When I'm Calling Yoo

Yoo's Lawyers Warn of Flood of Political Suits

A ruling that allowed a prisoner to sue former Bush administration attorney John Yoo for devising the legal theories that justified his alleged torture threatens to "open the floodgates to politically motivated lawsuits" against government officials, Yoo's lawyers say.
[...]
Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, was a Justice Department lawyer from 2001 to 2003 and wrote a series of memos on interrogation, detention and presidential powers.

The best known was a 2002 document that said that rough treatment of captives amounted to torture only if it caused the same level of pain as "organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death." The memo also said the president may have the power to authorize torture of enemy combatants.

Another Yoo memo said that U.S. military forces could use any means necessary to seize and hold terror suspects in the United States.

The article didn't go quite far enough about Yoo's position. Yoo held that Americans can be arrested & tortured by our government.

Personally? I think justice would be served if Yoo should be abducted, tortured and confess to his crimes against the Constitution ... or maybe just disbarred and lose his tenure.

Extra Special bonus points!

More declassified documents reveal FBI warnings about interrogation tactics

You have to figure that if the FBI sez 'OMG! You can't do that!' you've really crossed the line.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Mean What You Say, Say What You Mean

Guess who said this?

March 17, 2003
War crimes will be prosecuted. War criminals will be punished. And it will be no defense to say, "I was just following orders."

The people who performed the torture, the people who used tortured legal logic to rationalize the torture, the people who approved the torture, to the people who knew about the torture and did nothing to stop it should be tried for war crimes.

This isn't a partisan issue, it's a war crime issue. Whether you're a Dem or a Repub, go to the International Court; do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to the court and get a fair trial.

p.s. CIA official: no proof harsh techniques stopped terror attacks
p.p.s. Torture does work! (If by 'work' you mean being tortured until you tell the torturers exactly what Bushco wanted to hear.)

I can't believe there is even a debate about torture in our country. Or even a debate about what constitutes torture. We've had this debate, as has the rest of the world, and we came to specific conclusions about torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Ronald Reagan signed it.

Even if it did work, which it doesn't for purposes of 'actionable intelligence', it's wrong, it's wrong on so many levels!



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and the paragraph on the back of each one

Obama consulted widely on memos

White House senior adviser David Axelrod says President Barack Obama spent about a month pondering whether to release Bush-era memos about CIA interrogation techniques, and considered it “a weighty decision.”
[...]
A former top official in the administration of President George W. Bush called the publication of the memos “unbelievable.”

“It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are,” the official said. “We have laid it all out for our enemies. This is totally unnecessary. … Publicizing the techniques does grave damage to our national security by ensuring they can never be used again — even in a ticking-time- bomb scenario where thousands or even millions of American lives are at stake."

I'll ignore the standard Politico method of giving anonymity to anyone who asks for it, (it's been covered), and go straight to the heart.

Those 'techniques' the Bush official was unwilling to lay claim to? Yeah, that would be torture, illegal by moral, US & International laws. And the 1st thing President Obama did in office was to outlaw those methods.

Now back to Bushworld "It's damaging because these are techniques that work, and by Obama's action today, we are telling the terrorists what they are" - actually the torture methods have been proven not to work. They weren't designed to elicit information, they were designed to elicit false confessions.

And, point of fact, the methods have already been published, (raise your hand if you've heard of 'waterboarding?'), just not the memos that authorized the torture. And what Obama was signifying to the world was that we have begun to climb out of the immoral & illegal abyss that 8 years of Bush & Co sunk us in.

More from the NYT:

Interrogation Memos Detail Harsh Tactics by the CIA.

[...]
Together, the four memos give an extraordinarily detailed account of the C.I.A.'s methods and the Justice Department's long struggle, in the face of graphic descriptions of brutal tactics, to square them with international and domestic law. Passages describing forced nudity, the slamming of detainees into walls, prolonged sleep deprivation and the dousing of detainees with water as cold as 41 degrees alternate with elaborate legal arguments concerning the international Convention Against Torture.
[...]
In the memos, the Justice Department authors emphasized precautions the C.I.A. proposed to take, including monitoring by medical personnel, and the urgency of getting information to stop terrorist attacks. They recounted the C.I.A.'s assertions of the effectiveness of the techniques but noted that interrogators could not always tell a prisoner who was withholding information from one who had no more information to offer.

The memos include what in effect are lengthy excerpts from the agency's interrogation manual, laying out with precision how each method was to be used. Waterboarding, for example, involved strapping a prisoner to a gurney inclined at an angle of "10 to 15 degrees" and pouring water over a cloth covering his nose and mouth "from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches" for no more than 40 seconds at a time.

But a footnote to a 2005 memo made it clear that the rules were not always followed. Waterboarding was used "with far greater frequency than initially indicated" and with "large volumes of water" rather than the small quantities in the rules, one memo says, citing a 2004 report by the C.I.A.'s inspector general.

Further:

2 Suspects Waterboarded 266 Times

C.I.A. interrogators used waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, 266 times on two key prisoners from Al Qaeda, far more than had been previously reported.
[...]
A former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Abu Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The 2005 memo also says that the C.I.A. used waterboarding 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Wow, either waterboarding doesn't work or these guys really like their job!

p.s. John McCain, that flaming liberal, says:

"It's unacceptable," McCain said, adding:

One is too much. Waterboarding is torture, period. I can ensure you that once enough physical pain is inflicted on someone, they will tell that interrogator whatever they think they want to hear. And most importantly, it serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us.

p.p.s. Digby says it better than I can.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

What do you think the teacher's gonna look like this year?

(Bergen, McCarthy, Snerd, WCFields-You Can't Cheat an Honest Man)

Chapman University (used to be called Chapman College; University sounds much more chi chi) is a small college deep in Orange Co., CA. My mom lived a few miles away, as did I once upon a time. And my brother even took a class or 3 there.

Notable faculty include Hugh (I'm actually a tool) Hewitt, so that doesn't speak well of the staff. In fact, 2 quotes from Wikipedia (yeah, I know) clearly demonstrate HH's bias and hypocrisy:

1. A recurring theme on Hewitt's show is accusing the mainstream media of liberal bias and lack of transparency, and the unwillingness of its members to answer questions about their own political beliefs. Hewitt has said that the modern paradigm of reportage, whereby journalists make a claim to objectivity while never answering questions about their own beliefs, allows a deep-seated culture of liberal media bias to be perpetuated.
2. He returned to California in 1989 to oversee construction of the Richard M. Nixon Library as the Library's executive director from groundbreaking through dedication and opening. In 1990, Hewitt sparked controversy by proposing screening of researchers wishing to use the library resources — e.g., Hewitt suggested refusing admission to researchers deemed "unfriendly," — specifically Bob Woodward — because he was "not a responsible journalist."

Yeah, so HH's bias is OK, anyone else's is, you know Teh Liberal Bias™.

But Chapman U. has landed an even more important fish. As Ian points out:

Academic freedom is very important. Universities exist to produce knowledge, uncontrained by political winds or the whims of wealthy donors. If professors live in fear of termination without good cause, they cannot contribute their university’s mission.

So even though I would have fired John Yoo from the Berkley faculty—not because of his repugnant viewpoints, but because his incompetent representation of a former client, the United States of America, calls into question his ethical fitness to train young lawyers—I am sympathetic to the reasons why Berkley allows him to stay.

What is completely incomprehensible to me, however, is why a different university, which is not bound by a tenure agreement with Professor Yoo, would nonetheless hire him as a visiting faculty member. Admittedly, that school is Chapman Law School, whose faculty boasts such legal luminaries as Rush Limbaugh wannabe Hugh Hewitt, but Chapman’s most recent hire can do little more than take a school whose most famous professor makes them a punchline, and turn that school into a tragic embarrassment.

Chapman Law Dean John Eastman, who worked with Yoo as co-clerks to Justice Thomas, claims that this new hire is to bring “publicity” to his relatively young law school, and it has already accomplished that goal. I could also garner publicity by advising my client to torture helpless captives, but I doubt it would turn out well for any organization foolish enough to hire me afterwards.

John Yoo, who wrote the comically awful memos approving anything done to prisoners of war that GWBush dared to dream, that John Yoo. The John Yoo who deemed Habeus Corpus too lenient. John Yoo, who sat alongside David Addington on Dick Cheney's lap like Mortimer Snerd & Charlie McCarthy, saying the words of the master who pulled the strings inside his back.

John Yoo; a legal mind for the ages. The Dark Ages.

Good on you, Chapman U. Fight on for . . . torture.

Bastards.

I want To Live in Manchuria America

China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo

The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods.

These techniques were designed to break torture victims and get them to say anything that a corrupt regime wanted them to say.

And while experts agree that torture doesn't work to obtain accurate information, it works great if you want the prisoner to say anything you want them to say.

Just ask John McCain. He not only made a video confessing war crimes for his captors, the torture he experienced drove him to attempt suicide. (He wrote a book about it.) And while McClain admits to his capitulation to torture, he also alleges he refused early release. (We have only his word that this happened. It requires a suspension of disbelief to think that a broken, tortured, powerless prisoner can dictate the terms of his release to his captors.)

So when lunatic wrongwingers send a viral email that Senator Obama is the "Manchurian Candidate," maybe they should look closer to home. Maybe they should look at John McCain, who actually was tortured, broken, and then sent back home by the communists.

The same John McClain who shortly after being released by his captors cheated on his wife, and then divorced her while she was permanently disfigured from a car accident.

The same John McCain that cheated on this faithful wife? Yeah, he did it with Cindy, a 20 year younger multimillionaire heiress, (heiress, drug addict and thief). But John did the right maverick thing, he dumped his crippled wife and married his mistress, who just happened to have $100 million. And that's when he began his political career.

If you wanted to write a script about a hero who'd been tortured & brainwashed, cut himself off from those who knew him best, suddenly had unlimited financing and decided to run for president ... oh, wait a minute, George Axelrod already wrote that script. Hmmm, what was it called?

BTW, this is the same John McCain whose former interrogator in communist Vietnam wants him to be president.

The same John McCain who said "I didn't really love America until I was deprived of her company."

I'm not disparaging John McCain's service, I'm not saying he's the Manchurian Candidate, I'm just stating facts.



Cross posted at VidiotSpeak

Yoo who?

Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat has the timeline and lists of torture memos and statements that puts Yoo right up there with the Nazi apologists and enablers.

Anyone for the Nuremberg Defense?

The Nuremberg Defense is a legal defense that essentially states that the defendant was "only following orders" ("Befehl ist Befehl", literally "order is order") and is therefore not responsible for his crimes. The defense was most famously employed during the Nuremberg Trials, after which it is named.

Yoo really did want to please his overlords, didn't he?


crossposted at Rants from the Rookery