It is now undeniable the chamber of horrors that was Abu Ghraib was not just a bored night shift of immature "bad apples" torturing inmates for fun and profit. It was a policy directed by a chain of command that stretches to the bunker on Pennsylvania Avenue. This conclusion is based on the release of a 2003 memo written by that eminent Confucian legal scholar and Regime yes man, John R. Yoo. He was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Yoo co-authored an earlier memo in 2002 in which the Justice Department concluded that legal prohibitions of torture did not apply to the interrogation methods being used at Guantanamo by redefining torture absurdly narrow. The second memo, just recently released pursuant to a FIOA request by the American Civil Liberties Union, was much broader in scope. The memorandum concluded that constitutional protections and international treaties could be essentially ignored by a Commander in Chief exercising his war powers. The rulings of the OLC are binding on the executive branch including the Department of Defense. Military lawyers objecting to the "enhanced" interrogation methods were stymied by the opinions. Both memos were rescinded in 2004 when a new assistant attorney general took over. He wrote in his 2007 book that the Yoo memos "stood out" for "the unusual lack of care and sobriety in their legal analysis." Of course Yoo's abject cronyism and lack of independent professional judgment did not prevent him from getting a job as a professor of law at Boalt Hall, Berkeley. What I want to know is who taught Yoo constitutional law?
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Yoo the Merciless
It is now undeniable the chamber of horrors that was Abu Ghraib was not just a bored night shift of immature "bad apples" torturing inmates for fun and profit. It was a policy directed by a chain of command that stretches to the bunker on Pennsylvania Avenue. This conclusion is based on the release of a 2003 memo written by that eminent Confucian legal scholar and Regime yes man, John R. Yoo. He was deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). Yoo co-authored an earlier memo in 2002 in which the Justice Department concluded that legal prohibitions of torture did not apply to the interrogation methods being used at Guantanamo by redefining torture absurdly narrow. The second memo, just recently released pursuant to a FIOA request by the American Civil Liberties Union, was much broader in scope. The memorandum concluded that constitutional protections and international treaties could be essentially ignored by a Commander in Chief exercising his war powers. The rulings of the OLC are binding on the executive branch including the Department of Defense. Military lawyers objecting to the "enhanced" interrogation methods were stymied by the opinions. Both memos were rescinded in 2004 when a new assistant attorney general took over. He wrote in his 2007 book that the Yoo memos "stood out" for "the unusual lack of care and sobriety in their legal analysis." Of course Yoo's abject cronyism and lack of independent professional judgment did not prevent him from getting a job as a professor of law at Boalt Hall, Berkeley. What I want to know is who taught Yoo constitutional law?