Yes, John Yoo, former and typical Bush "Justice" Department operative,
a undoubtedly Chinese-DNA "lawyer" who in 2003 wrote a soon-to-be-very
notorious MEMORANDUM
-- which your Nincompoop-In-Chief and Donnie Rummy used to justify
TORTURE of U.S. captives. Much to the detriment of the honor,
respect, and moral leader****p once-accorded the formerly UNITED States
of America.
And for all we know, it's probably still the "law" of the Bu****es.
Among the memo's flip and glib statements authored by Yoo:
"Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a 'national
and international version of the right to self-defense.' "
A definition of illegal conduct in interrogations: " ... it must
"shock the conscience. Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in
part on whether it is without any justification." Yoo explained that
it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be
prosecuted.
Does this sound like a WAR CRIMINAL to you? How about a Chinese
Communist, twice-removed?
Do these 'official' remarks "shock YOUR conscience?"
(And NO, the memo is NOT the work of Joe Goebbels. At least not the
direct work of the late Joe G.)
--------------------------------
"Memo: Laws Didn't Apply to Interrogators"
"Justice Dept. Official in 2003 Said President's Wartime Authority
Trumped Many Statutes"
By Dan Eggen and Josh White
Wa****ngton Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 2, 2008; A01
The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003
asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other
crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda
captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in
chief overrode such statutes.
The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly
yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not
give rise to criminal liability. The do***ent also appears to defend
the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect"
calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or
personality."
Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents
had not been previously disclosed.
Nine months after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the
Defense Department to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided
the legal foundation for the Defense Department's use of aggressive
interrogation practices at a crucial time, as captives poured into
military jails from Afghanistan and U.S. forces prepared to invade
Iraq.
Sent to the Pentagon's general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C.
Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered
presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws
and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to
U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's
inherent wartime powers.
"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an
interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal
prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks
on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote.
"In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive
branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack
justified his actions."
Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a "national
and international version of the right to self-defense," Yoo wrote. He
also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations --
that it must "shock the conscience" -- that the Bush administration
advocated for years.
"Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is
without any justification," Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that
it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be
prosecuted.
The declassified memo was sent by the Defense and Justice departments
late yesterday to Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Carl M.
Levin (Mich.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), who had seen the do***ent in
classified form and pushed for its release.
The do***ent is similar, although much broader, than a notorious memo
primarily written by Yoo in August 2002 that narrowly defined what
constitutes illegal torture. That do***ent was also later withdrawn.
In his 2007 book, "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith, who took
over the Office of Legal Counsel after Yoo departed, writes that the
two memos "stood out" for "the unusual lack of care and sobriety in
their legal analysis."
The do***ents are among the Justice Department legal memoranda that
undergirded some of the highly coercive interrogation techniques
employed by the Bush administration, including extreme temperatures,
head-slapping and a type of simulated drowning called waterboarding.
In 2005, amid public controversy over such methods, Congress limited
Defense Department officials to interrogation methods listed in the
Army's field manual, which was rewritten to forbid many of the
aggressive methods. The CIA was exempted, however, and President Bush
vetoed recent legislation that would have applied the same
requirements to that agency.
Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley,
defended the memo in an e-mail yesterday, saying the Justice
Department altered its opinions "for appearances' sake." He said his
successors "ignored the Department's long tradition in defending the
President's authority in wartime."
"Far from inventing some novel interpretation of the Constitution,"
Yoo wrote, "our legal advice to the President, in fact, was near
boilerplate."
Yoo's 2003 memo arrived amid strong Pentagon debate about which
interrogation techniques should be allowed and which might lead to
legal action in domestic and international courts.
After a rebellion by military lawyers, then-Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 suspended a list of aggressive techniques
he had approved, the most extreme of which were used on a single
detainee at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoner,
military investigators later would determine, was subjected to stress
positions, ****ity, hooding, exposure to dogs and other aggressive
techniques.
Largely because of Yoo's memo, however, a Pentagon working group in
April 2003 endorsed the continued use of extremely aggressive tactics.
The top lawyers for each military service, who were largely excluded
from the group, did not receive a final copy of Yoo's March memo and
did not know about the group's final re****t for more than a year,
officials said.
Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, said
yesterday after reading the memo that it appears to argue there are no
rules in a time of war, a concept Romig found "downright offensive."
Martin S. Lederman, a former lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel
who now teaches law at Georgetown University, said the Yoo memo helped
create a legal environment that allowed prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib.
"What else could have been the source of belief in Iraq that the
gloves were off and all laws could be disregarded with impunity?"
Lederman asked. "It created a world in which everyone on the ground
believed the laws did not apply. It was a law-free zone."
In a 2004 memo for the Navy inspector general's office, then-General
Counsel Alberto J. Mora objected to the ideas that cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment could be allowed at Guantanamo and that the
president's authority is virtually unlimited.
Mora wrote that he spoke with Yoo at the Pentagon on Feb. 6, 2003, and
that Yoo "glibly" defended his own memo. "Asked whether the President
could order the application of torture, Mr. Yoo responded, 'Yes,' "
Mora wrote. Yoo denies saying that.
[Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this re****t.]
http://www.wa****ngtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/01/AR2008040102213.html
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