Yuppie Yoo sez Yippie me

[jotsy]

Found this over at Talking Points Memo by Zachary Roth.


John Yoo is celebrating the Justice Department's finding that his Torture Memos did not violate standards of professional conduct, while calling investigators from DOJ's internal ethics unit "incompetent" and "obviously biased," and describing their probe as a "farce."

In a Philadelphia Inquirer column -- his first public comments since the release of the Office of Professional Responsibility report -- Yoo accuses the OPR investigators of "the politicization of national security." He describes their probe as a "witch-hunt" against Bush administration lawyers, and asserts that "OPR's political bias was legion." As evidence, Yoo cites the fact that former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and his deputy had argued that there were errors in the report.

OPR had originally found that Yoo had violated standards of professional conduct, but its findings were softened by a DOJ career lawyer, who concluded instead that he had been guilty only of poor judgment.

In his op-ed, Yoo, a Philadelphia area native who teaches at Berkeley law school, also appears, misleadingly, to bring the Obama administration into the controversy. He writes:


OPR lawyers - and the Obama administration - disagreed with the policy choices made by President Bush on the detention and interrogation of terrorists. But instead of arguing against those policies honestly and openly, they decided to fight them under the pretext of a cooked-up ethics investigation.
The OPR investigation began in 2005 when Alberto Gonzales led the Justice Department, and was reportedly largely complete by the time the Obama administration took office.

As for the memos themselves, Yoo writes, with a bit of hyperbole, that they were written "under the most difficult circumstances and pressures of time imaginable." "We gave the best answers we could, in good faith."

And he slams the OPR lawyers for what he describes as their lack of grounding in the subject at hand:


OPR lawyers who conducted the investigation had no training or experience in complicated issues of separation of powers law, and were ignorant of the decades of practice within the executive branch on wartime power questions and of other sensitive programs that relied on legal grounds similar to those in our memos.
Yoo's memos were quickly withdrawn by DOJ. Even Mukasey called one of the memos "a slovenly mistake," according to OPR's report.

###

Yeesh! I got some legal theory I'd like to bat around with this lawyer lapdog. I keep a Louisville slugger handy for just such occasions.

[tom_paine]

1. Yoo was saved by one thing: The BIG Bushie e-mail delete.

The Bushies in the CIA (or NSA or wherever) so thoroughly deleted the emails and all the backups and backups of backups they are gone apparently almost as efficiently as if they were burned documents.

Amazing, but of course the Intelligence & NSA, both of which are Bush-controlled, have the backdoor "keys" to all the necessary systems, I'm sure.

In either case, yet ANOTHER felonious Bushie gets away it, with the likely connivance of the Bushie-controlled Intelligence Services.

Not to mention Bushified Law Enforcement Agencies, which are undoubtedly shot through with Loyal Bushies who will happily monkeywrench an investigation, for "National Security", that old tyrant's catch-all.

Yawn. Probably what is really gross, in a "Nazi's taunting us" kind of way, is the smug preening they bloviate when corrupted justice systems deliver predictable "get out of jail free" cards that they always knew they were going to get.

Talk about echoes of the Nazis! Yoo is more lawyerly, but he is essentially saying the same thing as O'Keefe Nazi-taunting us about how his arrest was "all propaganda" and not to believe anything said about him.

Know what? It's all gonna turn out like he says because of "aid" from the Bushie Intelligence Services (who are directly implicated by Dai's membership in them) and symapthetic Bushified Law Enforcement and Judicial "Helpers".

History may not repeat but it sure does rhyme. The worst part about Yoo and O'Keefe is that corrupted Bushification will make their "Nazi taunts" retroactively "true". In the minds of most who follow the story from with the RW Lie Machine/Corporate M$M False Reality Bubble, that is.

[jotsy]

2. Indeed

There's a bridge that needs gapping, it's the one between truth and justice. Society is sure to unravel if we keep rerouting it out of consideration for the affluent and allies of the powerful.

The lusty pursuit of a unitary executive has sent all other entities, both private and public in search of their own unicorn to ride rough shot over the rest. The age of unreason, as you say is as invasive and grainy as sand in your shorts on the way home from the beach.

The Patriot Act: $ liberty
The financial fiasco $ viability

Debushification? priceless

[ShortnFiery]

3. No, the Obama Administration could PUSH and INVESTIGATE but they are PROTECTING ...

their own. :puke:

Don't blame this on e-mail disappearance. IF HOLDER really cared about following through and seeking justice, he could dig up MORE THAN ENOUGH.

Face it fellow DUers: Our beloved party is complicit in covering up potential War Crimes.

[Dr.Phool]

4. +1000