Former Bush Administration Lawyer Still Flacking for Torture

[babylonsister]

http://www.alternet.org/rights/41817/

Former Bush Administration Lawyer Still Flacking for Torture

By Greg Grandin, AlterNet. Posted September 21, 2006.

John Yoo, the law professor who helped draft the infamous "torture memo," is still defending Bush's policies even though the rest of us have long lost patience.

On Sunday, the New York Times ran an op-ed by John Yoo, the Berkeley law professor who, while working in the Justice Department, wrote a memo justifying torture. Even after the Abu Ghraib photos broke in the press, Yoo defended his position, telling one interviewer that Congress didn't have the power to -- wait for the metaphor -- "tie the president's hands."

Torture is in the news again, giving Yoo an opportunity to make his case once more. And just as the White House has worked hard in recent weeks to depict the occupation of Iraq as but a single battle in a larger "struggle for civilization," Yoo now believes that the right to torture -- or as he put it in the New York Times, interrogate "harshly" -- is just one front in a larger crusade.

Bush needs to torture people, Yoo believes, not to extract intelligence but to "reinvigorate the presidency." It takes a subtle legal mind to understand what water-boarding or sleep-deprivation has to do with Bush's other power grabs -- not just claiming the right to imprison without bringing formal charges or to engage in warrantless wiretaps, but to reclassify government documents made public by previous administrations, refuse to tell Americans what advice Enron and the oil industry gave to his energy task force, and issue hundreds of signing statements that empowered him with the right not to enforce laws that have absolutely nothing to do with national security. But professor Yoo sees the bigger picture. They are all moves in a larger fight to restore balance to the three branches of government, to roll back the "supremacy" assumed by the Congress and the judiciary in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate.

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[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. That's really what's going on, I think.

Bush and Yoo and Rummy and the rest of them know perfectly well that torture is not an effective method of getting reliable information -- that isn't why they want to do it. I have suspected all along that one of the real reasons for insisting they should be able to torture people in secret prisons -- contrary to established law and the Geneva Conventions and the objections of most of the rest of the world -- is that they want to prove that they, on behalf of the so-called unitary executive, can exercise whatever powers they want. They want to be able to defy the law and demonstrate that no one else can make them obey it. That's what Yoo means by "reinvigorating the presidency" -- it's just a weasel phrase for "establishing a dictatorship."

They don't care if they get useful information from their prisoners. They want to torture them just to prove they can do it and no one can stop them. Sadly, far too many Americans are drinking the Kool-Aid; they actually believe Bush when he says these practices are necessary to "keep America safe."

And the other part of it, beyond all the cynical power-grabbing, is that there are those, the freeper sort, mostly, who like torture because they think it makes "us" look tough. We got kicked in the nuts on 9/11 by 19 guys with box-cutters, so now we have to catch some guys who may or may not have had anything to do with al-Qaeda, and make up for our "weakness" by pounding the snot out of them, humiliating them and breaking them. This sort of thing makes weak, frightened people feel strong. Weak people torture.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. John Yoo: The power of the presidency

Is this the article? It was distributed by the NYT.

John Yoo: The power of the presidency