John Yoo speaks

[Bruce Clemens]

How do people like him function in a public position without bad things happening to them?

What we need is to hire P.I.'s to find out where these people live, the tag numbers on the vehicles they drive, their regular routes and haunts, their personal phone numbers and emails and publish all that information on the web for whackos and nut-jobs who are looking for 5 minutes of fame to see...

Maybe one of 'em do us all a favor.

[Jan Klimkowski]

How do people like him function in a public position without bad things happening to them?

What we need is to hire P.I.'s to find out where these people live, the tag numbers on the vehicles they drive, their regular routes and haunts, their personal phone numbers and emails and publish all that information on the web for whackos and nut-jobs who are looking for 5 minutes of fame to see...

Maybe one of 'em do us all a favor.

Sorry, Bruce, but Yoo is just a paid apparatchik who lost his moral compass many years ago - if indeed he ever had one.

Yoo is the type of retarded amoeba that spawns in a toxic swamp. He is a necessary and inevitable parasite receiving sustenance from a thoroughly corrupt and evil system.

That system breeds the likes of Yoo every time it takes a shit. They are near identical, scummy, slimy, amoral, greedy - like nearly all the Volkland Security (ooh my bad, Homeland Security) apparatchiks.

But Yoo is not the system.

[Austin Kelley]

Bruce, I think you were simply indulging in an (understandable) revenge fantasy because the massive injustice involved is so horrific, so I don't really have a big problem with what you wrote. That said, the comments above made me think of the pamphlet entitled You Can't Blow up a Social Relationship - The Anarchist case against Terrorism, written in 1978 in the wake of the bombing of the Sydney Hilton Hotel. Here is a relevant excerpt from the ending section:

Armed struggle means people would be killed and there is no getting away from the fact that violence threatens humanism. But libertarians would hope to preserve their humanism by ensuring that armed struggle would merely be an extension of a political movement whose main activity would be to spread ideas and build alternative organization. The forces of repression (police, army) and the rulers themselves would not be excluded from such efforts. In fact much effort would be devoted to splitting them with politics to minimise the necessity for violence. In this situation everyone would have a choice. Libertarians are extending to people the hope that they can change. We are extending to people our confidence that a self-managed society will be more satisfying for all people. This includes our rulers, even though we recognise the limitations created by the characters people have developed in their lives, especially those adapted to the exercise of power...

You can't blow up a social relationship. The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what replaced it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for the creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to, what they believed in, what existed unchallenged in their own personalities.

Proponents of terrorism and guerrilla-ism are to be opposed because their actions are vanguardist and authoritarian, because their ideas, to the extent that they are substantial, are wrong or unrelated to the results of their actions (especially when they call themselves libertarians or anarchists), because their killing cannot be justified, and finally because their actions produce either repression with nothing in return or an authoritarian regime.

To those contemplating political violence we say, first look to yourselves: is destructiveness an expression of fear of love? There are political traditions and political possibilities you have yet to examine.

To the society which produces the conditions of poverty, passivity, selfishness, shallowness and destructiveness in which the response of political violence can grow we say, take warning. These conditions must be overthrown. As a French Socialist said in 1848 - "If you have no will for human association I tell you that you are exposing civilisation to the fate of dying in fearful agony."

[Ed Jewett]

An interesting and indirectly-related thread at RI which starts with a postulated set of scenarios:

"Add your own: CIA prof's post-9/11 ethics class scenarios"
http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewt...=8&t=20974

[Ed Jewett]

My Gift to the Obama Presidency

Though the White House won't want to admit it, Bush lawyers were protecting the executive's power to fight a vigorous war on terror.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424...st_Popular

By JOHN YOO

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.
Related WSJ Stories:

•In the News:
Yoo Lawyer Attacks Dawn Johnsen's 'Partisan' Assertions
•On the Editorial Page:
Review & Outlook: Vindicating John Yoo


In office only one day, Mr. Obama ordered the shuttering of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, followed later by the announcement that he would bring terrorists to an Illinois prison. He terminated the Central Intelligence Agency's ability to use "enhanced interrogations techniques" to question al Qaeda operatives. He stayed the military trial, approved by Congress, of al Qaeda leaders. He ultimately decided to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks, to a civilian court in New York City, and automatically treated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, as a criminal suspect (not an illegal enemy combatant). Nothing better could have symbolized the new president's determination to take us back to a Sept. 10, 2001, approach to terrorism.
Part of Mr. Obama's plan included hounding those who developed, approved or carried out Bush policies, despite the enormous pressures of time and circumstance in the months immediately after the September 11 attacks. Although career prosecutors had previously reviewed the evidence and determined that no charges are warranted, last year Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a new prosecutor to re-investigate the CIA's detention and interrogation of al Qaeda leaders.
In my case, he let loose the ethics investigators of the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to smear my reputation and that of Jay Bybee, who now sits as a federal judge on the court of appeals in San Francisco. Our crime? While serving in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in the weeks and months after 9/11, we answered in the form of memoranda extremely difficult questions from the leaders of the CIA, the National Security Council and the White House on when interrogation methods crossed the line into prohibited acts of torture.
View Full Image



David Klein

Rank bias and sheer incompetence infused OPR's investigation. OPR attorneys, for example, omitted a number of precedents that squarely supported the approach in the memoranda and undermined OPR's preferred outcome. They declared that no Americans have a right of self-defense against a criminal prosecution, not even when they or their government agents attempt to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. OPR claimed that Congress enjoyed full authority over wartime strategy and tactics, despite decades of Justice Department opinions and practice defending the president's commander-in-chief power. They accused us of violating ethical standards without ever defining them. They concocted bizarre conspiracy theories about which they never asked us, and for which they had no evidence, even though we both patiently—and with no legal obligation to do so—sat through days of questioning.


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.
Attorney General Holder could have stopped this sorry mess earlier, just as his predecessor had tried to do. OPR slow-rolled Attorney General Michael Mukasey by refusing to deliver a draft of its report until the 2008 Christmas and New Year holidays. OPR informed Mr. Mukasey of its intention to release the report on Jan. 12, 2009, without giving me or Judge Bybee the chance to see it—as was our right and as we'd been promised.
Mr. Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip found so many errors in the report that they told OPR that the entire enterprise should be abandoned. OPR decided to run out the clock and push the investigation into the lap of the Obama administration. It would have been easy for Mr. Holder to concur with his predecessors—in fact, it was critical that he do so to preserve the Justice Department's impartiality. Instead the new attorney general let OPR's investigators run wild. Only Mr. Margolis's rejection of the OPR report last week forced the Obama administration to drop its ethics charges against Bush legal advisers.
Why bother fighting off an administration hell-bent on finding scapegoats for its policy disagreements with the last president? I could have easily decided to hide out, as others have. Instead, I wrote numerous articles (several published in this newspaper) and three books explaining and defending presidential control of national security policy. I gave dozens of speeches and media appearances, where I confronted critics of the administration's terrorism policies. And, most importantly, I was lucky to receive the outstanding legal counsel of Miguel Estrada, one of the nation's finest defense attorneys, to attack head-on and without reservation, each and every one of OPR's mistakes, misdeeds and acts of malfeasance.
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. He will call upon the men and women serving under his command to make choices as hard as the ones we faced. They cannot meet those challenges with clear minds if they believe that a bevy of prosecutors, congressional committees and media critics await them when they return from the battlefield.
This is no idle worry. In 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. If a president cannot, or will not, protect the men and women who fight our nation's wars, they will follow the same risk-averse attitudes that invited the 9/11 attacks in the first place.
Without a vigorous commander-in-chief power at his disposal, Mr. Obama will struggle to win any of these victories. But that is where OPR, playing a junior varsity CIA, wanted to lead us. Ending the Justice Department's ethics witch hunt not only brought an unjust persecution to an end, but it protects the president's constitutional ability to fight the enemies that threaten our nation today.
Mr. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was a Justice Department official from 2001-03. He is the author, among other books, of "Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush" (Kaplan, 2010).

[David Guyatt]

That system breeds the likes of Yoo every time it takes a shit.

:congrats::hahaha::hahaha::hahaha:

I wish I'd said that...

[David Guyatt]

You can't blow up a social relationship. The total collapse of this society would provide no guarantee about what replaced it. Unless a majority of people had the ideas and organization sufficient for the creation of an alternative society, we would see the old world reassert itself because it is what people would be used to, what they believed in, what existed unchallenged in their own personalities.

Very well said Kelly. Human nature does tend to commence new beginnings with the highest hopes and ideals but sooner or later regresses to personal interest. Imo of course.

[Peter Lemkin]

Lidice is just down the road from where I type this.....Here is a photo of what was left after the German 'Yoos' were done.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Lest we forget:

http://www.thisdayinquotes.com/2010/02/i...wn-to.html

February 7, 1968 – “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

This is how Associated Press journalist Peter Arnett reported it:

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” a U.S. major said Wednesday. He was talking about the grim decision that allied commanders made when Viet Cong attackers overran most of this Mekong Delta city 45 miles southwest of Saigon. They decided that regardless of civilian casualties they must bomb and shell the once placid river city of 35,000 to rout the Viet Cong forces.

When Arnett’s story about the destruction of Ben Tre hit the news the next morning, February 8th, the major’s quote immediately became infamous. To this day, it is still cited as a classic quotation that epitomizes the insanity of war in general and of the Vietnam War in particular.

The veracity of the quote has also been a source of controversy. Since Arnett did not identify the officer who supposedly used the line, some people have questioned whether anyone actually said it.

In 2006, a Vietnam veteran named Michael D. Miller created a website titled “Saving Ben Tre.” On that site, Miller claims to have been present when a “Major Booris” said something very close to what Arnett reported. Miller gives the quote as: “We had to destroy Ben Tre in order to save it.”

Like Arnett’s report, Miller’s version has been disputed.

More significantly to the people of Vietnam, there has been a long-running dispute over whether Ben Tre actually had to be destroyed.

The U.S. military’s official explanation of why “it became necessary to destroy the town” is that it had been infiltrated by thousands of Viet Cong. Thus, their rationale went, trying to oust the VC in ground-level fighting, from street to street, would have caused a high number of American casualties and even more civilian casualties.

Perhaps they were right. But somehow, Arnett’s report on the outcome doesn’t quite smell like victory:

U.S. advisers said the heavy allied firepower hurled on the city to drive out the Viet Cong probably contributed largely to the deaths of at least 500 civilians and possibly 1,000. South Vietnamese officials say the enemy dead totaled 451. About 50 Vietnamese soldiers died, along with more than 20 Americans...Lt. Col James Dare of Chicago, commander of U.S. Advisory Team 93, said “we will never know for sure” the number of civilians who died…Maj. Chester L. Brown of Erie, Pa., spent hours over the city as an Air Force forward air controller directing helicopter and fighter-bomber attacks. “It is always a pity about the civilians,” he said.

The AP story went on to say:

U.S. officials reported it was impossible to determine the attitude of the city’s residents to the bombing and artillery fire. “Most of those we see around appear mighty relieved that they survived,” one official said, “But I know that there are lots of refugees, maybe 10,000 to 15,000, outside of town in a camp and they may not be so happy.”

I suspect that last quote was a bit of an understatement.

[Ed Jewett]

Sing Along... "Tangled Up in Yoo"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nvJaQQ4x...r_embedded

The Hoos of the University of Virginia support indictment and prosecution for guest lecturer John Yoo. Join a protest in Charlottesville, Va., on March 19, 2010.
This event can be found at http://hoosagainstyoo.org and on Facebook.

This event is supported by After Downing Street, Backbone Campaign, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, CODE PINK: Women for Peace, Defenders for Freedom Justice & Equality, Democrats.com, Joyful Dissent, Peace of the Action, Progressive Democrats of America, Socialist Party of Central Virginia, War Criminals Watch, World Can't Wait.
March 19, 2010, Charlottesville, Va.
Year 8 Begins in Iraq War, as Afghanistan escalates
2 p.m. meet on grass across from Corner for Funk the War musical march.
3 p.m. meet in front of Minor Hall at the University of Virginia for rally to protest John Yoo, who speaks in Minor Hall at 3:30. SPEAKERS include: Cindy Sheehan, Susan Harman, Ray McGovern, Charlotte Dennett,
Print flyer: PDF.