLaurel]

Apparently, the planned assaults on civil liberties were worse than what actually transpired. Thank heaven someone with their head not in their ass prevailed.

The number of major legal errors committed by Bush administration lawyers during the formulation of its early counterterrorism policies was far greater than previously known, according to internal Bush administration documents released for the first time by the Justice Department yesterday.

Those policies were based on at least 10 legal opinions conferring broad powers on the president that the Justice Department later deemed flawed and ordered withdrawn, including several approving the military's search, detention or trial of civilians in the United States without congressional input, according to the documents.

While the Bush administration had previously acknowledged rescinding two of those memos -- authorizing the infliction of pain and suffering on detainees and claiming unquestioned authority to interrogate suspects outside the United States -- the government's eventual repudiation or rewrite of the eight other early legal memos was secret until now.

In one of the newly disclosed opinions, Justice Department appointee John Yoo argued that constitutional provisions ensuring free speech and barring warrantless searches could be disregarded by the president in wartime, allowing troops to storm a building if they suspected terrorists might be inside. In another, the department asserted that detainees could be transferred to countries known to commit human rights abuses so long as U.S. officials did not intentionally seek their torture.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/02/AR2009030202906.html?hpid=topnews

[sharp_stick]

1. There are few people in this country I hate more

than John Yoo, the POS that wrote a lot of these blatantly illegal and pathetically poorly thought out memos. The fact that a prick with a 10 cent mind like him can not only get into but graduate from Harvard does nothing to help the reputation of that school. It's not just him there are a ton of rich legacy pricks like Shrub on the grad list too.

It's my alma mater and having assholes like that worm their way in because of money and connections just to fuck up the rest of their lives by being morons really makes me wonder if it was worth all that hassle when I could have gone to a much cheaper and closer school without all the studying, extracurricular bullshit and begging to the admissions office.

Not only that now the ugly motherfucker has a nice cozy tenure position with Berkeley where he really enjoys tweaking the more qualified staff and students with his pathetic course offering and even more pathetic publication record. How Berkeley got conned into giving him a position I'll never know, but I'll bet a lot of it is his JD from Harvard.

[MountainLaurel]

2. I concur

Personally, I'd like to see him disbarred (although a dock at The Hague would also do), but I doubt it will ever happen.

[Nickster]

3. This one statement sums it all up very nicely.

Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch, said the documents taken together "read like a how-to document on how to evade the rule of law."

This wasn't just a simple legal flaw as the article tries to push, this was an outright assault on the rule of law and John Yoo was allowed to run rampant at the OLC because that's exactly what Darth Cheney wanted to see coming from the OLC. They were circumventing the rule of law and John Yoo was more than happy to try and provide them any twisted logic they wanted to make what they were doing "right".

Read up on Seymour Hersch, he covered the OLC situation and how these documents got brought into being quite well.

[SpiralHawk]

4. "Ooops, excuse my boners. Wink. Smirk." - xCommander AWOL (R)