Why, that would be akin to following the rule of law, and we wouldn't want that, now, would we?

bush, cheney, pelosi, rockefeller, reid, feinstein, gonzales, rice?

should be in prison

Why, that would be akin to following the rule of law, and we wouldn't want that, now, would we?

bush, cheney, pelosi, rockefeller, reid, feinstein, gonzales, rice?

should be in prison

Yoo was recruited to the Office of Legal Counsel ostensibly because of his academic writings in support of wide-ranging unreviewable powers of the President in “time of [undeclared] war.” I attended a lecture by Yoo at the Charleston (S.C.) School of Law some time in the last year. The lecture laid out Yoo's theory of expansive nature of Presidential powers, based largely on executive acts by presidents who knew that those acts were highly questionable under the U.S. Constitution. These acts included FDR's unlawful wiretaps in violation of the 1934 laws against wiretapping and Lincoln's unilateral executive actions at the beginning of hostilities in the Civil War when Congress was not in session, such as his suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. FDR of course never even disclosed, much less tried to justify the wiretapping prohibited by statute as an exercise of his constitutional powers, he simply concealed the existence of the taps. Lincoln was a scrupulous defender of the Constitution, and as soon as Congress convened Lincoln sought and obtained Congressional endorsement of his emergency measures.

Yoo graduated Magnum Cum Laude from Harvard with a major in U.S. History. Whatever history he learned, however, his professors apparently did not require that he demonstrate any capacity for critical analysis or critical thought. Apparently the same was true of the faculty at Boalt Hall, which seems to have granted Yoo tenure based on “scholarly” analyses that rested on his arguments from historical examples that truly provided no support whatsoever for the radically anti-constitutional conclusions he drew from those examples.

I spoke with Yoo briefly after the lecture in Charleston, and he appeared to be a mediocre academic with virtually no force of personality. It is easy to see how David Addington, counsel to Cheney, could have imposed his own conclusions on Yoo's academic framework, without Yoo ever pausing an instant to question whether his own tenuous academic theories could be stretched far enough to justify calling the Geneva Conventions “quaint.” [My contact with Yoo was brief, but my money is on Addington as the author of the idea that the Geneva Conventions were "quaint" in any respect - such dismissive language to describe a long-standing International Treaty is not normally part of an intelligent academic's vocabulary, but a bully like Addington uses dismissive language routinely to undermine the confidence of anyone who is trying to uphold a law that gets in Addington's way.]

As Scott Horton has argued persuasively, Yoo and Addington may well be guilty of war crimes under the standards applied in the Judges Case in the Nuremberg trials. To the extent that Cheney knew how badly Addington and Yoo were mangling the applicable law, he also could be guilty of war crimes under similar analysis.

Sunnstein appears to have accepted for a long time that neo-con academics should be considered wo/men of good faith to be treated as colleagues. The extent to which legal academic writing has been corrupted by the bad faith outcome-oriented screeds of members of the Federalist Society is so extreme that the universe of academic legal discourse now countenances defenses of legal atrocities that have been universally condemned for centuries. (Remember, “the water treatment” was one of the torture techniques that was used on converted Jews and heretics by the Spanish Inquisition. This barbarity has a much longer pedigree as a tool of unscrupulous interrogators than just the last sixty or 120 years.)