Is It Torture? Or is It Merely Inhumane?
Let me count the ways.
* Eyes poked out
* Scalding water, corrosive acid, caustic substances thrown on a person
* Slitting an ear, nose, or lip
* Disabling a tongue or a limb
These are among the means of torture that the President has the authority to order according to John Yoo, previously a senior lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and now a law professor with the University of California Berkeley. His startling and bizarre assertion plus many more are contained in a memo he wrote in 2003.
Yoo is one of those ambitious individuals who populate presidential administrations and provide the President with the legal authority to do something questionable he has already decided to do.
Perhaps the most famous presidential sycophant was John Dean, one of Nixon’s cohorts during the Watergate scandal. After a stint in prison based on his criminal acts in covering up the Watergate affair, Dean saw the fallacy of his ways and wrote a book called Blind Ambition, a tale of his rise and fall.
Oddly, in the Yoo case, U.S. law specifically prohibits assaults, maimings, and other harsh physical attacks on prisoners by U.S. military interrogators. Yet, Yoo managed to tack together an 81-page footnoted memorandum that neatly disposed of U.S. law by asserting that the President’s authority as Commander in chief trumps U.S. law in a time of war.
The Commander in chief has absolutely no specifically enumerate powers of any kind in the Constitution. Thus all of the powers now claimed for that office are figments of imaginations like Yoo’s.
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