John Yoo and the Self-Satisfied Defense

John Yoo, the primary author of the legal memoranda that gave President Bush the power to detain and torture anyone he likes, has written a slimy op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending his ethical lapses. I know that Mr. Yoo is a big-shot Berkeley Law professor (and I’m just a 22-year-old nothing), so for fear of sounding ignorant I suppose I won’t give his article too much time. But it does beg for comment.

He begins, detailing the marvelous gift he bestowed upon President Obama:

Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.

He sure didn’t make it easy. When Mr. Obama took office a year ago, receiving help from one of the lawyers involved in the development of George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies was the furthest thing from his mind. Having won a great electoral victory, the new president promised a quick about-face. He rejected “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” and moved to restore the law-enforcement system as the first line of defense against a hardened enemy devoted to killing Americans.

This is confusing for so many reasons. As I’m sure Mr. Yoo knows, President Obama has endorsed kidnapping “terrorism suspects” and holding them indefinitely at various sites around the globe. He’s opposed to any further investigation into our torture policy (something for which I imagine Mr. You would be quite grateful), and has, in fact, expanded the legal black hole at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where no defense attorneys, judges or prosecutors can set foot.

Mr. Yoo mentions that President Obama has ordered Guantanamo closed (actually, Obama hasn’t closed it yet, and probably never will), but no other evidence to suggest President Obama has endorsed a meaningful review of executive power. I just don’t understand how one promise that anyway went unfulfilled  means Obama is “[determined] to take us back to a Sept. 10, 2001, approach to terrorism”, as Yoo later writes.

Then Mr. Yoo complains of being “hounded” in the form of a superficial Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) review. I admit I have not read the report, but Mr. Yoo claims:

OPR’s investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department’s own standards that last week the department’s ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.

Which says more, perhaps, about the Office of Professional responsibility than it does about the tactics which Mr. Yoo authorized, which include being forced to stand for weeks while shackled to the ceiling. And, of course, Mr. Yoo doesn’t deign to mention that the very “enhanced interrogation techniques” that he advised Presidents Bush and Obama to use, and defends in this article, are unconstitutional according to the Supreme Court.

Mr. Yoo lauds himself for sitting through the tedious hearings, even though he was under “no legal obligation to do so” and even though they had no impact on his lucrative professional career. Why should he make such a non-sacrifice?

I did not do this to win any popularity contests, least of all those held in the faculty lounge. I did it to help our president—President Obama, not Bush. Mr. Obama is fighting three wars simultaneously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against al Qaeda.

Forgive me, but if one of the wars is specifically against al Qaeda, whom are we fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan? Are those merely “wars” in the general sense of the term, with no clear enemy or end? If they are, Mr. Yoo’s lengthy and repeated defenses of executive rule-by-decree during “wartime” means he advocates for a vast and permanent expansion of the President’s power. I don’t get it. Is that what he’s trying to say?

He ends his “op-ed piece”, which was really a self-serving polemic, with a bizzare example from five years ago:

n 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts.

The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow. In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission.

So, according to John Yoo, those few American deaths justify the indefinite detention of any and all goathearders (and anyone else we might happen not to trust). Do not bother asking Mr. Yoo why it is we’re in Afghanistan in the first place, who it is we’re fighting, or what our ultimate goals are. That’s not his department.

The Spanish Conscience

Via Scott Horton and The Huffington Post: Spain demands to know how high the torture directive went.

The people of Spain, as you may remember, also threw their conservative government out of office shortly after that poor minister agreed to the Iraq War. They since provided a valuable European criticism of American policy all throughout the era of general acceptance. Now they have a serious mind to prosecute the authors of the famous “Torture Memos” which provided the legal groundwork for our abuses from Guantanamo to Bagram.

The Obama Administration has steadfastly refused to engage in “political” prosecutions, morality be damned – and no other country seems to want to bring the matter up, so little will likely come of this. But it is heartening to see such defiance of America (and on such a sensitive issue) amid the general obeisance one views from the rest of Europe.