Thursday, May 06, 2010

John Yoo: Stupid Political Hack AND Craven Addington Disciple

A couple of days ago John Yoo wrote an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Closing Arguments: Supreme Court sanity calls for filibusters about how Obama is far to the left and GOP should use "Democrats' tactics" to filibuster any SCOTUS nominee that basically isn't a conservative. I read it as very one sided and something at the level of O'Reily.

emptywheel commented on it more forcefully, John Yoo: Stupid Political Hack AND Craven Addington Disciple.

"You see, John Yoo has always pretended he neutrally read the law when he wrote his torture memos. He claimed, repeatedly, that he just did the legal analysis and had no stake in the policy decision. He suggested that he didn’t care, one way or another, whether Bush and Cheney embraced torture, he was just the lawyer doing analysis in isolation from those policy questions. He further has claimed that he only approved limited torture, not the techniques described by the press (which happen to match what the CIA IG saw on the torture tapes).

But all that, of course, is proven to be bullshit, as John Yoo bases his critique of Obama on the claim that Obama has chosen not to use the illegal tactics that Yoo himself authorized. That’s not only an admission–on the part of Yoo–that his claims to political neutrality were all lies. But it’s a repudiation of the very expansive claims to executive power that John Yoo holds dear: after all, if the executive has absolute authority to decide how to implement foreign policy, than the disgraced hacks from the past Administration have no business critiquing the exercise of that authority"

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