A report by the Office of Professional Responsibility has deemed John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the authors of the Torture Memos, guilty of "poor judgment." That's right. The two Bush administration lawyers are being treated like a couple of children by the Justice Department. Their only punishment, according to Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, is having to sit in the corner, and reflect on what they've done. And what exactly did they do? Through their legal guidance and supervision, Yoo and Bybee granted the President the almighty authority to do whatever he wanted to whomever he wanted. Like all good lawyers, they helped cover their client's ass. Except this time it was Uncle Sam's ass, so it took a whole lot of covering.
The Torture Memos gave the President of the United States the opportunity to act like Hitler and get away with it. Doug Robertson of AlterNet summed it up pretty well:
The memo accorded Bush the okey-doke to order torture (felony), declare war on a whim anytime, anywhere, on anyone for any reason (banned), to conduct unauthorized wiretaps of U.S. citizens (Fourth Amendment violation, I don’t care how you spin it). Also under this umbrella of exemptions, permission granted to randomly abduct whomever for whyever, bringing them to secret places to be dealt with secretly.
In Margolis's opinion, Yoo was a crackpot ideologue who sincerely believed that the country's national security rested solely on the President's shoulders, and his authority to massacre women and children in foreign regions. So he shouldn't be punished because he didn't know any better. It is basically the insane defense. Yoo and Bybee shouldn't be prosecuted and sent to jail for their actions because they are too crazy to know what is the correct legal guidance when it comes to State decisions. But if they're truly crazy and are incapable of surrendering themselves to their moral conscience then how will they change their behavior if they reflect in a corner like a little bully? Simply disgracing them will have zero effect because men who are criminally insane don't care about what other people think about them. They're in their own little world.
Margolis' defense is reminiscent of the mobster Carmine Falcone in the film Batman Begins being let off the hook by the Scarecrow, who also uses the insane argument. It is a poor excuse, and one that we will not soon forget, because unlike a movie, reality sticks around for a little longer than criminals and their hangers-on like to hope. The closing credits on the Bush administration have not yet appeared. As David Swanson writes below, the real judgment on Yoo and Bybee's criminal authorizations is still to come.Everything you're reading about torture lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee getting off the hook is wrong. They are not torture lawyers, they are not off the hook, there never was any hook, they may not be lawyers for long, impeachment and indictment are on the agenda, and you have a role to play.
Calling these men "torture lawyers" is dramatically dumber than labeling Al Capone a tax cheat. These are people who provided "legal" cover for aggressive wars, who put down in documents treated as secret "laws" that any president can launch any aggressive war at his whim, without regard to domestic or international law, Congress, the Supreme Court, you, me, or morality. The very report that is the subject of the latest "news" flurry quotes Yoo declaring that, "Sure!", a president can order a village massacred. Yoo's previous declaration that a president can crush a child's testicles is so much more shocking, I realize, but the villagers' testicles WOULD die with the rest of them upon being massacred. Over a million Iraqis lie dead. So stop obsessing on the torture for godsake and try to focus on the fact that these people are conspirators in the supreme crime of war. Read the memos of September 25, 2001, and October 23, 2002, if this is all new to you.
How many villages could a president "legally" massacre? You're missing the point. John Yoo's president cannot be limited in any way when it's war time, and it's always war time. And can other nations' presidents potentially "legally" massacre our villages? Again, you're missing the point. The ONLY way to prevent them from doing so is to massacre enough of their villages first. And the only way to do that is to empower presidents. Thus think these psychopaths, and so will our children think like this if we do not put a stop to it now.
Yoo and Bybee are openly guilty of conspiracy to engage in aggressive war, banned by the U.N. Charter and Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, and of conspiracy to torture, a felony under 18 U.S.C. § 2340A-c and § 2441, and to spy without warrants, banned by the Fourth Amendment. Their memos are public. The fact that everyone waited for years to do anything about it, until they could see the Justice Department's own report on the matter doesn't change the absolute irrelevance of such nonsense. Yoo's and Bybee's actions, no matter what you make of them, consist entirely in authorship of a series of written documents available for all to read. And those documents constitute overwhelming grounds for impeachment and indictment.
