John Yoo is sorry for nothing! - Democratic Underground

G_j

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Mon Mar-09-09 09:16 PM
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John Yoo is sorry for nothing!

Edited on Mon Mar-09-09 09:17 PM by G_j

http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/03/10/john_yoo/index.html

John Yoo is sorry for nothing
Sneering with contempt, the unrepentant Bush attorney has challenged "Obama's antiwar base" to read his infamous memos closely. So I did.

By Gary Kamiya

Pages 1 2
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March 10, 2009 | You have to give John Yoo credit for chutzpah. The disgraced author of the so-called torture memo was back in the news last week, when the Obama administration released seven more secret opinions, all but one written in whole or in part by Yoo and fellow Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer Jay Bybee, arguing that the Bush administration had the right to override the Constitution as long as it claimed to be fighting a "war on terror." Professor Yoo, who I am embarrassed to say holds a tenured position at the law school of my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, was already known as the official who provided a legal fig leaf behind which the Bush administration tortured inmates at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. His legal misdeeds are widely known, but now they have been exposed chapter and verse. Among the new memos is one written in 2001, in which Yoo and co-author Robert J. Delahunty advised the U.S. that the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the Army to be used for law enforcement, and the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, do not apply to domestic military operations undertaken during a "war on terror."

In other words, bye-bye, Bill of Rights. This is a prescription for a police state, where not just the police but the Army can kick your door down without a warrant or probable cause, as long as the president says he's fighting "terror." If Barack Obama had solicited such an opinion from an obliging Justice Department lawyer because he wanted to sic the U.S. Army on a group of domestic terrorists, the right would be screaming about jackbooted federal thugs descending from black helicopters to haul off American citizens. Strangely, no conservatives have taken to the streets to warn us of the Big Government danger posed by this radical doctrine. Perhaps they are too busy mobilizing against the unspeakable socialist menace represented by Obama's 3 percent increase in taxes on millionaires.

But if professor Yoo has so far mysteriously escaped the wrath of the right, he has more pressing problems. The Justice Department's ethics office is finishing a report that reportedly harshly criticizes him and other Bush administration attorneys. The department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) is investigating whether the advice given in the interrogation memos "was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys." At issue is whether Yoo and other DOJ lawyers improperly told the Bush administration what it wanted to hear, instead of rendering an objective professional judgment. According to Newsweek, one former Bush lawyer "said he was stunned to discover how much material the investigators had gathered, including internal e-mails and multiple drafts that allowed OPR to reconstruct how the memos were crafted."

Yoo has also been sued by convicted al-Qaida conspirator Jose Padilla. The suit, brought by Yale Law School's human rights clinic, claims that Yoo's memos helped set the Bush administration's abusive policies toward "war on terror" detainees in motion. Padilla, an American citizen, was held for more than three years in a Navy brig as an "enemy combatant" without charges being brought against him. Padilla's lawsuit, which also targets top Bush officials including Donald Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft, seeks only $1 in damages, but its discovery request resulted in the disclosure of the just-released memos

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