"Out, damn'd spot!"

John Yoo, the former Bush administration Justice Department official who is now infamous for writing the legal opinions which provided the administration legal cover for their torture policy, pens an insipid and weak op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, in which he tries to criticize President Obama's decision to close Guantanamo.

In the piece he declares as "naive" the statement made by Mr. Obama that we can "reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." This is exactly the kind of politics that lost the Republicans the election. They may call it pragmatic or realistic as they dismiss the resonant message of November's winner, but the real outcome remains: we won.

In a close examination of Yoo's piece, Scott Horton writes for Harper's that Yoo:

... alludes to techniques used by our allies the United Kingdom and Israel which he claims now Obama rejects. What on earth is this about? If we recall his memo, one of its more bizarre passages involves a European human rights court decision in which five specific techniques used by the U.K. on suspected Irish terrorists during the “troubles” are classified as “cruel, inhuman and degrading” rather than torture. Thus, Yoo argues, these techniques have passed international muster and are fine. That’s the sort of answer which would get a law student a failing grade.

Horton also believes that the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) "is looking at serious ethical issues surrounding the issuance of Yoo’s legal opinions. But the OPR probe is far from Yoo’s only or even most pressing worry. The likelihood that he will face a criminal probe and then possibly prosecution is growing."

Yoo is a despicable individual, to be sure, and his memo cascaded into what many legal scholars successfully argue was one of the grossest violations of Constitutional and international law in United States history. In fact, that the University of California (at Berkeley, no less) employs him at all gives me the creeps that I actually graduated from that system.

But Yoo is but one small cog in a much bigger machine. A machine that looked like George W. Bush; ticked like Donald Rumsfeld; was oiled by David Addington and Doug Feith; was sold to the public by Colin Powell and Condi Rice; but was designed, created, and powered by Dick Cheney. If offering Yoo immunity would get him to tell the truth, I'd probably argue for it, but he's a True Believer in the "near dictatorial powers" of the Executive. He wouldn't crack unless someone beneath him had direct knowledge that Yoo was specifically instructed to find a way to make it "legal" to torture people.

Some of my readers have responded that torturing Gitmo detainees is no big deal. Aside from the fact that most of the people detained there are likely "enemy combatants" in name only, the ability of any American to forget basic human rights is repugnant to me. We are talking basic here -- the fact that some may wish for the destruction of America (and/or Israel) is irrelevant. One need not care if these people live or die, but what we as a country stand for, above all else, is freedom. Suspending freedom to secure freedom is a bullshit idea. That's a cynic's view; that is not a view of the America that I live in.