Letters to the Editor
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American Memos
But discussion of things like the "Yoo Memos" has started to have the effect of obscuring the fact that those were really "Bush Memos" and, ultimately "American Memos."
And whether we want to admit it to ourselves or not, this is in fact the takeaway of the rest of the world!
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Questions For Glenn
What is the legal mechanism by which charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity could be bought against this administration? Who would lead this effort? How is it pursued? Is it different depending on whether Bush is in- or out of office?
Given that Pelosi & company have taken impeachment off the table and show no inclination to return to it in an election year, this seems like the best way to raise an investigation of this administration's criminal activities.
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Start at Berkeley
We can forget the accomplices in Congress. How does one get a "Truth Commission" fired up. Hand the damn case off to the Hague.
Goddammit, every single one of these zombies needs to have their heads chopped off, a stake driven through their hearts (scratch that, heartless bastards) be riddled w/ silver bullets, and dragged out into the sunlight to die, motherFUCKERS, DIE!!
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Like any animal that attacks in packs
it's natural to go after the weakest in the herd. Not that I agree with the tactic, it's just natural. The weakest hopefully spills the beans, to mix a metaphor.
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Yoo and others had a choice
While I agree with your view on Yoo's part in this mess, he, as well as others in the administration all had a choice, free will to lower our nation's standards to that of one who tortures. Yoo was happy to provide this cover and defends it today.
We should not focus or make Yoo the scapegoat, but he is responsible for the legal opinions he wrote.
Frankly, I cannot understand how one can have his views, but we need to know that many in this administration share them, and make damned sure we don't elect another bunch like this!
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Breaking the Law
Aren't US government officials bound by law to obey the Geneva Conventions? If so, then Yoo was a party to a conspiracy to break the law. That merits firing him in my book.
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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.
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please digg this story
here:
http://digg.com/political_opinion/John_Yoo_Spearhead_or_scapegoat
My local newspaper has school board budget cuts as a banner headline on page 1 (I'm a teacher!), followed by middle school kids robbing a pizza delivery man and concerns about Christian license plates. Discussion of Bushco's advocacy of torture is on page 9. This is nuts.
I have to explain to my daughters that our country tortures people as an instrument of official government policy? We've become the enemy.
writing a letter to the editor now...
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At least...
Mr. Edley didn't put lipstick on this pig. He entitled his memo "The Torture Memos and Academic Freedom". He doesn't avoid the facts to which he is speaking. If only the press could take this cue...
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Point Taken
I fully agree that Yoo should not be transformed into a scapegoat, or decoy, to distract and divert critics from the overarching criminal nature of the present maladministration. Ideally, the focus should be top-down, so that the smaller fish are exposed in the context of the designs of their masters.
Tragically-- and infuriatingly-- both the self-serving Bush Crime Family collaborationists and allies and the political and law-enforcement elites have simply declined to further the cause of justice. It's been taken off the table, you see, and is reduced to scratching and knocking from beneath the table, mostly impotently.
I believe that this repression and frustration causes the uneven focus Glenn discusses. It's a bit similar to the fervent hope, even lust, to see reprobates like Scooter Libby "frog-marched" to the pokey. As Glenn notes, it's not that the Libbys and Yoos don't deserve all that and more; it's just that there is a danger of becoming so invested in inveighing against these smaller critters that the big fish-- or frogs, or whatever life-forms I'll drag into the metaphor next-- slip away into the murky depths.
I was typically cynical when Patrick Fitzgerald was investigating the Libby matter and various progressive blogs began exploding with premature hope and delight about the coming of "Fitzmas"; so many folks were certain that the dogged Fitzgerald was initiating the indictment of the criminal maladministration, and that catching the Libbyfish was only the beginning.
When it proved very much otherwise, and Libby was sent away with a presidential pat on the back and the prospect of a Medal of Freedom in the future, the hopeful progressives were fraught with disappointment, or at least a painful case of anticlimax. So indeed, it behooves us to keep Yoo in perspective.
He definitely remains on the A-list of criminals with high schadenfreude potential, though.
And it's bitterly ironic, at best, to listen to university authorities defend vicious creeps and charlatans like Yoo with the traditional rhetoric about academic freedom and the marketplace of ideas. None of that lofty sententiousness was employed to defend Ward Churchill or Norman Finkelstein, I notice. I wonder why?
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Ask John Yoo
I've set up a satire blog, so if anyone would like to ask John Yoo a legal question, email me.
http://askjohnyoo.wordpress.com/