> Yes, John Yoo, former and typical Bush "Justice" Department operative,
> a "lawyer" who in 2003 wrote a soon-to-be-very notorious MEMORANDUM
> -- which your Nincompoop-In-Chief and Donnie Rummy used to justify
> TORTURE of U.S. captives. Much to the detriment of the honor,
> respect, and moral leadership once-accorded the formerly UNITED States
> of America.
>
> And for all we know, it's probably still the "law" of the Bushies.
>
> Among the memo's flip and glib statements authored by Yoo:
>
> "Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a 'national
> and international version of the right to self-defense.' "
>
> A definition of illegal conduct in interrogations: " ... it must
> "shock the conscience. Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in
> part on whether it is without any justification." Yoo explained that
> it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be
> prosecuted.
>
> Does this sound like a WAR CRIMINAL to you?
>
> Do these 'official' remarks "shock YOUR conscience?"
>
> (And NO, the memo is NOT the work of Joe Goebbels. At least not the
> direct work of the late Joe G.)
>
>
> ---------------------------------
> "Memo: Laws Didn't Apply to Interrogators"
>
> "Justice Dept. Official in 2003 Said President's Wartime Authority
> Trumped Many Statutes"
>
> By Dan Eggen and Josh White
> Washington Post Staff Writers
> Wednesday, April 2, 2008; A01
>
>
>
> The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003
> asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other
> crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda
> captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in
> chief overrode such statutes.
>
> The 81-page memo, which was declassified and released publicly
> yesterday, argues that poking, slapping or shoving detainees would not
> give rise to criminal liability. The document also appears to defend
> the use of mind-altering drugs that do not produce "an extreme effect"
> calculated to "cause a profound disruption of the senses or
> personality."
>
> Although the existence of the memo has long been known, its contents
> had not been previously disclosed.
>
> Nine months after it was issued, Justice Department officials told the
> Defense Department to stop relying on it. But its reasoning provided
> the legal foundation for the Defense Department's use of aggressive
> interrogation practices at a crucial time, as captives poured into
> military jails from Afghanistan and U.S. forces prepared to invade
> Iraq.
>
> Sent to the Pentagon's general counsel on March 14, 2003, by John C.
> Yoo, then a deputy in the Justice Department's Office of Legal
> Counsel, the memo provides an expansive argument for nearly unfettered
> presidential power in a time of war. It contends that numerous laws
> and treaties forbidding torture or cruel treatment should not apply to
> U.S. interrogations in foreign lands because of the president's
> inherent wartime powers.
>
> "If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an
> interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal
> prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks
> on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote.
> "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive
> branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack
> justified his actions."
>
> Interrogators who harmed a prisoner would be protected by a "national
> and international version of the right to self-defense," Yoo wrote. He
> also articulated a definition of illegal conduct in interrogations --
> that it must "shock the conscience" -- that the Bush administration
> advocated for years.
>
> "Whether conduct is conscience-shocking turns in part on whether it is
> without any justification," Yoo wrote, explaining, for example, that
> it would have to be inspired by malice or sadism before it could be
> prosecuted.
>
> The declassified memo was sent by the Defense and Justice departments
> late yesterday to Democrats on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Carl M.
> Levin (Mich.) and Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), who had seen the document in
> classified form and pushed for its release.
>
> The document is similar, although much broader, than a notorious memo
> primarily written by Yoo in August 2002 that narrowly defined what
> constitutes illegal torture. That document was also later withdrawn.
>
> In his 2007 book, "The Terror Presidency," Jack Goldsmith, who took
> over the Office of Legal Counsel after Yoo departed, writes that the
> two memos "stood out" for "the unusual lack of care and sobriety in
> their legal analysis."
>
> The documents are among the Justice Department legal memoranda that
> undergirded some of the highly coercive interrogation techniques
> employed by the Bush administration, including extreme temperatures,
> head-slapping and a type of simulated drowning called waterboarding.
>
> In 2005, amid public controversy over such methods, Congress limited
> Defense Department officials to interrogation methods listed in the
> Army's field manual, which was rewritten to forbid many of the
> aggressive methods. The CIA was exempted, however, and President Bush
> vetoed recent legislation that would have applied the same
> requirements to that agency.
>
> Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley,
> defended the memo in an e-mail yesterday, saying the Justice
> Department altered its opinions "for appearances' sake." He said his
> successors "ignored the Department's long tradition in defending the
> President's authority in wartime."
>
> "Far from inventing some novel interpretation of the Constitution,"
> Yoo wrote, "our legal advice to the President, in fact, was near
> boilerplate."
>
> Yoo's 2003 memo arrived amid strong Pentagon debate about which
> interrogation techniques should be allowed and which might lead to
> legal action in domestic and international courts.
>
> After a rebellion by military lawyers, then-Defense Secretary Donald
> H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 suspended a list of aggressive techniques
> he had approved, the most extreme of which were used on a single
> detainee at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoner,
> military investigators later would determine, was subjected to stress
> positions, nudity, hooding, exposure to dogs and other aggressive
> techniques.
>
> Largely because of Yoo's memo, however, a Pentagon working group in
> April 2003 endorsed the continued use of extremely aggressive tactics.
> The top lawyers for each military service, who were largely excluded
> from the group, did not receive a final copy of Yoo's March memo and
> did not know about the group's final report for more than a year,
> officials said.
>
> Thomas J. Romig, who was then the Army's judge advocate general, said
> yesterday after reading the memo that it appears to argue there are no
> rules in a time of war, a concept Romig found "downright offensive."
>
> Martin S. Lederman, a former lawyer with the Office of Legal Counsel
> who now teaches law at Georgetown University, said the Yoo memo helped
> create a legal environment that allowed prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib.
>
> "What else could have been the source of belief in Iraq that the
> gloves were off and all laws could be disregarded with impunity?"
> Lederman asked. "It created a world in which everyone on the ground
> believed the laws did not apply. It was a law-free zone."
>
> In a 2004 memo for the Navy inspector general's office, then-General
> Counsel Alberto J. Mora objected to the ideas that cruel, inhuman or
> degrading treatment could be allowed at Guantanamo and that the
> president's authority is virtually unlimited.
>
> Mora wrote that he spoke with Yoo at the Pentagon on Feb. 6, 2003, and
> that Yoo "glibly" defended his own memo. "Asked whether the President
> could order the application of torture, Mr. Yoo responded, 'Yes,' "
> Mora wrote. Yoo denies saying that.
>
> [Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.]
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/01/AR20080