John Yoo works now at Berkeley Law (can one think of Berkeley the same way again?). He used to work for the Office of Legal Counsel. His work included writing the legal justifications for torture that the Defense Department used to ground its policies in 2003.
Yesterday, the Washington Post published his work, which was previously classified for reasons of national security (can anyone explain that?).
I don’t have the expertise to parse the legal language, but I am confident that the reasoning is flawed, because I am confident that there can be no justification of torture and a fortiori no legal justification of torture. One could argue, I suppose, that moral reasoning and legal reasoning are different. I disagree, but at any rate they are not different with respect to torture.
Perhaps the most obnoxious things about Yoo are his hubris and his contempt for the public. In his response to the WaPost article he asserted, “Far from inventing some novel interpretation of the Constitution, our legal advice to the President, in fact, was near boilerplate." Not having ever worked for the OLC or knowing anyone who has ever worked there, I am nevertheless pretty sure that he is blatantly lying. I am sure that he will be called out on this by someone at the OLC. He is lying because surely and obviously there is no legal template justifying unconstrained presidential powers.
But his lie reveals a damning truth, at least as applied to his own work. This is because by boilerplate he might be referring to his understanding of the OLC’s charge of providing legal justification (really, merely legal language) for whatever actions the executive wants justification. That is, he bought into his own reasoning: in times of war, crisis, turmoil, distress, stress, discomfort (where’s the bottom?), do whatever the president says. Since our president wanted to 'fight terror' by any means necessary, that's what John Yoo sought to justify.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
John Yoo’s ‘torture memo’
Posted by MT Nguyen at 11:19 AM
Labels: torture, war on terror
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4 Comments:
Yoo also authored the August 2002 memo offering legal cover for CIA torture. This memo is often called the Bybee memo because it is signed by Jay Bybee. After a brief look, the reasoning in both memos seems to me formally the same.
Do you remember what happened to Ward Churchill? What are the odds Yoo will get Churchilled? Not high, I suppose.
As MT suggests, Yoo's torture memos reflect one facet of the general "do whatever the president says" modus the Executive Branch has operated under for going on eight years now (in the current incarnation of the phenomenon).
That statement is the core belief of the neo-con political philosophy as expressed by Leo Strauss who said "The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many."
Toss in the Straussian belief in the importance of the use of secrecy and "Noble Lies" by Good Leaders and you have the complete BushCo package... an unfettered aristocracy able and willing to use any means to achieve it goals - basically an amoral monarchy.
By the way, desire for a strong ruler is not particularly un-American in historical terms, there were plenty of royalist founders who wanted to give Washington a crown.
Leo Strauss indeed. That contemporary pied-piper seemed to have seduced a whole legion of our current 'philosopher-king' politicians. This leads to many fascinating questions, like the influence of the academy on D.C. Differently, we can wonder whether even Strauss' Plato (surely, not Plato himself) could accommodate a considerably-less-than-wise Bush as guardian. It must be that the guardians are not the political rulers themselves, but rather their advisers and official underlings. Enter Cheney's sideshow and shadow government: Wolfowitz, Feith, Addington, et. al. Yoo seems to be a sacrificial lamb, for it is ultimately unclear how the opinions of a lowly assistant AG could have such sway--that is, without the express authority of the men behind the curtains.
No doubt his political philosophy, which he cloaked with the authority of the visages of his historical subjects, is abysmal. But I must confess a grudging admiration for some of Strauss's writing. In particular, his 'Persecution and the art of writing' is a rather good read. He seems to have been a hundred times more subtle than the hacks who posture under his banner.
Dick Cheney is hardly the first power behind the throne (umm... Presidential desk) in history as Bush is far from the first bumbling ruler.
Grind some Strauss and some Machiavelli together and put them in your pipe and smoke it and you'll see the world through Dick colored glasses too...
I imagine you know the work of Shadia Drury of U. of Regina - she is probably the most authoritative writer on things Straussian. You may be unaware that she started her career at Calgary where she worked with two Wolfowitz contemporaries, Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff.
Like Wolfowitz, Morton and Knopff studied under Bloom and they are the leaders of the Calgary School of Canadian political thought - a nexus of northern neocons.
One of their star students at Calgary named Stephen Harper went on to great success as an Alberta Reform Party MLA. Later, he became Prime Minister of Canada.
It is surely no surprise then that the current Canadian government is shocking the country with its secretiveness, its adamant anti-environmentalism and pro-oil policies, and other Bush-like practices.
Ir is so bad that Harper uses Bushisms on a regular basis - for instance telling Canadians that it would be wrong to "cut and run" on Afghanistan and naming his anti Kyoto pro coal environment bill the "Clean Air Act".
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