Yoo Be the Judge

So the DOJ has released the mother memo on presidential powers following 9/11 (hat tip: Carter, for Newsweek article on the memo see here). Not surprisingly it's written by none other than our very own John Yoo. I really have my two cents' worth on this, but Carter already did a great job of summarizing the whole problem with Yoo's mentality. He writes:

This memo doesn't just tell the President what the law is, it tells the President 1) what the author thinks the law ought to be, and perhaps more dangerously, 2) what the President wants to hear about the law.

This is not good lawyering, and it's not good public service. By taking such a precarious legal position, the author has set the President up for failure. Memoranda like this pushed the President to take an increasingly expansive view of his own powers, and engendered a kind of "group think" within the administration on these issues

Uh hum. Yoo made an attempt to justify the memos on the use of torture back in June in an LA Times Op/Ed, where the core of his thesis was that prisoners are not hotel guests. I responded to that in a letter that was actually published. I think that should adequately summarize my perspective:

With respect to the laws and international conventions against torture, Yoo writes, "General criminal laws are usually not interpreted to apply to either [the president or the military], because otherwise they could interfere with the president's constitutional responsibility to manage wartime operations. If laws against murder or property destruction applied to the military in wartime, for instance, it could not engage in the violence that is a necessary part of war."

Yet the Constitution commands the president to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." As the memos on torture, Abu Ghraib photos, and numerous accounts suggest, the administration has done nothing but evade its obligations. Searching for loopholes in the law is not quite "faithfully" executing them. Yoo is correct in saying we should not treat prisoners as if they are hotel guests. But then again, the Hanoi Hilton wasn't exactly a four-star hotel.