Letters to the Editor
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Yoo is a focus, for good reason.
I agree with Glenn about the need to broaden the inquiry into what Rumsfeld, Chaney, and yes, Bush all did to establish the torture regime. But I also think that the office of legal counsel has a special resonsibility, to say no, and to scream bloody murder when overridden on something as fundamental to human rights as this. Yoo wasn't the spearhead, but he had an opportunity to try, at least, to stop it before it began. But he, with Addington, and with Cheney especially, was gung-ho on the Straussian-Schmittian idea of unitary executive power, or what the conservative American constitutional scholar Clinton Rossiter once called "constitutional dictatorship." It is the lawyers in the end, who stand between us and fascism. Yoo is exactly that, an American fascist, serving a fascist administration. No, they aren't Nazis, but you don't have to be a Nazi to engage in the policies and programs that constitute a fascist policy of rule. The latest forms of this stuff never appears as we imagine it will.