The speakers, national security journalist Peter Bergen, Editor in Chief of Foreign Policy magazine Susan Glasser, and president of NAF Steve Coll, rarely disagreed on each other’s takeaways, often adding personal anecdotes of interviews with prominent foreign leaders whose input fell on deaf ears.

Questionable Military Tactics

Glasser told the audience she spoke to General Boris Gromov, the commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan at the time of the 1989 pullout, who told her days after the Twin Towers fell, an American foot presence in Afghanistan would be a disaster.

For Coll, whose book on the subject, Ghost Wars, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005, the wrong lessons were learned from previous Soviet and British campaigns in the country and elsewhere.

While admitting the “thought experiment” in Afghanistan was skewed by the Iraq war, Coll explained the diagnosis of mistakes NATO and the U.S. made were not those of the USSR. “The latter had a much more illegitimate cause,” he said. “The U.S. revolt (by the Afghans) took much longer,” he added, and required “many more mistakes and more years to unfold.”

The speakers explained the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in the early days was designed to minimize the visibility of ground forces. Glasser remarked he didn’t see an American soldier until 2002, some three months after Operation Enduring Freedom commenced. Bergen, CNN’s national security analyst and director of NAF’s National Security Studies Program, shared an exchange he had with a senior commander. Bergen asked why the 10th Mountain Division — a light-infantry unit with specialized training to fight in harsh terrain — wasn’t called in to join the assault on Tora Bora, a decision Glasser wrote in an essay was one of the worst decisions of the decade. Bergen says the commander “feared, on basis of advice, if he put men there, it would provoke a Pashtun uprising,” a reality the three panelists say the U.S. wasn’t prepared to face.

The footprint of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan was so light, the panel maintained, that more journalists were killed than soldiers in the opening months of the conflict.

Role of Pakistan

The panelists agreed the Bush administration erred in outsourcing the security and political apparatus to then-President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, a move done to focus personnel and resources on the imminent war in Iraq. Coll points the finger at the lack of South Asian experts on the Bush staff, arguing Bush’s advisors were too credulous of Pakistan, and took for granted the Asian country’s interest’s aligned with America’s. Coll, mirroring Glasser’s analysis, said, “It didn’t require deep investigation to see the duality in how Pakistan managed its relationship with the U.S.”

What frustrated the panelists most about the U.S. pullback in the country was the willingness of Taliban officials to integrate themselves in the new pro-U.S. Karzai government, and the missed opportunity of securing the trust and stability of regional leaders.

Coll recounted a meeting replayed to him of Taliban regional leaders gathering a few weeks before Karzai formally took over. After the leaders discussed surrender policy and securing their role in the new government, one member asked if they would still receive car allowances. To Coll, that anecdote plays to the ease with which rival factions in the war-torn country shift allegiances.

But what should have been an easy and nation-building transition was sundered by what Coll says was a U.S. policy of giving rein to “proxy warlords.” He says Bush Afghan policy made the U.S. “a bunch of warlords,” selling local and regional Taliban leaders to bounty under the assumption all Taliban members were in toe with the group’s senior members.

Glasser said Pakistan continued to play both sides, something obvious to journalists and senior policy makers. She brought up an observation that hundreds of Pakistani families living outside of Islamabad were sending their sons off to war in Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion, their return facilitated by the Pakistani government.

Hitting upon a theme used throughout the 90-minute discussion, Coll said, the “problem, even today, is that we overlearned the lesson. Being shocked by our inability to see what was obvious, we’re becoming firm in the other direction.”

To Bergen, the Bush administration’s reliance on Musharraf smacked of wishful thinking. He explains the U.S. approval rating in Pakistan is 12 percent, down from the higher teens earlier in the decade. Bergen mocked the notion held by Bush officials that Pakistan would understand its real strategic interests and curry favor with the U.S. Alluding to the country’s conflicts with India, he said, “If we lost 3.5 wars with Canada over 60 years, we’ll have a different focus.”

How important was 9/11, anyway?

Coll and Glasser proposed 9/11 was a false ground-zero to the international developments most important to U.S. strategic interests. Coll, after describing an essay that appeared in the Financial Times, portrayed the events of September 11th as a “side-bar” to the economic expansion of China and Brazil, and the economic crises of the last three years.

Glasser referred to a spread in Foreign Policy that identified events following 9/11 that were more impactful domestically and abroad than the terrorist attacks. Social networking appeared on the list, as did the fastest transition from poverty to the middle class in the last ten years the world has ever experienced, she said.

Coll and Glasser considered whether the military expeditions in Asia were a “late-imperial overstretch,” rather than a response to terrorism. In terms of path dependencies, the two proffered whether the military build-up in Afghanistan occurred independent of 9/11 and proposed that 50 years from now, history books could view the last decade that way.

Why the wars happened

Coll explained 9/11 provoked extension “of what was building up anyway.” He asked whether the war in Iraq  was instigated by 9/11, or was it inevitable the U.S. and Tony Blair of Great Britain would over-interpret their international role given Saddam Hussein’s UN violations.

For the panelists, that over-interpretation was premised on how speedy and cost-effective previous U.S. and British military engagements were following the collapse of the USSR. The budgets that dramatically undershot the massive debts the U.S. would incur were a manifestation of the luck the two powers had. Coll pointed to the quick and successful intervention in Bosnia, the bombing of Serbia, the first Gulf War and UK engagement in Sierra Leone as motivation for entering Iraq regardless of its 9/11 culpability. “That’s the overstretch, that basically success of the Gulf War (and other victorious conflicts) was so rapidly over-learned,” Coll said.

Bergen was uneasy putting so much stock into the US-led conflicts. He said the war in Afghanistan costs 1 percent of U.S. GDP, compared to the 9 percent Vietnam commanded. And while that conflict spelled significant political unrest domestically, the current military expedition is on the back of the minds of most Americans. He summarized the decade since 9/11 as a time of relative peace and limited economic wealth.

The Center for Constitutional Rights’s Maria LaHood said in a statement that the court ”has effectively condoned torture by denying Maher’s right to seek a remedy. It is now up to President Obama and Congress to apologize to Maher for what the Bush administration did to him, to make clear that our laws prohibiting torture apply to everyone, including federal officials, and to hold those officials accountable.”

Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security John Brennan (EPA/ZUMApress.com)

John Brennan has a tough rhetorical job ahead of him Wednesday morning. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Brennan, President Obama’s most influential terrorism and intelligence adviser, will attempt to reconcile the harder edges of Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan and his enthusiastic embrace of drone-enabled assassinations of terrorists with the broader approach to grand strategy that the White House will finally unveil this week. Some wonder if that reconciliation is even possible.

The National Security Strategy will be formally unveiled on Thursday. And Brennan won’t be the only senior official previewing it and amplifying its themes. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, just back from a wide-ranging trip to China, will present it to the Brookings Institution. Vice President Biden will do the same on Friday, to the graduating class of Navy midshipmen at Annapolis. Jim Jones, Obama’s national security adviser, has said that the “defining feature of our foreign policy” is that the U.S. is “willing to commit to a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” He’s finalizing the details of his own National Security Strategy-related speech.

Brennan tried this once before — at CSIS, in fact, last August. But back then, Brennan was more interested in articulating discontinuities with the Bush administration in how Obama handled terrorism, such as eschewing a war-centric construct for viewing the conflict and taking it away from Islam. One senior administration official, Dan Benjamin, the State Department’s counterterrorism chief, has urged an expansion of that critique, arguing last June that U.S. strategy needs to “shift away from a foreign and security policy that makes counterterrorism the prism through which everything is evaluated and decided.” The National Security Strategy is supposed to be that prism, but it remains to be seen how the administration’s counterterrorism efforts can be viewed through it.

Marc Lynch, a professor at George Washington University and a non-resident scholar at the Center for a New American Security, grapples with that reconciliation in a forthcoming paper for the influential think tank, and doesn’t come away with particularly easy answers. “The problem they face is they make a series of pragmatic decisions, each on its own terms, and you can see the logic behind any of them,” Lynch said. “But add it all up, and you see the implementation is clearly at odds with the philosophy.”

All of which are unilateral actions that have met with significant opposition overseas. None easily fit within the framework of “a new era of engagement based on mutual interests and mutual respect.” A senior Republican congressional aide agreed that that framework was the “essence” of Obama’s foreign policy. “There are norms and there are laws and ways of doing things in the world that we in the U.S. have in large part put into place, and sustain,” summarized the aide, who declined to speak for attribution. “Those laws, norms and ideas are above every nation and every nation has a responsibility to uphold them. So we need to do better at meeting our responsibilities and so too, incidentally, does the Iranian government.”

Obama’s approach to Afghanistan might not be such an anomaly, even if the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize inherited the war he has escalated. That’s because even though Obama has nearly tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan, by July 2011 the so-called “extended surge” will begin to give way to more of a supporting role for U.S. forces. What’s more, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s visit to Washington two weeks ago highlighted, Obama has recast relations with both Afghanistan and Pakistan in terms of long-term diplomatic, economic and security cooperation, beyond just counterterrorism. What’s more, not only is military action in Afghanistan a multinational affair operated by NATO and not the U.S. alone, it is specifically legally authorized by the U.N. Security Council. Lynch, a former Obama campaign adviser and a critic of the Afghanistan war, observed, “Afghanistan is a big hole in the strategy in all kinds of ways of ways that matter, but not in a conceptual way.”

Heather Hurlburt, an administration ally at the progressive National Security Network, said that the problem is indicative of an inherent tension between a rules-based international order and the prerogatives of a superpower. “What any administration says is the strategy and what the national-security apparatus does on a day-to-day basis are not necessarily the same thing, especially early on,” Hurlburt observed. The role of a National Security Strategy isn’t necessarily to eliminate those tensions, but rather to bring the military and the intelligence services into rough alignment with the broader vision. “It’s a very powerful signaling mechanism across the government and outside of it, to say ‘We’re serious about this rules-based multilateralism, this human rights stuff, this non-proliferation stuff, and you can’t outlast it.’”

But if the administration keeps granting itself exceptions to following the international order for the exigencies of terrorist emergencies, Lynch said, it will be left without the intellectual underpinnings — and, accordingly, the public support — for an appropriate response if a terrorist attack ultimately succeeds. “What i’m afraid of is that as soon as you get turbulence — like an actual terrorist attack — there’s going to be a big backlash and you can’t hold the overall structure in place,” Lynch said. “Right now, Obama’s got the rhetoric, but they’ve done precious little to institutionalize it and put on durable legal foundations.”

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) makes his opening statements before a hearing Tuesday on the accident in the Gulf of Mexico involving the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon. (Pete Marovich/ZUMApress.com)

On the surface, the two accidents couldn’t have been more different. The first occurred in the rugged mountains of Appalachia; the second was more than a thousand miles away in the Gulf of Mexico. One was miles underground; the other thousands of feet underwater. One happened in pursuit of coal; the other in the unending search for domestic oil.

[Environment1]Yet last month’s deadly explosion at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in southern West Virginia, and the more recent fatal blast on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, have at least this much in common: Both were likely preventable, according to a growing number of lawmakers and workplace safety experts — if only federal regulations designed to prevent such disasters had been enforced.

“I don’t believe it is enough to label this catastrophic failure as an unpredictable and unforeseeable occurrence,” Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said during a Tuesday hearing on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. “If this is like other catastrophic failures of technological systems in modern history … we will likely discover that there was a cascade of failures: technical, human and regulatory.”

The message is clear: Regulations are only as good as the people enforcing them. And Congress, some experts are warning, would do well to recognize that trend as lawmakers contemplate reforms as diverse as those governing coal mines, oil rigs and Wall Street.

Along those lines, Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist for the New York Times, noted this week that the problems at the Interior Department are by no means unique. Instead, they represent “a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency … into a cruel joke.” The common thread, Krugman argued, “is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.”

Krugman targeted the Bush administration in particular. But many work safety experts are quick to note that the lax enforcement over the extraction industries represents a much broader trend, beginning well before Bush took office, and extending well beyond his exit. Along the way, federal enforcement agencies have been stacked, at times, with anti-regulation regulators — many of whom still remain. And the industries have showered millions of dollars on Congress in order to persuade lawmakers that, when it comes to protecting workers, business knows best. The results have been predictable.

“We have a strong anti-regulatory bent in this country,” said Celeste Monforton, former work-safety official in the Labor Department who’s now at George Washington University, “Regulation is like a four-letter word.”

In the case of the Deepwater Horizon, which is leased by BP, the Interior Department is now under a microscope on several fronts. For one thing, the Minerals Management Service granted the rig a “categorical exclusion” from a federal law designed to protect the environment from significant spills. (The agency simply didn’t believe that such a spill was possible from that project.) And quite separately, the MMS has spent the last decade transferring most of its safety-enforcement duties to the industry, in effect allowing the drillers to police themselves. The trend has led lawmakers, in the wake of last month’s deadly accident, to accuse the agency of being too close to those it’s charged with regulating.

“Clearly, stronger, more independent oversight of oil company activities is needed,” Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who heads the Senate Environment Committee, said during a separate hearing on the spill Tuesday afternoon.

Acknowledging that problem, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Tuesday that the agency plans to split the MMS into two separate entities: One would be charged with inspecting rigs and enforcing safety measures; the other would be responsible for managing leases and collecting royalties.

Similar regulatory questions have dogged the Mine Safety and Health Administration, particularly following the April 5 blast in Raleigh County, W.Va., that killed 29 miners. In the days and months leading up to the explosion, federal investigators had cited the mine for a long list of safety violations. Ultimately, though, they didn’t take any steps to close the operation down. A number of mine-safety experts have charged that MSHA leaders simply didn’t want to confront the powerful mining industry, even in the name of miner safety.

Ken Hechler, former West Virginia congressman and lead sponsor of a 1969 law that overhauled mining safety, said that his bill gives MSHA officials all the authority they needed to close down the troubled mine — if they had chosen to exercise it.

“The legislation is there on the books. You can tell in black and white precisely what it means,” Hechler said in a recent phone interview. “This is why I regard MSHA as partially responsible [for the tragedy].”

Most observers are quick to caution that the cause of neither the Gulf spill nor the West Virginia blast have yet been discovered — and might not be learned for months to come. Indeed, investigators in West Virginia haven’t been able to enter the UBB mine yet, due to the accumulation of toxic gases. And emergency workers around the Deepwater Horizon are still concentrating all of their efforts on stopping the gusher, which is still spewing crude oil into the Gulf at a rate of 5,000 barrels per day.

There’s also a strong sense that the companies themselves should bear most of the blame if it’s discovered that they simply ignored existing safety measures. Peter Galvin, a former MSHA official, noted that both BP and Massey Energy, which owns the UBB mine, have troubling safety records. “In both cases, we have a large and very wealthy parent corporation with a history of ignoring worker safety and health risks until it is too late,” he said in an email.

Still, when companies fail to protect their employees, then it falls on regulators to intervene. And if they’re not doing it, Hechler said, then Congress needs to step in to force their hands.

“This process of writing good laws that are not enforced,” he said, “somehow has to be toughened to require the enforcement.”

A still from Keep America Safe's "Al Qaeda Seven" ad (YouTube) and Cully Stimson (heritage.org)

One of the things Charles “Cully” Stimson remembers about the interview that cost him his job is just how run down he was when it happened. His January 11, 2007 sit-down with Federal News Radio, said Stimson, was one of 40 interviews he’d given that week. That’s one of the reasons the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs stumbled so badly when talking about a Freedom of Information Act request that would have revealed the names of attorneys who were defending prisoners detained at Gitmo.

[GOP1] “When corporate CEOs see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001,” said Stimson to Fed News, “those CEOs are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks.”

The comment, coming only days after Democrats took charge of both houses of Congress, blew up in Stimson’s face. Within three weeks, he had resigned. He apologized to the lawyers that he “allegedly was slamming.” He would never have done such a thing. Cut to last week, when he saw an ad by Keep America Safe, a national security think tank founded by Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol, that demanded the names of attorneys who’d defended Gitmo detainees — what it called “the Al Qaeda Seven” — and gone on to work for the Department of Justice.

“I think the blowback against me,” Stimson told TWI, “especially the ad hominem attacks, was unfair. And I think that these ad hominem attacks — calling the Department of Justice, where I proudly served, the Department of Jihad — are disgusting.”

Over the weekend, Stimson joined 19 other conservative lawyers, many of them fellow veterans of George W. Bush’s administration, signed a letter condemning Keep America Safe for “a shameful series of attacks on attorneys in the Department of Justice.” The letter, written by Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution, compared what the lawyers did to what John Adams did in defending the soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre. One reason Stimson signed the letter, he told TWI, was that his “controversial” 2007 episode would bring more attention to a cause he supported.

One week after Keep America Safe launched the campaign, the strategy of Stimson and co-signers like Ken Starr and David Rivkin appeared to have paid off with plenty of articles about their criticism and a partial apology from CNN for the way it packaged its segment on the subject. But the pushback is unlikely to become what critics hoped it might — a humbling moment for Cheney, Kristol, and neoconservatives who aim to move the administration’s national security policy closer to that of the Bush administration. Sources close to Keep America Safe acknowledged that its “Al Qaeda Seven” ad had played poorly in Washington, but were confident that the “conservatives versus Cheney” story had played itself out without dealing a substantial blow to national security conservatives.

On Monday, the effort by conservative attorneys to criticize Keep America Safe had apparently peaked. In op-eds and in conversations with TWI, other Bush administration veterans largely defended Cheney, even if they agreed that the TV ad had gone too far. Curt Levey, a Bush DOJ veteran who now runs the Committee for Justice — one of several conservative legal groups that vets Obama nominees for court slots — told TWI that the criticism could have been headed off had Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) received, as he had requested, the names of the DOJ lawyers who’d done work for terrorism suspects. (The names, as Fox News would find, could be located with some digging on the internet.)

“Attorney General [Eric] Holder brought this controversy on himself by resisting Grassley’s reasonable request,” said Curt Levey. “Despite the usual rhetorical excesses of political ads, Keep America Safe has not argued that the Al Qaeda Seven’s past work disqualifies them from working at DOJ. So the Human Rights Watch letter is aimed, at least in part, at a straw man argument. I would add that it’s curious that many of the Democrats who defended Holder’s refusal to disclose are the very same folks who gleefully investigated every detail of the Bush Justice Department’s hiring practices in the hope of proving that the department deliberately tried to increase the paltry representation of conservatives among the ranks of DOJ’s career attorneys.”

A similar argument came from Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, in the column he now writes for The Washington Post. “Where was the moral outrage when fine lawyers like John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Jim Haynes, Steve Bradbury and others came under vicious personal attack?” wrote Thiessen. “Their critics did not demand simple transparency; they demanded heads. They called these individuals ‘war criminals’ and sought to have them fired, disbarred, impeached and even jailed. Where were the defenders of the ‘al-Qaeda seven” when a Spanish judge tried to indict the ‘Bush six‘? Philippe Sands, author of the ‘Torture Team,’ crowed: ‘This is the end of these people’s professional reputations!’ I don’t recall anyone accusing him of ‘shameful’ personal attacks.”

Hans Von Spakovsky, a former counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in the Bush administration — and like Stimson, now a Heritage Foundation scholar — aligned himself with Cheney. “I don’t think it is unfair or somehow improper to criticize those lawyers who have volunteered to help the enemies of the United States who are dedicated to killing as many innocent Americans as possible and destroying our country,” Von Spakovsky told TWI. “I certainly don’t think those same lawyers should be in the Justice Department directing policy and making decisions on prosecutions of those same terrorists. That would be like hiring Mob lawyers in the Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force or hiring someone who volunteered to defend the Klu Klux Klan in the Civil Rights Division. Those lawyers who all come from big firms have a wide choice of who to help on a pro bono basis and their choice of terrorists says a lot about them –- I would not hire them to represent my company, either, if I were still a corporate in-house counsel, because I would not want my company’s money subsidizing that kind of legal work.”

One week after Keep America Safe launched its campaign, there was more evidence of rallying behind Keep America Safe than of more conservatives turning on Cheney. Allies of the group laughed off the idea that Democrats could stoke more controversy by re-enacting the legislative drubbing that Republicans gave MoveOn.org for its 2007 ad asking whether Gen. David Petraeus would mislead in his testimony about Iraq and become “General Betray-Us.” Democrats, they argued, knew that they didn’t have a long-term winning argument to buttress the murmurs of conservative anger. In his conversation with TWI, Stimson poured cold water on any Democrats who hoped he’d become a steady critic of Keep America Safe.

“I like Bill Kristol,” he said. “I like Debra Burlingame. If I met Liz Cheney, I’m sure I’d like her, too.”

The Financial Times reports that China dumped $34.2 billion in Treasuries in the month of December alone, which was enough to make China only the second-largest holder of U.S. government debt for the first time since September 2008. Of course, the Treasury Department didn’t have those figures on hand when Chinese military officials got busy posturing to the media over Taiwan.

Given the burgeoning Greek crisis and its potential downstream effects on Euro-denominated government debt, most analysts don’t expect another huge sell-off of Treasuries by China. But the more they can threaten it to get their way on foreign policy issues — see also, China policy under the Bush Administration — the more they’ll keep trying it.

None of about 48 Guantanamo Bay detainees released or transferred elsewhere by the Obama administration has participated or been suspected of participating in subsequent “recidivist” activity, compared with 20 percent of about 540 detainees released by the George W. Bush administration, according to White House counterterrorism chief John O. Brennan.

“We believe that significant improvements to the detainee review process have contributed to significant improvements in the results,” Brennan said in a letter Monday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Why not also throw into the mix the administration’s decision to stick the money to close Guantanamo into the Afghanistan war funding, a direct dare to the Republicans to filibuster money for the troops in combat.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Mo.), the Senate GOP leader, is giving a terrorism speech at the Heritage Foundation later this morning. Because when the nation’s security is imperiled, the first words on everyone’s lips are, “Get me Mitch McConnell.”

Today, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) was asked point-blank how Republicans, given their track record, can criticize others for over-spending.

“Republicans will accept our fair share of the blame,” Boehner said. “But over the course of the last several years, Republicans have stood up on fiscal responsibility issues each and every time.”

I think this is important, because we have to prove to the American people that we are who we say we are. And I think when all of us voted against the stimulus bill twice last year, when all of us voted against their trillion-dollar budgets for as far as the eye can see twice last year, we began the process of not just talking about fiscal responsibility, but showing the American people that we are who we say we are.

Writing in Forbes last November, Bruce Bartlett — former advisor to Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) — had another take on Republicans who, as the minority, suddenly see themselves as budget hawks.

It astonishes me that a party enacting anything like the drug benefit would have the chutzpah to view itself as fiscally responsible in any sense of the term. As far as I am concerned, any Republican who voted for the Medicare drug benefit has no right to criticize anything the Democrats have done in terms of adding to the national debt. Space prohibits listing all their names, but the final Senate vote can be found here and the House vote here.

And yes, Boehner voted in favor of Part D.

Yoo’s being pretty disingenuous here. The August 1, 2002 OLC memo on torture isn’t about perishable circumstances shortly after 9/11. It’s about the scope of executive power — and exclusive, inherent executive power. Yoo tells Stewart that Congress or the courts could rein in a rogue president on his conduct of a war. Yet his consistent view, as expressed in the memo, is that there’s pretty much nothing Congress can do during wartime short of cutting off funding, a politically extreme step.

Maybe people should give Yoo credit for picking his speaking venues.