Letters to the Editor
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World standing
From reading it seems there may be little to be done to the alleged torturers (Bush Administration = torturers). But the world looks to the damage caused by these torturers; if the torturers get away with it, irreparable damage. America will never be America again, no more the shining city on the hill. We have an obligation to the world to see they don't get away with their criminal actions, but are indicted, and if convicted, punisheded to the fullest extent possible.
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Merely a Tool
"John Yoo was not a mastermind but a mere instrument -- a tool -- in the Bush administration's arsenal to abolish existing constraints on our treatment of detainees and to implement torture methods."
Isn't this similar to what was said of Germans who worked to make more efficient the RR systems leading to the camps, or of those who might want to verify every name on Oscar Schindler's list.
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Exactly!
But what comfort is there for those of us who have opposed this from the beginning? As I have said before, this is a stain on each and every one of us.
I call my congressman's office and the lady just laughs at me. How sad.
Did I read here that 108 have died in our captivity as a result of this treatment?
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@Silash
First: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 gave immunity dating back to November 26, 1997. What is so special about this date?
That's when the war crimes definition was updated from the War Crimes Act of 1996.
Second: OLC is responsible for deciding what is and is not legal. I thought this was the jurisdiction of the courts. Is OLC somehow in violation of the Separation of Powers?
IANAL, but the OLC doesn't have the authority to decide what is and isn't legal. They are non-binding non-judicial opinions. Much like going down to your John Q. Lawyer's office to ask if your Saturday poker game will get you thrown in the clink. I think that throughout history Presidents that have operated under the OLC's advice have been given the benefit of the doubt , since they were supposedly acting with "good faith", but it stretches one's credulity to think that's the case here.
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the real question is not whether to fire Yoo, but: why was he hired?
Granting Glenn's point about not scapegoating Yoo, I still want to press on the issue of whether Berkeley should dismiss him. To me, this question actually misses the point that the university hired him after his tenure in the executive branch and his service to the War on Terror. I think questions should be raised about what the justification was for this decision.
But how likely can it possibly be he will be fired, when the basic outlines of what he wrote were already long known? The university was acting as an establishment refuge for a discreditable "thinker," and the disclosure of more details about his thinking wouldn't seem to give Berkeley any reason to withdraw its support.
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vengeance
The same moral reasoning or (more accurately,impulses) that drive my opposition to torture unfortunately also extend to my attitude towards it's perpetrators. While there might be a moral calculus that would call for John Yoo's head on a platter and all the BushCo enablers brought up before the Hague, I personally will settle for the activities they engaged in and the justifications they used to be permanently discredited.
For me, a decent vindication would be if John McCain fails to become President. As long as he's allowed to be portrayed as anti-torture after specifically voting to allow the CIA to continue to engage in it, there is tons of work to be done.
It's where I'll be concentrating my energies.
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A house divided...
Some of the particulars of the Bush administration's conduct were revealed only in the last couple of weeks, but the general contours have been known for a long time and most of the country, and almost all of its political and media establishment, acquiesced.
"Most" of the country acquiesced? No, slightly over half the voting population acquiesced (and the non-voters don't count, so let's stick with that figure.) The rest of us have been shouting and marching and bitching for years!
That, in my mind, is the even bigger issue. Is this nation truly divided by such a large gap--those who think torture, pre-emptive war, spending ourselves into oblivion behind the false security of the world's largest military machine, suspension of the constitution when it suits the president's agenda, the end of habeus corpus, et al ad nauseum, and those who think the United States could and should play by the rules we try to impose on others and actually live according to our own hype?
Frankly, if that gap is real, I don't see how this house can stand much longer.
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USDOJ: OLC Restoration
I hope that Glenn will be willing to contribute some of his time and expertise to the restoration of integrity to the OLC in the coming Democratic administration.
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Why not?
Berkeley can't act until Bush and Cheney have answered for their crimes? I don't think so.
We have been discussing John Yoo because we have before us 81 pages of his badly written, poorly referenced, un-thought through legal drivel justifying barbaric and repellant acts. Now is precisely the time to ask why a supposedly reputable law school keeps on its faculty a professor who has actively participated in war crimes. This is not about academic freedom.
And no, many of us do understand that torture and many other abuses extend far beyond John Yoo. I can see no reason why we can not express our outrage and scorn on him and on the law school that was fool enough to hire him and has become complicit in his acts by retaining him.
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the Olympics torch protest in SF
When I heard sound clips in the news earlier this week of people in SF protesting human rights abuses in China, I felt disgust that the protesters weren't also screaming about the abuses committed by their own government. Such moral blindness, ignorance, and hypocrisy. We've become a nation of Good Germans turning a blind eye to the administration's Little Eichmanns.
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just working for the administration
I mean, more than Nazi comparisons, it reminds me of Chief Justice Roberts's defense, during his confirmation hearings, of his conservative attacks on the judicial branch while working for the Reagan administration. He said he wouldn't be such an "activist" on the bench; he was just working for the administration. As if he somehow at that point in his career just found himself working for the administration, which just happened to be under a conservative Republican. Like Roberts, Yoo got to where he was by not only having certain views--which he wasn't born with, but developed--but also by making certain decisions, about his career but also about the law, which are open to criticism (and in this case, possibly prosecution).